Having surveyed the diverse opinions regarding The Magic Ring's place in fantasy literature, it might be à propos to tell a bit about the story, a general outline only, for the plot has innumerable twists and turns. The young squire Otto of Trautwangen, accompanied by his cousin Bertha, witness a battle of two knights over a magic ring. When the lovely Gabrielle's defender loses and she must turn over the ring, Otto impulsively promises to win it back for her. Knighted by his elderly father, Sir Hugh, a retired knight with a rather chequered past, he leaves behind Bertha, his not-quite-betrothed, eventually winning fame, the ring and Gabrielle to be his wife... but fate has other plans. When, at the wedding-eve's feast he mistakenly drinks a potion intended for another, he disgraces himself, and leaves in dishonour to fight the pagans on the Finnish border. The action shifts back and forth between Otto, his doppelganger, a pair of sorceresses — one unrepentantly pagan, one Christian, of sorts, various interrelated knights and maidens, nefarious kidnappers, and, amongst others, a mysterious man who appears to be able to draw great power from the ring. Things come to a head when all the characters converge on the castle of Trautwangen, where secrets are revealed and violent supernatural revenge threatens.

While the book is entitled The Magic Ring, besides a few brief mentions at the beginning of the book when knights are battling to decide its ownership, the ring and its magical powers of illusion are not explicitly outlined until nearly 70 percent of the way through, its full powers being only presented at the very conclusion. Overall, the bulk of the complex story reads very much like William Morris' mediaeval fantasies, albeit with a better pace, less of the slanting sunlight through the bedewed forest depictions, and far fewer archaisms (besides a few conversational 'thine' and 'thou'). Regarding this, Sturgis mentions that Robert Pearse Gillies' 1825 translation-adaptation, while perhaps less literally accurate than the later Victorian translation of The Magic Ring, is much more readable and attuned to English expectations. While Sturgis finds plot parallels to Arthurian legendry, the narrative's shifts back and forth between characters, the chivalric relationships between the sexes, and the use of sorcery and the supernatural, seem much more akin to the later (16th century) chivalric romances, such as Amadis of Gaul, derided in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In the context of when de la Motte Fouqué wrote these elements can be termed Romantic and Gothic.

While an inherent part of such literature, the at times overtly Christian-chivalric ethic was, by today's standards, a bit much: Christian knights virtually never knowingly do evil, Richard the Lion Hearted (a documented sexual predator and pedophile) is portrayed as a paragon of virtue and justice, Moors spontaneously convert to Christianity in the presence of the Pope, sorcery is defeated by the stainless maiden Bertha, pagans are portrayed as debased superstitious barbarians... I almost wished that the druidess Gerda had stuck to her guns and after giving up her supernatural powers, had held to her refusal to accept Christianity. In a number of ways she and Theobaldo, the ring wielder, are the most interesting characters, even if they eventually succumb to the prevailing ethic. The other potentially interesting character was that of Otto's father Sir Hugh, but his character is not developed, and in the end his past indiscretions are quickly forgiven. However, this is, along with the shifting story line, a limitation inherent to the genre.

Where de la Motte Fouqué excels is in melding a number of disparate themes into a cohesive story, without having his obviously extensive knowledge of such matters come off as didactic or pedantic. When he wants to he can also develop an excellent atmosphere of supernatural horror — no less than Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft pointed this out —, which is particularly the case in the episodes occurring in the dense woods of the Finnish borderlands. If some of the coincidences which tie everything together at the end and the good knights' miraculous ability to survive even the most crushing defeat are somewhat eye-popping by today's standards, they were common fare in chivalric romances.

Besides any literary importance accorded to it by academics or putative links to modern fantasy themes (who does not hesitate to read a book when told it is an influential "classic"), the The Magic Ring remains a very readable and entertaining novel, with numerous twists and turns, mysteries and secrets revealed, drawing and ably combining several rich myth-traditions. This, not its antecedents or offspring, is why it deserves a reading after over a century in obscurity.