Escaping to Elfland

On the legacy of portal fantasy in literature, from "The Mabinogion" to Lord Dunsany and C.S. Lewis.

Fantasy in Twilight, Edward Robert Hughes ca. 1911. Via Wikimedia Commons.

One night, when I was six years old, I woke up to the faint sound of bells. 

At that late hour, the soft pink walls of my childhood bedroom appeared muted and gray. The chest of drawers in the corner loomed above me; the handles of each drawer cast jagged shadows over my ballerina-themed bedspread. Every shadow was an outstretched claw, poised to crush a spinning dancer in its grip.

I shut my eyes and hid under the covers, but the sound of ringing bells soon enveloped the little room. Peering one eye over the mound of blankets, I glanced about myself. The bells seemed to be coming from behind the curtains on the opposite wall. I frowned. 

With one foot extending dangerously off the side of the bed (that was monster territory, after all), I coaxed myself from my cocoon and tip-toed to the window. 

When I pushed open the curtains, a moonless night greeted me. I could see a few stars scattered here and there, the swaying silhouettes of trees in the yard, but the source of the bells eluded me—until I looked down. Beneath the windowsill, a tunnel had materialized. 

My heart raced. It was just large enough for me to squeeze myself inside. The interior was pitch black. It called to mind the infamous “big kid” slide at our local play center, with its outlet nowhere in sight. But the sound of the bells beckoned me forth. Hypnotized by the melody, I crawled into the darkness. 

Inching my way forward, I soon discerned a light in the distance. Its pale, aquamarine glow seemed to promise that something wonderful lay just ahead—perhaps a cloudless sky in spring, or a tropical sea. If I could only reach it, if I could only just see the place where the bells sang… 

My hands felt for the next bit of ground, and suddenly, they came upon the empty air. I looked down. 

I screamed. 

Down, down, down, I tumbled through the floor of the tunnel, descending rapidly into the bowels of the earth. Above me, the pale blue light vanished with a final twinkle. I braced for impact—

But it never came. When I opened my eyes, I was nestled safely in my bed once again. 

At the age of six, I dreamed of the tunnel many times. It was always the same: I would discover the entrance beneath my windowsill and summon the courage to go inside. But fairyland remained just out of reach, and I would plunge into the abyss before waking. The portal remained closed. 

“Mad Tea Party.” Illustration by Sir John Tenniel for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, originally published in 1865. Via Project Gutenberg.

Portal fantasies are a staple in speculative fiction. While their prominence waxes and wanes with shifting trend cycles, the door to Narnia (or, perhaps in my case, the rabbit hole to Wonderland) is never far away. 

Portal fantasies rather fittingly occupy a liminal space between low and high fantasy. Works of low fantasy, such as the Harry Potter series, take place entirely in our world. Hogwarts might be magically concealed from muggle intrusion, but the U.K.’s premiere wizarding school is not on another planet or in a different realm. Rather, Hogwarts is tucked away in the Scottish Highlands, a place brimming with unearthly beauty, but still very much real. 

Works of high fantasy are set in universes entirely separate from our own, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. But a portal fantasy indulges in the greatest dreams of our childhood and offers readers the best of both worlds. Traditionally, a portal fantasy involves a person from our world venturing into another realm, though occasionally, this narrative is reversed. (Think Disney’s Enchanted as a cheeky example.) 

The roots of portal fantasy stretch all the way back to humanity’s infancy. The crossroads—the namesake of this publication—is a common setting in folklore from around the world, often described as a place where the realm of humans intersects with the realm of gods, demons, or fairies. From Hecate in Greek mythology to the Yoruba orisha Eshu, deities across faiths and cultures can preside over the crossroads as a kind of gateway to their domain.

A katabasis, for example, is a journey to the underworld. This storytelling motif presents itself frequently in Greek and Roman myths, and can feature both god and human travelers. Persephone is perhaps the most famous example of a mythological figure journeying into Hades, but who can forget Orpheus’s rescue of Eurydice, not to mention Heracles, Aeneas, and Adonis? 

Long before the Greeks, the Mesopotamians had “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” a story that predates the Epic of Gilgamesh and involves Enkidu traveling to the underworld to retrieve magical objects for Gilgamesh. Underworld journeys also feature in living faiths, including the stories of Buddhist bodhisattvas such as Kṣitigarbha and Avalokiteśvara. 

