Arthur Pendragon, Eco-WarriorLAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN

This essay explores the environmental agendas and ambitions thatmotivate John Timothy Rothwell, 'a mad biker chieftain wielding an axe,'who, claiming to be a 'post-Thatcher' King Arthur, changes his nameand links his political struggles against the state to myths that mournthe lost original purity of ancient Britain. This article looks backward toauthoritarian values his ecocriticism should interrogate. (LAP and MBS)

What 'patienr labor of mourning' divides English Heritage's fantasy ofBritain's medieval origins from tbe acts of political legitimation of one

Artbur Utber Pendragon (born Jobn Timothy Rothwell), a 'British soldier,the son of a soldier, brought up in army camps and council estates, a truant,a persistent offender, a jack-of-all-trades, a traveler, a mad biker chieftainwielding an axe, who, in a moment of revelation, in a twentieth-centurysquat,' claims to be a 'post-Thatcher' King Arthur, who changes his name toreflect (create) that reality, and who links his political struggles against thestate to myths that mourn the always already lost original purity of ancientBritain, invoking 'a time, long before history, when the people knew theirplace in the Universe, not as the centre, but as parts of a greater whole'?' Thisis the characterization of Arthur Pendragon offered up in The Trials of Arthur:The Life and Times of a Modern-Day King, the (auto) biography written byPendragon and Christopher J. Stone. King Arthur (and when we refer to KingArthur in this essay, we are referring to this late twentieth-century return),wearing Druid robes, a crown, and wielding Excalibur, has since the late 1990sbeen involved in ecological conflicts with such keepers and maintainers ofthe mythologies of the British past—and British monuments—as EnglishHeritage, Parliament, and even the Monarchy, in his desire to reclaim thesacrality of the land. Ronald Hutton, the University of Bristol historian ofneo-paganism, describes Arthur Pendragon as 'a major figure in modernDruidry' and deserving of'an equally important place in the history of groupsconcerned with environmental issues and civil rights.'^ Taking as his battlecry John Boorman's mantra—through Jessie Weston—that 'the king and theland are one,'^ Arthur Pendragon has set out to reclaim sites like Stonehenge,providing a contesting myth of origin to that supplied by the current trustees,who have fenced off the stones, making what 'the king' claims was a place ofworship, where men and women communed with the earth, into little more

A R T H U R I A N A 2 3 . 1 ( 2 O I 3 )

ARTHURIANA

than a museum space catering to the 'tourist gaze.'''This essay explores the environmental agendas and ambitions that motivate

Pendragon's engagement with both the Arthurian past and the environment,exploring the imbrications of ecology and cultural heritage, nature and theantique past, in forms of nostalgia that become a means to forge politicalcommunities of all kinds, but most particularly, the community of thenation. While we do not claim to be experts on ecocriticism or green culturalstudies, we hope to bring our expertise in medievalism to bear on the tropeTimothy Morton has called ecomimesis—the techniques through whichnature writers speak for and represent nature—to investigate its investmentsin nostalgia as an expression of ecological nationalism.' Ecomimesis is anauthenticating device, but it is also 'a pressure point, crystallizing a vast andcomplex ideological network of beliefs, practices, and processes in and aroundthe idea of the natural world.'*

The 'patient labor of mourning' with which we opened is the phraseBernard Cerquiglini uses to describe the nostalgia of the medieval philologist's'quest for an anterior perfection that is always bygone.'^ This desire for the'authentic, first, and original version' also describes the passion that fuelsKing Arthur's self-described 'mad fantasy.'^ In both his protests and hismemoir, King Arthur conjures up an ecomimesis that knits together nature,medievalism, romance, and nostalgia for a lost organic society. It is too easy,however, simply to dismiss King Arthur's performance as so much nostalgickitsch. In a 2011 review in postmedieval, Carolyn Dinshaw observes that, bydismissing nostalgia, by failing to theorize it in discussions of medievalism, wecontribute to its derogation by both writers and literary theorists.' Theterm becomes simply a convenient 'rubbish bin' to collect what we want tothrow away: the trite, the sentimental, the kitsch, the chauvinistic, enforcingdistinctions between elite and popular culture. She notes that, in its negativeconnotations as superficial emotionalism, nostalgia 'is too blunt an instrumentwith which to tease out the temporal and affective complexity of...ourcomplex and ever fascinated relationships with the so-called past.''° We agreewith her appraisal, which constructively pushes us to articulate more preciselythe ways in which King Arthur, a largely undereducated, marginalized, self-consciously absurd—yet strangely compelling—figure deploys the public'snostalgia for England's medieval past in often subversively sophisticatedways that uncover the temporal dislocations, what Linda Austin calls the'imbricated succession'" that interleaves the past with the present, the naturalwith the built environment, in physical relics that survive in England as ruin,remnant, restoration, and re-creation (in both senses of that term). Whilewe appreciate the ways in which Pendragon's tactics combine 'yearning withhints of distance, desire with shards of critique,''^ the question we pose(and which we invite our readers to consider with us) is whether imagining

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 7

the British nation and its environment nostalgically through myths of pastorganic societies, however sophisticated the imagination, can be anythingbut retrogressive, tying us to the authoritarian values ecocriticism shouldinterrogate.

