The Scouring of the Shire: Fairies, Trolls and Pixies in Eco-Protest Culture

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Andy Letcher

Abstract

Environmental protest in Britain in the 1990s flourished with the growth of the direct action movement. A distinctive culture of protest emerged, particularly in response to the construction of new roads, with its own radicalised spirituality known as "eco-paganism." One feature of the movement was the adoption of a fairy mythology as a significant belief narrative. This article gives examples of this mythology, showing how it was expressed, and demonstrates that it produced three responses: outright rejection; a symbolic identification with fairies; and/or literal belief. This last position was given credence by occasional phenomenological encounters with otherworldly beings, examples of which are given. The article concludes that, whether literal or symbolic, the belief in fairies helped protesters make sense of their struggles, hardships and occasional successes.

Introduction

From Arthurian legend to Anglo-Saxon texts, from Shakespeare to Disney, from garden gnomes to washing up liquid, fairies and fairy legends are an integral part of Western culture. Fairies, and the other inhabitants of their enchanted world, [1] have been a potent source of inspiration for the human imagination for over a thousand years, and continue to be so to the present day. A best-selling illustrated book about fairies, from the 1970s, describes the allure of fairyland:

   [it is] a world of dark enchantments, of captivating beauty, of enormous
   ugliness, of callous superficiality, of humour, mischief, joy and
   inspiration, of terror, laughter, love and tragedy ... its position is
   elusive. It is sometimes just over the horizon and sometimes beneath our
   feet (Froud and Lee 1978, 3).

More recently, on this side of the horizon, fairies have inspired a countercultural movement. The 1990s in Britain were marked by large and dramatic public protests against a government-sponsored programme of road building, and a private sector-led expansion of opencast quarrying. A distinctive protest culture flourished in response to this, combining the politics of direct action and an anarcho-travelling lifestyle, with a definite neo-pagan sensibility. This culture adopted an important fairy mythology which placed protesters within an almost fairytale-like struggle between the benevolent forces of nature and a tyrannical and destructive humanity. Protesters came to regard themselves as, or aided by, fairies or nature spirits in a just cause that pitted nature against artifice, the little people against the much larger, but corrupt, forces of law and order.

The aim of this article is to document examples of the way in which protesters have done and continue to do this, and to analyse how this "fairy mythology" has become a significant narrative for the movement. I will demonstrate that there are three responses to this narrative within protest culture: (i) hostility or outright rejection; (ii) symbolic identification with fairies; (iii) literal belief in fairies as spirits of nature. I conclude that both the symbolic identification with, and the literal belief in, fairies is fuelled by occasional phenomenological encounters with otherworldly beings. These encounters are related as stories which shape the belief systems of the movement. This work is based upon my time spent actively involved as a road protester, and more lately as a researcher carrying out fieldwork for my Ph.D. thesis on bardism within modern paganism. I begin with a brief overview of the road protest movement.

Road Building and Eco-Paganism

In the 1990s, the then Conservative Government launched a massive 23 billion [pounds sterling] road building scheme as a response to Britain's worsening traffic congestion problems. In the process, they unwittingly instigated the "most successful revolutionary movement in Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century" (Monbiot 1998). Starting with just two people at Twyford Down in 1992, the movement grew, with protests the length of the country from Glasgow to Kent. It culminated at Fairmile in Devon in 1997, after which the Government announced a U-turn and cut the roads budget to just 6 billion [pounds sterling]. In all cases the protesters used the same tactics: positioning themselves bodily in the way of construction, either by sitting on machinery (called "digger diving") or by placing camps, tree houses, tunnels and locking-on points en route. Their ideal aim was to stop the road from being built at all; their more achievable aim was to add so much extra to the cost of construction that future projects would be rendered unviable.

A distinctive protest culture emerged which was derived from the relatively harsh lifestyle of the protest camps, and whilst not all protesters had spiritual inclinations, the movement was infused with a pagan sensibility. Eco-paganism, as it is called, [2] combines ideas from Wicca and Druidry, the New Age, Buddhism and theosophy, with anarchist politics, feminism, and 1960s psychedelia, all with an itinerant lifestyle incorporating green radicalism and direct action. It is a syncretic religion which gives primacy to lived experience, and is therefore hard to define or describe. Lacking any formal structures or hierarchies, it is, though, a perfect example of a vernacular religion, that is "the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly liturgical forms of the official religion" (Yoder, cited in Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000, 6), where, in this case, the more established pagan traditions of Wicca and Druidry can be seen as the "official versions." It is very much a religion of the people, which has emerged from the community of protesters and their collective stories.