New Roads to Faerie: Tolkien's Perilous Realm and the Art of Narrative Transportation
Storytelling and narrative enchantment in the digital age
Welcome to Story Ecology.
To ask what is the story ecology of a thing? is to look at the stories we tell about that thing, and to imagine how we might story it differently.
I’m no longer keeping things behind a paywall but I’m keeping paid subscriptions open because I believe writers should be remunerated for their hard work. If you feel my writing is of value and worth supporting for the price of a nice meal out, then I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I also have a one-of-a-kind digital gift for you.
Read The Book of Rain, available now. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/702669/the-book-of-rain-by-thomas-wharton/9781039002432
Wolf, Moon, Dog, my 250-page love letter to dogs, will be published Sept 20th 2025.
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It was a horrible commute—itchy winter coats, the train car stifling and stuffy even though it was freezing outside, and so jammed with people that Rachel had to hold her Kindle awkwardly close to her face. But all of that fell away as she got sucked into the tale of a family and a dog, with storytelling so sweet and so sad she soon began weeping quietly. Then runny-nosed sobbing. There she was, breaking down among strangers, with people giving her odd looks and trying to edge away from this distraught and possibly deranged woman.
Rachel didn’t pry herself away from the book until she was at Union Square, a full two stops past her office.
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Above I’ve paraphrased a first-person anecdote told by Rachel Griffiths, executive editor at Scholastic Press in New York City. She was reading Just a Dog by Michael Gerard Bauer, with an eye to whether or not she wanted to acquire it for her publishing house. Needless to say, she snapped the book up. A story that made her miss her train stop was definitely one she wanted to share with readers.
As a storyteller trying to get the attention of people like Rachel, whether they’re editors or anyone at all, I have a job in transportation.
Transportation of the reader, that is, to other places, other minds, other ways of seeing the world.
I see this task as a responsibility and a challenge. I’m also a reader and a cinephile and a television viewer, and I know when a story has transported me and when it hasn’t. When you’re fully immersed in another world made of words or pictures or both you may not notice until afterward that this immersion is happening to you. For a few moments a fictional world becomes your reality. You can forget—at least for a little while—that you were picked up and carried there by a story.
And when a story fails to take you anywhere you feel that, too, as distraction, boredom, and frustration. It might be because the story is taking you to a place that’s too familiar. You’ve seen all this before, and told better. Or maybe the problem with a story is that you want only the familiar, a tale you already know. Stories that take unfamiliar or more difficult roads aren’t for you. Not yet, anyhow.
The Elven Craft of Narrative Enchantment
When we’re lost deep inside a book, listening spellbound as someone spins us a tale, or watching wide-eyed as a story unfolds on a screen, we invest belief in fictional characters and come to care about them. We wonder about their motives, question their choices, anticipate their fates. As the story plunges them into peril our pulse may quicken, our breathing rate may change, we might sit up straighter or nervously clench our teeth. We’re no longer separate from what’s happening on the page or the screen. We’re there.
Story theorists call this narrative transportation. I like to call it narrative enchantment. When a story is doing what it was meant to do, it can feel like magic: like being swept up and wafted body and soul to another realm.
J.R.R. Tolkien had a name for this realm. He called it “Faerie.”
The word meant many things to him, but perhaps foremost was this notion of Story as a place you travel to, and the “elven” craft by which a good storyteller sweeps you up and takes you there. This is why it sometimes seems, in his letters and essays, that Tolkien actually believes in Faerie as a real place, as real as Oxford or Mount Everest. Because it was real. Stories had taken him there.
In his essay “On Fairy-stories,” in which he discusses the realm of Faerie and what travelers find there, Tolkien focuses primarily on narratives of a particular kind: fairy tales, myths, and fantastical tales (like his own The Lord of the Rings, which he was working on at the time he wrote the essay). When a teller of these kinds of stories is doing their job, they’re capable of evoking a convincing and internally consistent “Secondary World” for us to visit. While we’re reading or watching a movie we can feel completely carried out of our immediate surroundings into this secondary world.