Although Pendragon's remediation of Arthurian legends to supportecological protests have received scant attention from the academy, his anticshave been widely reported by the media in the UK, making him a figureworthy of attention not only from practitioners of ecocriticism but frommedievalists as well—not as guardians of some mythic Arthurian purity, butrather as scholars interested in the Arthurian legend as a social and politicalinstrument, simultaneously reflecting ctiltural fantasies even as it has been usedto direct those very desires. The first part of this essay examines the rhetoricaltechniques through which this 'king of shreds and patches''^ forges a royalidentity out ofthe fragments of Arthurian romances he has never read. Thesecond part takes up Arthur's conflicts with English Heritage over Stonehenge,battles that continue to this day. In the complexities of Pendragon's nostalgicremediation of Arthurian legend, we outline the contested space of theecological nationalism of the British Isles.

The tropes of ecomimesis erase its artifice as writing, promising the readerimmediate access to nature itself. Such a posture, however, comes at a cost.Morton writes, 'Nature writing partly militates against ecology rather thanfor it. By setting up nature as an object "over there"—a pristine wildernessbeyond all trace of human contact—it reestablishes the very separation[between natural and human environments] it seeks to abolish.''* Morton'spoetics of ecomimesis attempt to expose the rhetorical techniques centralto nature writing, which as he points out, is just as much about writing asit is about nature. Arthur's skill at manipulating the rhetoric of ecomimesisis apparent from the book's first sentence. The Trials of Arthur opens: 'C.J.[Christopher James Stone, Arthur's co-author] first heard about KingArthur—the late 20''̂ century version—on a sunny Saturday aftrernoon in thelate summer of 1994, on the pavement outside a pub in the café quarter ofCardiff, the administrative capital of Wales, where, maybe, the real historicalArthur—if he ever existed—^would have visited in his adventures, chasingpigs, fighting Saxons, lusting after maidens, drinking and carousing withhis faithful warband'(i). The 'as I write' trope invoked in 7rzÄZf'openingsentence, in which C.J. locates himself by describing his surroundings,attempts to counteract the artificial dimension of writing—its deferral ofpresence—ofîfering readers unmediated access to the scene of a long agopast. The contrast between the drab artificiality ofthe contemporary poUtical'administration' of Wales and the excitement and frenzied—if imaginary—

ö ARTHURIANA

activity of a pig chasing, Saxon fighting, lecherous, drunken 'historical' Arthurwhose activities—however redolent of the dirty Middle Ages''—suggest thepossibility of a more organic connection to the past than that on offer inthe yuppie centers of late twentieth-century Cardiff. However, ecomimesis,as Morton reminds us, renders nature. 'Rendering attempts to simulate lifeitself: to tear to pieces the aesthetic screen that separates the perceivingsubject from the object.''* Rendering convinces us that we are perceiving animmediate world: 'All signals that we are in a constructed realm have beenminimized.'*'' But this is an always self-deconstructing trope. In splittingthe subjectivities of the text's collaborators—the T of King Arthur, thelonged-for king who is only present in the third person, and that of Stone,the questing acolyte—the opening sentence of the Trials of Arthur asks fora more complex response than simple nostalgia. It offers up nostalgia for anexciting legendary past animated by the charisma of the book's subject, butwith a knowing wink. Throughout the passage the 'real historical' Arthur'sexistence is simultaneously asserted and denied by parenthetical commentslike 'maybe' and 'if he ever existed,' a tactic repeated at regular intervalsthroughout the text. The first hundred pages of the book, even as it givesus, in the genre of romance, Arthur's parentage, childhood, apprenticeship,initiation, and ascent to legendary status, also describe C.J.'s quest to locateand meet an elusive King Arthur, whom he seems always to nearly glimpse,always just missing him. Arthur's story and the political tactics he deploysagainst the heritage industry simultaneously invoke and complicate nostalgia,fashioning a rhetorical space for Britain as a site that oscillates between thehistoric and mythic, accessible and inaccessible, past and present.