Seated Avalokiteśvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, artist unknown. Bronze sculpture of Avalokiteśvara from Sri Lanka, ca. 750 A.D. Via Wikimedia Commons.

But my favorite early examples of portal- or journeying-narratives come from The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh stories that were first compiled in the 12th and 13th centuries but whose origins may stretch further back in oral traditions.* Scholars used to maintain that these tales reflected ancient, pre-Christian beliefs, but now they are generally understood as a blend of Wales’ Celtic past and its medieval context. Folklore, especially when transmitted orally, is poised for evolution. 

Characters in The Mabinogion frequently brush up against the Otherworld, a place of supernatural beings that plays a central role in Celtic myths—Tír na nÓg in Irish mythology, Annwn or Annwfn in Welsh, and in later Arthurian legends, Avalon. The people who occupy the Welsh Annwn are a race of god-like beings whom a modern reader might interpret as fairies. In the First Branch, Pwyll, the prince of Dyfed travels to the lands of Annwn and trades places with its king. In the Third Branch, a mist envelops the kingdom of Dyfed and kills all the humans except its rulers, two of whom later disappear in a magical castle before the others are able to reverse the curse.  

The Mabinogion and the wellspring of Arthurian legend that emerged from medieval literature gave British writers the early blueprints for portal fantasy. The key difference between mythology and fantasy is that myths are produced within cultures that understand the tales to be at least partially true, whereas fantasy is produced within cultures that understand the tales to be fictitious. Therefore, fantasy as its own distinct literary genre wouldn’t emerge until the 19th century, after the Enlightenment created clear divisions between the earthly and the otherworldly, and with considerable influence from Romanticism, Gothic literature, and the resurgence of the fairytale thanks to writers like Hans Christian Andersen.

The Riders of the Sidhe, John Duncan ca. 1911. Via Wikimedia Commons.

George Macdonald’s Phantastes (1858) is generally regarded as the first fantasy novel for adults. Phantastes is a portal fantasy that follows a young man named Anodos; he receives a desk for his twenty-first birthday, and trapped within is a fairy woman. She shows Anodos a vision of “Fairy Land,” and promises that the following day, he will find the road to her realm. Sure enough, the next morning, his bedroom transforms into a forest, and with the portal open, he ventures into Faerie. With this fantastical discovery emerging from Anodos’s writing desk, I am reminded of another piece of magical furniture: the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). Perhaps the most iconic moment in any portal fantasy is the scene in which Lucy Pevensie pushes past the fur coats and stumbles into Narnia, its lands smothered in endless snow. 

Macdonald’s Phantastes was followed by two other much-beloved portal fantasies: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, first as a play in 1904, and then as a novel called Peter and Wendy in 1911.   

However, Carroll and Barrie were both writing for children. The man who would take fantasy for adults into the mainstream was Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany—better known as Lord Dunsany, the author of The King of Elfland’s Daughter. His novel follows the prince of a kingdom called Erl, whose counselors have foolishly advised him to journey into Faerie and marry an elvish princess. In Dunsany’s work, one can see the influence of The Mabinogion, as well as Arthurian romances and George Macdonald’s Phantastes. Lord Dunsany’s gorgeously-written prose would in turn later influence the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, along with contemporary writers like Neil Gaiman and Erin Morgenstern. Gaiman’s Stardust and Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea are both portal fantasies, and Stardust in particular derives inspiration from Dunsany’s tale.

I’ve been mulling over the subject of portal fantasies because a few weeks ago, I had the dream again. For the first time in twenty years, I faced the tunnel—but now, its size mocked me. As an adult, I was too large to squeeze inside. I grew irate. Why was Faerie locking me out? What had I done wrong?

When I woke, my anger melted into relief. After all, I’ve read too many fairy stories from old folklore, and the fate of mortals who wander into the Otherworld is often unkind. But that deep-seated yearning for otherworldly encounters remains a cornerstone of the human experience, and indeed, the engine of the fantasy genre as a whole. The mists of Annwn have discovered a new way to envelop our minds and hearts, and with each turn of the page, we fall deeper under their spell.

*If you’re interested in reading The Mabinogion, but like me, you don’t speak Welsh, I enjoyed Sioned Davies’ translation (Oxford World’s Classics).