[Image ID: Detail from JRR Tolkien’s illustration of Hobbiton]
But the experience of being transported to an imagined world, and becoming completely immersion in that world, obviously happens not just with fairy tale and fantasy stories but with any well-told story that sweeps us up and keeps us spellbound. If Faerie is the realm of narrative transportation, then it’s the place any captivating tale takes us to. Realist novels. True crime podcasts. Tik tok confessions. News stories. A friend’s riveting account of a first date gone horribly wrong.
It might sound perverse but you could argue that the saga of Walter White took millions of viewers of Breaking Bad not to Albuquerque New Mexico but to Faerie.
The Yearning to Return
It’s difficult to know for sure when you’ve arrived in this enchanted realm. By definition to be narratively transported means you’re not standing back and critically assessing what’s happening to you. But once you’ve left that realm and are back in your own life you have no doubt you went somewhere. And if the spell was powerful enough, if the secondary world was real enough, you yearn with all your heart to go back.
It’s the reason millions of readers return again and again to Tolkien’s writings. It’s why millions of people rewatch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films over and over. To revisit Middle-earth, of course, but also to linger awhile in Faerie, the realm of narrative enchantment, of which Middle-earth is just one fabled region.
(A certain Amazon television show promised to take Tolkien fans back to Middle-earth. It has failed, dismally, to keep that promise. A sad irony, how a company that makes its money getting stuff to people knows so little about transportation.)
The Perilous Realm
The enchanted otherworldly realm of story, strangely enough, is where we learn a lot about being human. Through stories we both escape ourselves and become ourselves.
In Faerie we can—relative safely—encounter moral complexity, experience perspectives radically different from our own, and rehearse emotional responses to situations we haven’t yet faced in our own life. We can learn that our way of seeing and being is not the only one.
Research has shown that travelers who journey deeply into story-worlds return with enhanced empathy and increased prosocial behavior, as if they’ve practiced being human in a consequence-free space. Brain imaging also reveals that this enchantment activates our neural empathy networks, literally rewiring us for greater compassion.
Like the gifts of fairy-folk in old tales, these benefits persist long after we've returned from a story-world.
But in his essay Tolkien also cautioned that
FAERIE is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold . . . The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.
In other words, getting lost utterly in story has its risks. A powerful narrative is a Perilous Realm where we can be dazzled and captured by forces that aren’t always benign.
Research has shown we surrender to narrative enchantment we experience “cognitive detachment from reality” and become “less likely to challenge the story's content.” The very immersion that allows us to feel empathy also chisels away at our critical defenses, making us vulnerable to whatever values and beliefs the story carries.
Like fairy food that snares those who taste it and keeps them from leaving, compelling narratives can reshape our beliefs and attitudes in ways that take us further from compassion and wisdom. We can be tempted into mental prisons where we become easy prey for liars and manipulators who claim to have the only key.
The Perilous Realm of narrative transportation offers genuine magic, but like any magic, it demands respect for its power to change those who enter.
Road Work
So, storyteller, you’ve got yourself a job in transportation. Your story is a carriage. A passenger train. A rocket. A flying carpet. A whaling ship. A beat-up old 1986 Fleetwood Bounder RV.
Your audience is climbing aboard, eagerly waiting to be transported.
You’re in luck at the beginning of the journey—there are countless paths that will start you off on the road to Faerie, which means you really can’t go wrong at the beginning, as long as you get going somewhere. Any direction will do to start, really. The merest hint that some kind of story is getting underway is all you need. An audience will eagerly lend you their trust and good will, for a little while.
The further you go, however, the harder it becomes to stay on the road, and the more opportunities there are for getting lost, or suffering some kind of breakdown. There’s no sure-fire route or roadmap that works for every story, all the time, despite the claims of numerous how-to writing guides that there is (romance genre addicts may beg to differ). You may start to distrust yourself, or the road you’ve chosen. You may start looking for an easier way. Someone else’s way.
And this is another peril waiting on the road to the Perilous Realm. There are pitfalls and dungeons not just for the characters and for the reader, but also for storytellers who screw up the ride.