The Trials of Arthur manipulates the narrative elements of romance,turning Arthurian mêmes on their heads to produce a powerful critique ofclass. Arthur's parodie performance of kingship inhabits an uneasy spacebetween what he imagines as the natural world of the medieval warrior andthe postmodern cyborg. Medieval Arthurian romances celebrated aristocraticvalues of birth equals worth and the hegemonic masculinity of the warrior ata time when those prerogatives were zealously guarded by rigorous trainingand arcane rituals of initiation.'^ As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues, the medievalknight was a Deleuzoguattarian assemblage of 'human, animal, objects,and intensities' a fusion of horse, man, armor, and weapons into a single'identity machine,' a military elite.'' King Arthur's new knighthood risesfrom the fusion of man and machine— a mythology of working class maleempowerment in which the motorcycle occupies the place of the horse. TheTrials of King Arthur íáenúfLes the 'rockers,' outlaw bikers, as the first postwarBritish youth subculture: aggressively male, 'working class and proud, theywere forging an identity in the shifting uncertainty of the post-war world'(31). In comparison to the mods, 'stylized working class dandies,' 'the rocker

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 9

Style was more practical, based entirely around the bike. Leather jacketsand denim jeans, motorcycle boots and silk scarves. Even the obligatoryhandkerchief dangling out of back pocket had a practical purpose. It was towipe your hands on after working on your bike' (31). For King Arthur, the'rockers' and later the 'greasers' constituted a new assemblage, a modernistchivalric identity machine uniting man, bike, leather, denim, and tools toproduce a new 'knight' (and bear in mind the knight is not the man but theassemblage) who drew prestige from his disaffection, economic marginality,and mechanical prowess.

They thought of themselves as a biker elite, and referred to themselves,ironically, as the 1%. Not the top, but the bottom 1%.

They would wear a badge with 1% on it on their cut-down denim jackets.This referred to a statement made by the American Motorcycle Associationin 1964, that 99% of motorcycle enthusiasts were good citizens. The outlawclubs were declaring their allegiance to the 1% of the biker population thatthe AMA refused to acknowledge (32).

These bikers literally wore their class politics on their sleeves: 'the leatherswere like armour, and the bikes like iron steeds. They were the barbarianhordes come back to claim their own' (33). And they had a 'code of honour,'their own Pentecostal Oath: 'Like: never grass to the cops; never bring outa knife unless you intend to use it; stand by your mates; never back down;and know that whatever you do has to be justified, not only to yourself,but to your mates too' (32).These were unwritten laws; those who violatedthem were subject to banishment from the group. 'One of their words was"righteousness." Righteousness meant adherence to the unwritten codes' (32).

Despite the patina of Marxist politics, however, Arthur's ecomimesisbecomes a performance of masculinity, reproducing much of the hegemonyhe seeks to oppose. We are made more than a little nervous by the genderpolitics of the ebullient romance narrative that has been crafted for this leftisteco-warrior, a narrative that replicates—and reiterates—the inequalitiesof both medieval chivalry and the contemporary ecology movement hechannels. As leader of the Loyal Arthurian Warband (LAW), King Arthuroffers a mythology of rnasculinity as a 'protection racket,' in which warriorsengage in battle over an environment troped as feminine, ultimately seekingto dominate that very environment. Like the overtly phallic engine in WaltWhitman's 'To a Locomotive in Winter,' King Arthur's fossil-fuel-burningtechnology functions as a 'type of the modern—emblem of motion andpower—pulse of the continent,' roaring through a feminized nature.^"In this, Pendragon reproduces the gender dynamics that have markedtwentieth-century ecocriticism, fusing what Timothy Morton calls the'masculinity mêmes' of American ecomimesis—'rugged individualism, aphallic authoritarian sublime, and an allergy to femininity in all its forms'—to

10 ARTHURIANA

the biological essentialism of the mythopoetic men's movement.^' Pendragonand his followers offer a hard-bodied masculinity defining itself as 'outdoorsyand extroverted, heterosexual, able-bodied—disability is nowhere to be seen;physical wholeness and coordination are valued over spontaneity.'"

But what is going on when men on motorcycles invade fragile monumentslike Stonehenge? Aren't these fossil-fuel-burning machines the problemfrom which the environment must be protected? In contrast to the ruggedmasculine posing and noisy machinery of the biker culture that subtendsArthur's narrative, any number of passages chosen nearly at random revealthe heady mix of ecological kitsch, neo-pagan spiritualism, and new ageposturing of an ecomimesis that casts the Earth as something like the CourtlyLady of medieval romance: 'Putting something called Nature on a pedestal,'Morton reminds us, 'and admiring it from afar does for the environmentwhat patriarchy does for the figure of Woman.'^' In Trials of Arthur, Natureis narrativized as the damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued by these nowmechanized knights. One might consider that, in this formulation, whatwomen, what the earth, need the protection of men from is men—andnot necessarily other men. Chivalry has always been a protection racket inwhich the reward for protecting women and the land (always imagined asmetonymically connected) is ownership of their bodies. This gender narrativeis most evident in the passages that 'render' the green philosophies of neo-paganism:

