Every Story is Christian: Dragons, Alchemy, and the Perilous Realm | Dragon Common Room
Tolkien’s Perilous Realm Explained (and Why It Matters Now)
What does it mean to heal the storyteller? For the Dragon Common Room, the answer had always been tied to the gospel. Dr Rachel Fulton Brown from Fencing Bear at Prayer and Kimberly Crilly join me for a fascinating, rambling chat through Tolkien, stories, dragons, and magic.
Since God entered creation through the Word, then stories aren’t just entertainment. They can be the medium through which the incarnation echoes. Tolkien had seen this clearly, and it remained the reason why storytelling carried such weight.
Every great story is Christian?
The guests are adamant that every great story is Christian, not just as a religious idea, but as the reality of how existence works. That view can reshape how movies, novels, and even games are experienced. Even when the authors weren’t Christian, even when they didn’t intend it, the shape of Christ can emerge. And he often does.
Creation itself could not hide its maker. Evil might be present, but God was never absent.
Naturally, the question followed—what are the edges of that claim? Could every story, even the horrific or corrupt, really be called Christian? The response was clear: yes, though not all reflected God equally.
Sometimes His presence showed through human weakness, through the recognition of evil, or through the ache of a fallen world. Sometimes it was faint, sometimes vivid. Creation carries His signature, and stories—no matter how misshapen—can not erase it.
One of the guests remembered her early frustration that no one seemed willing to face the reality of evil. Long before her return to the faith, she wanted to write stories that shouted its presence. When she later read the accounts of exorcists like Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the patterns clicked into place. She said people tolerated evil because they no longer recognized it.
The new Mission Impossible films, for instance, presented a world under the control of a sinister AI. The imagery was unmistakable: spiritual warfare dressed as modern techno-thriller. Churches lingered in the background of scenes. The plot turned on temptation, oppression, and resistance. It feels more parable than mere popcorn blockbuster.
Dragons and Common Rooms
The Dragon Common Room had been working on their own poetic epic, Draco Alchemicus.
Born during the pandemic, the project wrestled with pharmakeia—both literal drugs and the spellcraft of propaganda. The dragon became a figure for temptation, control, and the subtle weaving of lies. Writing the poem meant exploring alchemy in all its layers: turning lead to gold, transforming the soul, grasping at power.
Was the dragon Satan with his promises, or Christ as the brazen serpent lifted in the desert? The ambiguity mattered. Temptations looked attractive. They promised dominion, cosmetics, industry. The trick was seeing them for what they were.
Alchemy, they discovered, was more than a medieval superstition. In the hands of artisans, even making pigments was spiritual practice. Spike Buck’s The Alchemy of Paint revealed how medieval craftsmen saw their work as participation in transformation—of matter and of soul. That insight reshaped the poem.
Storytelling itself was a form of alchemy. Done rightly, it became prayer. Done wrongly, it became a snare.
The conversation turned to dragons. Were they always evil? Not in scripture. Yahweh fought Leviathan, but other dragons sang His praise.
Dragons populated myths across cultures, sometimes as adversaries, sometimes as guardians, sometimes as symbols of wisdom. Modernity had flattened them into one-dimensional monsters—or worse, into marketable mascots. Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin both had warned against this loss. Dragons matter because they point to reality beyond themselves.
What is The Perilous Realm?
Tolkien’s notion of the perilous realm became the pivot. He described fairy as a dangerous land—not imaginary, but perilous, because it demanded reverence. Enter it wrongly, and you risked confusion or pride. Enter it rightly, and you found recovery, consolation, escape.
We chatted a little about Henry Corbin’s writings on the imaginal realm: a place between earth and God, accessed by the imagination, where saints and mystics encountered visions. Storytellers brush against it too, often without knowing.
The peril was not always external. Sometimes it was the peril you carried with you. Like Samwise, who could wield the Ring without ruin because his desires were simple, the dangers of the perilous realm often reflected the heart of the traveler. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish illustrated this brilliantly—the peril on the map changed depending on who touched it. The imagination magnified your wounds.
That was why, the guests insisted, storytellers needed healing. Without discipline, imagination wandered into traps. The form of art mattered as much as the content.
Poetry taught this relentlessly. The wrong word could break a stanza, but when the rhyme finally fit, meaning itself snapped into focus. They had discovered this while wrestling their seven-act epic into shape. Structure was not a cage but a guide.
Recovering fantasy for Christ
Healing the storyteller meant recovering fantasy for Christ. It meant refusing to reduce dragons to merch or stories to spectacle. It meant reclaiming the perilous realm as a place of reverence, not exploitation. It meant learning to see again—through math proofs, through poetry, through prayer—the rightness of form.
Attention itself was training in prayer, Simone Weil had said. To attend rightly was to open yourself to God.
The conversation ended where it began: with the conviction that every great story is Christian. Not because they all preached the gospel explicitly, but because creation itself was marked with it.
Stories revealed that truth, even in distortion. Evil tries to hide it, but fails. In fact, the struggle against evil often make it more visible.
Marvelous discussion!
Thank you for the conversation and for the beautiful write up!