Characters yanked around like marionettes by mechanical plots. Pacing that’s glacial or spasmodic. Narrative inconsistencies that constantly jerk audiences out of the story. Mysteries that get teased and then fizzle out. Perfunctory perils with no real stakes or consequences. These are some of the traditional pitfalls of the Perilous Realm—craft problems that skilled storytellers learn to avoid through practice, intuition, and respect for their audience.
Unfortunately, despite how much narrative skill and wisdom we storytellers can become proficient in and learn to wield, there are new and awe-inspiring forces arrayed against us that we have no control over. Forces that are busily transforming narrative enchantment right under our noses.
The road to Faerie is currently under threat, and under construction. And strangely enough the same technologies that have made the road harder to find and to stay on are also busily rebuilding it. Or creating new roads.
Like the smartphone. A device that seems to have been invented with the express aim of keeping people out of Faerie. No matter how skilled and passionate and clever a teller of tales learns to be, no matter how much heart and wisdom they pour into their storytelling, they’re more and more likely now to be reaching their audience by way of a device specifically engineered to fragment attention.
The Fractured Zone and the End of Faerie
The smartphone represents a completely different kind of transportation—one that’s would seem to be at odds with the deep, sustained immersion needed to reach Faerie. While narrative transportation gathers our consciousness inward, toward one coherent experience, smartphones tend to scatter our attention across transitory fragments—notifications, feeds, quick hits of dopamine. This kind of attentional diaspora that studies have shown hinders full narrative immersion.
As a storyteller, I worry a lot about this. In writing a novel that I imagine being read on a page made of real paper, or listened to by audiobook, I sometimes feel so far behind the times that I might be chiseling cuneiform onto a wet clay tablet.
Faerie is vertical transportation: diving deep into one world and creating it along with the storyteller. Smartphones and tablets, too, perhaps, excel at what one might call horizontal transportation, a rapid skipping across surface and jumping from link to link, feed to feed. A story told on a smartphone doesn’t have much time to slowly build up to intriguing twists or character revelations. Competing in a space of instantaneously available nowness, a story that wants to take you to Faerie has got to get your there fast.
I fear that smartphones are less likely to transport us to Faerie these days and more likely to shuttle us to another place altogether: the Fractured Zone. Faerie knows we can’t stay long, and that the farewell is an essential part of the journey. The Fractured Zone entices us in and then refuses to let us leave.
Do we feel joy in the Fractured Zone? When we leave it, do we yearn in our souls to go back, or are we compelled to, as if by some malign force? We know the difference, even if we’re usually too successfully distracted to notice there is one.
I can personally attest that having a smartphone with me most of the day has had a negative impact on my powers of attention and even my love of deep, immersive reading. These days I feel myself getting further from the road to Faerie, and it saddens and disturbs me. It’s one of the main reasons I came up with the practice I call intermittent slowing. This is my periodic “phone fast” during which I keep my smartphone (and laptop) off and put away for a set number of hours. The idea is to stay off social media and any other form of digital consumption—this can include television if you really want to get hardass about it—for a long enough time to dissolve the pernicious effects of screen overload.
On the other hand, new technologies like virtual reality offer a kind of visually stimulating story immersion that’s both like and unlike reading a book or listening to an oral storyteller. The first time I tried on a VR headset, I was sent down below the surface of the ocean in a metal cage and attacked by a great white shark. My pulse definitely quickened and my breathing rate accelerated, no doubt about it. For a few terrifying moments I there, and the experience definitely stayed with me afterwards, although I felt no longing to go back.
Was I inside a story, though? Was this Faerie, or someplace else? Someplace new? I wasn’t sure. I’m still not.
While changing technology can short-circuit our attention and create barriers to narrative enchantment, it’s also opening up new possibilities. There are new—and sometimes overwhelming or scary—paths for storytellers to explore, and new vehicles for transporting our audiences. They may not look or feel like the old road, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Meanwhile Faerie is still there, and presumably always will be, waiting for anyone who longs to be enchanted. Waiting to help us know ourselves better and show us that the world is larger and more strange and wondrous than we’d ever imagined. Transformative, dangerous, essential: the realm of narrative transportation remains as vital to human flourishing as always, perhaps more so as true enchantment gives way to the flattening power of the algorithm.
One thing for certain, the storyteller’s job in transportation has never been harder, or more necessary.