If you want to understand the pagan belief system, it's easy. There's nomystery there. There's no invisible God who you can't see or hear or feel, whonevertheless imposes his demands upon you. The pagan goddess isn't at allinvisible. You don't need a priesthood to interpret her. Do you want to meether? Then go out of your front door right now. That's her out there, in thetrees, in the bushes, in the landscape, in the soil, in the wind, in the rain, inthe buds, in the shoots, in the clouds, in the air, in the very Earth that gave youbirth, that sustains and nourishes you in all her fierce beauty, in her majestyand splendour, in all her moods, from quiet calm to raging stormy anger, inall her changing aspects, her seasons and her cycles, and her lovely, curvingform. (130-31)

For all its considerable bombast, this passage gives us a simplistic 'green'reading of the Earth as a woman, the complement to the manly biker,offering herself up to the reader. She is beautiful, voluptuous, and of coursenurturing; we are to admire her 'majesty and splendor,' 'her changing aspects,'as well as her 'lovely, curving form.' In fact she is the Lady of courtly love,simultaneously accessible and aloof, giving and withholding. But it is worthpausing over the rhetorical slight of hand by which this passage slides froman anaphoric list of 'things'—trees, bushes, soil, wind, rain, buds, shoots,clouds—to a personified and feminized Nature, substituting for an 'invisible

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 11

God' an equally transcendent concept, the métonymie list smuggling in amateriality that the concept can never possess, precisely because the idea ofNature is, as Morton suggests, meaningless: 'useful to ideologies of all kindsin its very slipperiness,' its immateriality.^ Having established the métonymieconnection between women and land, the trope can insinuate itself into thenarrative tacitly. Arthur and his Loyal Arthurian Warband (LAW) can claimto be 'forging their identity from the body of the Earth, creating stories forthemselves and then living them' (130), and we read in his words the warriorethic that justifies claiming women and land as spoils of war. The verbs'forging' and 'creating' can imply male activity carried out on the inert body ofthe Earth waiting to give up what these men desire. The active male forcefullytakes from the passive female body (earth) what he needs, exerting his willover her at the same time he claims that this is what she really wants. In hissearch for a myth of origin in the remote past. King Arthur, like so much of thenature and ecology writing he is imitating, grounds his ecomimetic narrativein a regressive gender dynamic that protects both women and the land bysubordinating them to the desires of̂ a particular masctiline hegemony—^whichdifferentiates itself from other masculine hegemonies only in how it structuresits rhetorics of domination (in this case through the mêmes of Arthurianlegend). The stories on which the latter-day King Arthur builds his identityas ecowarrior were always about powerful men imposing their wills on bothwomen and on the earth. His revisions offer nothing to change that.

II

If Arthur Pendragon is, as he imagines himself, a 'trickster' figure, his primarytactic of subversion has been to manipulate the rhetorics of a history thatnever was and a nature fashioned as lover/mother into a political discoursepotent enough to disturb—though by no means destabilize—the powerfulinstitutions that define English nationhood. Deriving his status from thelinkage of the Matter of Britain, 'a set of unstable signs appropriated bydiffering cultural groups to advance differing ideological agendas'^' and amystical vision of voluptuous nature. King Arthur satisfies his followers' desiresto live in the past, live with the past, and envision a 'new age,' a new Englandreceptive and open to the economically marginalized. His various and varieddemonstrations call for his followers to reject the conservationist technologiesof the heritage industry as elitist, consumerist, and anti-nature, even as thesedemonstrations impose other equally dangerous technologies—thousands ofmotorcycle-riding revelers who leave sites littered with beer cans and othersorts of waste—on the environment they offer to protect. The King deploysthe semiotics of carnival—the interplay of'new age' historicism and costumeevent that provides the backdrop for, say, Goddess conventions in Britain'sGlastonbury—to disrupt and re-imagine the ways England's institutional

12 ARTHURIANA

authorities have constructed the idea ofthe past. As King Arthur frames thestruggle, his methods place him in opposition to stodgy, tired, necrophiliacantiquarians. His involvement with the legend creates a vibrant political party.

Pendragon appropriates Arthurian myth to connect his environmentalactivism to England's heritage, the imagined community constituted by asense of'place' projected back into the distant past: 'Eco-warriors,' the LoyalArthurian Warband web site proclaims, 'never stop caring about our lands, it's[sic] sacred sites and places we treasure.'̂ '̂ Despite their disagreements, Arthurand the heritage industry share certain beliefs about what we might coyly call'the matter of Britain,' that is, the material culture (the buildings, artifacts, andlandscapes) that 'belong to and largely define a group.'^^ Heritage, as DavidLowenthal notes, 'more and more means what we hold jointly with others'and what defines us as a people.^* Arthur Pendragon's activism defines itselfagainst the heritage's industry's definition of what it means to call a people,the land, or the material of the past, English. He believes England's 'sacredsites' belong to 'the people of Britain—to the stars, to the Earth—not someunaccountable government body whose only motivation was to fleece thetourists and make money' (84).

