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

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Andy Letcher

The song suggests lazy summer days lying in hay meadows, in a countryside where the fairies or pixie folk and the protesters are part of the natural order of things, part of the natural force of green growth which will make "Eden reborn again." Matt played in a band called the Space Goats, who were extremely prominent at road protests, often providing a live musical accompaniment to digger diving with their heady brew of psychedelic folk music. The members of the band saw their music, in part, as trying to recreate the enchanting music that fairies, in legend, are supposed to make; and, to some extent, with their use of exotic instruments such as the hammered dulcimer, the bouzouki and the didgeridoo, they succeeded. The lead singer changed his name to Poc, deliberately echoing that of the fairy, Puck, from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fairies make regular appearances in Space Goat songs. "Eyanabella" (Space Goats 1999) is a love song to a fairy queen who conforms to the Victorian stereotype: delicate beauty and gossamer winged. The "Pixies Jinx" (Space Goats 1999) warns a security guard to be wary of an unnoticed leprechaun sitting on his boot, whilst in "Pixie People," Poc asks:

   Who are the Pixie people, are you one of the fairy folk? Do you like your
   planet, or do you want to see it go up in smoke? (Space Goats 1999).

It is a direct challenge to non-protesters to run away and join the "pixie people," namely, the protesters.

Caution must always be exercised when analysing song lyrics. As it is a medium where metaphor and hyperbole are frequently used, lyrics should not necessarily be taken literally or as indicative. An example is the song "Whisper on the Breeze" by Paul "Busker" Gill from the "Tribal Voices" tape. The song speaks of the anger felt by the Horned God when a tree is felled, but he uses this imagery figuratively, and does not actually believe in a Horned God. [6] However, the adoption of fairy mythology is not just limited to protesters' songs but infuses the whole movement. The protest site at Stanworth Valley in Lancashire was called the "Cosmic Pixie Tree Village," and similarly, the first camp to be set up at Newbury was called the "Pixie Village." One of the most popular books at Skyward camp at Newbury was Enid Blyton's The Enchanted Forest, in which children climb the "magic faraway tree" and meet the various elves and pixies who live in the tree and in the worlds to be found in its canopy. At Fairmile in Devon, protesters referred to themselves as "Fairies." At the centre of the camp stood one large oak tree, complete with four tree houses, which, for protesters, came to resemble the magic faraway tree. The second camp, about one mile away across the valley, was literally a fortress made from earth and the debris of previously felled trees. It was named "Fort Trollheim," and protesters here, reacting to what they regarded as the childlike naivety of the "fairies" across the way, developed a different identity, but one still drawn from the same mythology: they called themselves the "Trolls." A playful rivalry existed between the two camps, the Fairies at Fairmile and the Trolls at Trollheim, during the whole campaign--the trolls, for example, banning the use of penny whistles at their camp. [7]