The Magic Ring
chivalric romance by Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué
The Magic Ring: A Knightly Romance (German: Der Zauberring. Ein Ritterroman) is an 1812 novel by the Geman writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. It is a chivalric romance about a medieval knight who searches for a magic ring and participates in a crusade to Finland. It was Fouqué's most popular historical novel.
Plot
The story is set in an idealised version of medieval Europe and uses tropes from chivalric romances. It revolves around a German knight, Otto, who tries to obtain a ring with magic properties so he can return it to a lady who has lost it. He soon becomes involved in a series of intrigues and ends up participating in the Northern Crusades, fighting pagans in the dark forests of the Finnish borderlands.
Publication
The novel was first published in three volumes by Johann Leonhard Schrag in Nuremberg in 1812. It was commercially successful and a second, revised edition was published in 1816. It was published in English translation by Robert Pearse Gillies in 1825.
“The Magic Ring” enters the record as chivalric romance by Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Magic, Ring and chivalric can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108884738. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1812, 1816 and 1825.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Magic Ring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.