Heritage 'may be "people's history" in one manifestation, it may beabout New Age travelers or saving old buildings and landscapes from roaddevelopments and property barons,' but, as Lowenthal reminds us, it is alsoentrepreneurial: 'Tourist profits are the "prime duty" of English Heritage.'^'The goals of the heritage industry, which came into its own in the 1980s inthe United Kingdom, are expressed in the National Heritage Act of 1983 thatfounded the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England,more commonly known as English Heritage. English Heritage's four statutoryresponsibilities'"—to preserve, restore, teach, and sell British antiquity—createa series of binary oppositions that Arthur's narrative consciously exploits:oppositions between the natural and built environment, the past and present,authentic and inauthentic, the organic and artificial, the romantic andcollective gazes, ritual and recreation (re-creation), kitsch and camp, nostalgiaand irony, use value and commodity value. Heritage depends upon a sensethat the past—whether natural or built—is done and finished; it must bepreserved and certified 'authentic,' despite the complexities that designationentails. To 'update' or renovate a heritage site is heresy To allow the presentto mingle with the past is to destroy the object's (or landscape's) aura, whichderives from its remoteness.'' What makes an item (a site, building, relic)'heritage' is in some sense its removal from the contemporary world. It survivesas a ghost, a trace, of a closed oflF—and oft:en unknowable—past, material butunusable, an object to be fenced and ticketed, put on display, untouchable.The heritage apparatus 'manages' visitors' interactions with the site or object,using a variety of mechanisms (lines, ropes, gates, tickets, audio guides) to

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 13

limit access to the 'tourist gaze.' This gaze, as John Urry notes, is furtherobjectified through 'photographs, postcards, films, models and so on,' thatis, through reproductions sold in ubiquitous gift shops.'^ These practices setthe site or object apart from the everyday experience of the viewer and conferupon it its aura, but they also destroy it.

Heritage promises, if nothing else, 'authenticity.' After all, the heritageindustry is the custodian of 'real' prehistoric stone circles, the tomb whereArthur is 'really' buried, the 'real' field on which the Battle of Shrewsburytook place. By way of contrast. King Arthur's campaigns stake his claim to'the real Britain behind the dreary spin of modern consumer capitalism'(copy from book's back cover) by recognizing the power of heritage objectsto mobilize people's imagination about the past for political ends. For KingArthur, the once and future king, the past visits the present as 'mythicalreturn.'" In Arthur's version of England's heritage, past and present aremutually constitutive. While the heritage industry attempts to rationalizeand order the past, as well as its human 'visitors' (the tourists whose entryfees help pay for the monument's upkeep), King Arthur wants to imaginethe past as wild and undomesticated—but usable.

Because in his philosophy, the objects of the past are meant to be usedin the here and now. King Arthur's performances shrewdly complicate andeven send up claims made on behalf of historical objects to authenticity. Forexample, to complete his transformation from outlaw biker to legendaryKing of England, Arthur requires Excalibur, which he initially evokes in allof its nineteenth-century Tennysonian romanticism. The Trials of Arthurdescribes Arthur and his followers awaiting in vain 'an ethereal boat, with theLady of the Lake in it, complete with white, drifty, medieval clothing, likesome Pre-Raphaelite goddess....She would climb out, while strange musicdrifted through the translucent air, as she raised the sword, Arthur would,of course, fall to his knees, praising her loveliness, while she knighted him,before finally passing the sword on to him' (55). Instead, Arthur's 'discovery'of Excalibur plunges his reader into the dizzying mise en abyme of hyperrealityand siniulacra. Our hero happens upon a shop in Aldershot called the Casqueand Gauntlet that has a sword the owner claims he had made for the film'Excalibur.' Not a sword made for some 'poxy re-enactment society,' but thesword that had performed the very ritual described above—in a movie. Whenthe owner tries to fob him off with a copy of this copy without the original,Arthur proclaims, 'I want the real thing.' The owner counters that he will onlysell it to 'the real King Arthur, if he ever returned.' Arthur presents him withhis passport to authenticate his identity and the owner, recognizing royaltywhen he sees it, sells him the sword, valued at about £5,000, for one hundredquid (57). Unlike Monty Python, who in 'Holy Grail' mock the Lady of theLake narrative as a means of robbing the tale of any political relevance. King

14 ARTHURIANA

Arthur's version embraces simultaneously both authentic and fake, kitsch andcamp, attesting to Arthur's canny ability to use cultural nostalgia to 'shakeup the historical myths, revealing the mechanisms of seduction and masshypnosis, the codependency of personal and official memory' that fuel theheritage industry.''• Excalibur is a prop sword, but in his hands it becomesExcalibur. A hyperreal fake, reminiscent rather than remnant of the past,authorizes Arthur and is in turn authorized by him: 'Without it, he couldn'trepresent Britain any more and he couldn't be King Arthur' (191).

But what the text giveth it taketh away: 'even if he wasn't King Arthur,and this wasn't Excalibur—even if this was some mad fantasy clogging uphis overheated brain' (191). Real and fake, vision and mad fantasy oscillatethrough the text, but, contrary to those who believe deconstruction to bepolitically nihilistic, this oscillation creates a surprisingly effective mechanismto mobilize 'the lost people, the rejected people, the lonely people, thedruggies, and the drunkards, the homeless people, the dispossessed' as the'true aristocrats of the heart, with something more valuable than gold toshare: their own shining humanity' (191).The sword figures not only in thebattle over Stonehenge and the road protests, but 'taking up...the Britishlegal system...in a mighty battle of symbols' (206). On trial for ViolentDisorder following road protests at Newbury bypass in 1997, Arthur and theother defendants refuse to swear on the customary Bible, arguing that theywould swear oaths only on the sword Excalibur. Arthur's lawyers, callingupon customary laws that likely hadn't been evoked since the Reformation,succeed in challenging the Oaths Act of 1978, convincing a judge to allowthe defendants to swear by the sword; thus 'for the first time in 1,500 years...Druidry had been recognized as a religion within these shores' (195).Theruling gives Arthur's protest substance and validity within an English courtof law (leading ultimately to the case's dismissal).

Arthur's conflict with English Heritage over the people's access toStonehenge crystallizes the differences between the King and the heritageindustry. In 1996 David Lowenthal described the joint management of thismonument by English Heritage and the National Trust as 'a self-confessednational disgrace.''' He quotes then-English Heritage chair Jocelyn Stevens:'We've managed to separate the stones from their setting. We've surroundeda great monument to the genius of the early British with the worst excessesof the twentieth century.''* Desirous of protecting the monument fromwhat Lowenthal refers to as 'a motley crew of New Age cultists, communenostalgists, ley-line mystics, and drug addicts' who 'camped in nearby fields,got stoned and laid, and left behind condoms, needles, and excrement,' theguardians of the monument created a four mile exclusionary zone aroundthe stones: 'Razor-wired, dog-patrolled, and arc-lit, Stonehenge was cleansedof riffraff by 1987,'''' although not without violence. During the so-called

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 15

'Battle of the Beanfield,' a convoy of some 600 new age travelers attendingthe Stonehenge Free Festival in 1985 were attacked by more than 1,300 police;all of their vehicles were destroyed, most were arrested, and dozens injured.As the Guardian describes it twenty years on: 'Pregnant women were clubbedwith truncheons, as were those holding babies... .It was extremely violent andvery sickening.''*The very brutality of the 'Battle of the Beanfield' highlightsthe differences between King Arthut and English Heritage in their concernsfor preserving both the land and the monuments that reside on that land. Itpoints to the extreme sacrifices—of persons, reputations, ideals—both partiesare wifling to endure.

In this conflict, the newly minted King Arthur had found 'a battle worthyof his name' (85). Having collected and connected the objects necessary toreinvigorate working class masculinity, having prepared himself (Rothwell'sbiker years are described as his apprenticeship), all that is required to createa new knighthood is the call. Paradoxically, it is the call of nature not themachine that galvanizes the rough but determined 'band of brothers.' JohnTimothy Rothwell and his mates are interpellated by Stonehenge to translatetheir raw outlaw hypermasculinity into a higher calling, to mold them intoKing Arthur and his Loyal Arthurian Warband (LAW):

But something happened to the bikers when they started going to Stonehenge.It was like they picked up something from the site itself, something morefundamental. As if they grew psychic roots that buried [sic] down into theearth, into the remote past, to draw up a kind of spiritual water, to refresh andrevive a dried up part of their souls. After a while they stopped being cowboyson mechanized horses. They became something else. They became Warriors.Knights of the Road. (32-3)

What is this 'something' that has such a transformative effect on these'mechanized cowboys,' that coalesces their rugged individualistic masculinityinto a new chivalry? Causes them to become 'starlight inspired, moonlightinspired, sages of the campfire sour(33)? The cause is left intentionally vague,'something.' The elusive power of these 'remote stones, so mysterious, soimplacably ancient' is the power (whose power? the stone's? the viewer's?) tocall upon the 'spirits of the ancestors' to 'commune' with these 'modern dayrevelers' (33). The passage never reveals who or what calls on the ancestorsto 'join them [the bikers] at the party,' who or what links these mechanicalknights' carousing to 'a party that has been going on at the time of the SummerSolstice for thousands of years' (33).

For Arthur and his Druid acolytes, Stonehenge's sacrality is rooted in itsability to connect past and present, in the Druidic rituals performed thereon particular days like solstice and equinox. Arthur would free the stones forthe Druids and 'the free people of the Earth.' He would gain complete publicaccess for the quarterly festivals for which these stones had been laid' (85). He

ARTHURIANA

would take on 'the full might of the British Establishment, the Law, the Police,the Judiciary, the Government, the wealthy landowners of Wiltshire' withhis protest—camping out near the stones and passively refusing to move—aprotest he describes as 'a strange kind of battle: one befitting the superficialityof 2O'''-century life' (85, 89). Although by 2000, the Druids had been allowedaccess to Stonehenge for religious ceremonies, in 2008, Arthur once againtakes up his protest to return Stonehenge to its natural environment.

In Stonehenge, King Arthur has discovered an irresistible site for his eco-war against England's ruling elite. This ancient collection of rocks offers aperfect ground-zero for twentieth- and twenty-first century conflicts overnature, social class, and religion. Even more than the structure itself, itsliterary supplement makes Stonehenge a compelling target. Dating back to3,000 BGE, Stonehenge is so old that no one really knows who built it, how,or what it was used for. Although built by human hands, the monumentmerges into the plain on which it sits, creating a 'natural' landscape that isthe perfect screen upon which to project the nostalgic fantasies of scholars,poets, artists, photographers, and nature writers of all stripes. 'While Geoffreyof Monmouth imaged Stonehenge as a war memorial, ingeniously constructedby Merlin, Wordsworth described it in 'Guilt and Sorrow' as an 'inmate oflonesome Nature's endless year,' an enigmatic place of Druidic sacrifice that'saw'st the giant wicker rear /For sacrifice its throngs of living men.'"

Just as a photograph of Stonehenge erases the technology of its making, aswell as the tourists, tacky gift shop, and nearby motorway, so ecomimesis seeksto erase the conditions of its own making. Stonehenge tends compulsivelyto evoke the ecomimetic trope Morton calls the Aeolian, a technique that'establishes a sense of processes continuing without a subject or an author.'*"It is a technique that simultaneously proffers and withdraws knowledge.Consider by way of example the following passage in which Jeffrey J. Cohenattempts to explore the life of stones.

Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialitieswithin the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence ourfascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across a temporalduration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices,such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers havebeen obliterated. Stonehenge has outlived the peoples of the Bronze and Ironages, as well as the Romans, the Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans....Stonehenge may even be a human collaboration with rock formations foundin the Preseli Mountains, where dolerite stands in architectural pillars arrangedby no human hand.'*'

Cohen suggests that Stonehenge 'communicates' something. But how does itcommunicate and what does it tell us? Stonehenge's speech lacks a speaker;that is its mystery and its effect. As Morton notes, 'Even at the very depth

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 17

of the illusion of rendering, there is a blankness that is structural to ouracceptance ofthe illusion itself.'-*̂ Stonehenge's power to awe us depends onus simultaneously accepting that it communicates, and that we cannot knowthe substance it communicates. What is left are the conclusions we drawfrom the silence, or perhaps the conclusions we impose on it. King Arthur'sdescription of Stonehenge carries the same Aeolian promise of revelationthat Cohen invokes (the spirit of'collaboration' Cohen seems to imagine):

And isn't there a mystery here, that these old piles of stones can have suchan effect? That their message—whatever it is—has carried down the ages,inspiring new generations to join the chorus? They speak of something thatwent before, before the time of ignorance and stupidity, when the people werelike holy scientists, observing the immeasurable Universe with diligence andcare, while feeling its immense love for them, as a Mother loves her children.The stones speak of a time, long before history, when people knew their placein the Universe not as the centre, but as parts of a greater whole, circling inthe circles of the heavens like the eternal stars. (82)

This ekphrastic slight of hand rejects the crass commercialism of contemporarylife only to invent a history that mourns 'the impossibility of mythical return,the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values.'« It suggeststhat we make ourselves and our world better by rejecting the present as atime of 'ignorance and stupidity,' only to prefer instead a past that neverexisted, 'when people knew their place in the Universe...circling in thecircles of the heavens like the eternal stars.' But really, if a man is to takeon the identity of King Arthur, he should, at the very least, be aware of theprofound ignorance, stupidity, and horrific destructiveness of the civil warsthat produced Ceofïrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae or ThomasMalory's Morte Darthur. As Morton notes, we need to be able to argue for 'aprogressive view of ecology that does not submit to the atavistic authority offeudalism or 'prehistoric primitivism' (New Age animism). It requires thatwe be nostalgic for the future, helping people figure out that the ecologicalparadise has not occurred yet' (emphasis in original)."^ The question we leaveyou, the reader—with the question both King Arthur and English Heritageavoid—is, how do we learn to be nostalgic for the future?

KENYON COLLEGE AND EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

Besides her work with Martin Shichtman, Laurie A. Finke, Professor of Women'sand Gender Studies at Kenyon College, is one of die editors of die Norton AnthologyofTheory and Criticism and author o( Feminist Theory, Women's Writing and Women'sWriting in Middle English. She has published in £;cfOT/>¿7níí, Theatre foumal. TheatreSurvey, Arthuriana, and Signs.

l8 ARTHURIANA

Martin B. Shichtman is Director of Jewish Studies and Professor of English Languageand Literature ar Eastern Michigan University. With Laurie A. Finke, he has writtenCinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film and King Arthur and the Myth ofHistory. He is co-editor, with James P. Carley, of Culture and the King: The SocialImplications of the Arthurian Legend, and, with Laurie A. Finke, oi Medieval Textsand Contemporary Readers. He has also authored numerous articles on medievalliterature, contemporary literary theory, and film.

NOTES

1 Arthur Pendragon and Christopher James Stone, The Trials of Arthur: The LifeandTimesofaModern-DayKing, (Element, 2003), pp. 50-1; subsequent citationswill be noted parenthetically in the text. j

2 Taken from a witness statement for the trial of Arthur Pendragon, SouthwarkCrown Court, November 1997, contesting Arthur's right to carry the swordExcalibur, Pendragon and Stone, Trials of Arthur, p. 241.

3 The phrase is from Boorman's 1981 film, 'Excalibur'; for a discussion of Boorman'sdebt to Jessie Weston, see Martin B. Shichtman, 'Hollywood's New Weston:The Grail Myth in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and John Boorman'sExcalibur,' PostScript ¿^ (1984): 35-49.

4 The term is from John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. (London: SAGE, 2002).5 For introductions to the field of ecocriticism see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism

(London: Routledge, 2004); Lawrence Buell, The Future of EnvironmentalCriticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Maiden, MA: BlackwellPub, 2005). On ecomimesis, see Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature:Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,2007), pp. 31-3.

6 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 35.7 Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, Parallax

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 34-8 Cerquiglini, In Praise, p. 34; Pendragon and Stone, TriaL of Arthur, p. 191.9 Linda Austin describes the ways in which nostalgia is derogated across fields of

knowledge: 'as psychology, nostalgia demonstrates a non-traumatic unconsciousand an impersonal mode of remembering, as public memory, it fabricates orsimplifies history to form false consciousness in the form of public memory; asthe impulse toward art, it purveys the overfamiliar and simulated...Nostalgiaresults in bad art because it falsifies the past and skirts "genuine" emotion' (LindaMarilyn Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917 [Charlottesville: University ofVirginia Press, 2007], p. 198).

10 Carolyn Dinshaw, 'Nostalgia on My M\r\A,' postmedievalz (2011): 232.11 Linda Austin, T h e Nostalgic Moment and the Sense of History,' postmedieval 2

(2011): 129.

12 Dinshaw, 'Nostalgia on My Mind,' 227.13 //^w/ei 3.4.102.14 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 125.

ARTHUR PENDRAGON, ECO-WARRIOR 19

15 The rhetorical trope, common in film, in which the backwardness of the MiddleAges is visually rendered by dirt.

16 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 35.17 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 35.18 Hegemonic masculinity is the term developed by R.W. Connell to describe the

most powerful and valued form of masculinity within a given culture; see R.W.Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, 'Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking theConcept,' Gender and Society-it) (2005): 829-859.

19 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures vol. 35(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 46.

20 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co. 1897), p.359.21 Timothy Morton, 'Queer Ecology,' PMLA 125 (2010): 274.22 Morton, 'Queer Ecology,' 279.23 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 5.24 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 14.25 Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, 'Introduction' in Culture and the King:

The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend (New York: SUNY Press, 1994),P- <5.

26 'Loyal Arthurian Warband Environmental,' http://www.warband.org.uk/page13.htm (accessed 24 September 2012).

27 David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils ofHistory (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 60.

28 Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, p. 6029 Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, p. 60; Urry, The Tourist Gaze, p. 107.30 'National Heritage Act of 1983,' legislative.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/

ukpga/1983/47/crossheading/historic-buildings-and-monuments-commission-for-england (accessed 24 September 2012).

31 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1" ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,1968), p. 229.

32 Urry, Tourist Gaze, p. 3.33 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 8.34 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 62.35 David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, p. 28.36 Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, p. 28.37 Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, pp. 28-9.38 'Twenty Years After, Mystery Still Clouds Battle of the Beanfield,' The Observer,

n.d., http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2oo5/jun/12/ukcrime.tonythompson.(accessed 24 September 2012); see also Trials of Arthur, p. 43.

39 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1., ed.William Knight (London: Macmillan, 1896). p. 83,11. 121-23.

^oyionon. Ecology Without Nature, p. 41.41 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 'Stories oí Szone,' postmedieval 1 (2010): 58.42 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 43.43 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 8.44 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 162.

Copyright of Arthuriana is the property of Arthuriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple

sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,

download, or email articles for individual use.