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

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Andy Letcher

   [We] actually physically stepped into archetypes, it wasn't something we
   got out of a book or something, it was people who built a hill fort, lived
   in mud upon a hill and called themselves Trolls. [11]

In this section, I identify three key features resulting from this choice of identity: that protesters see themselves as the "little people" standing up to the power of the state; that protesters position themselves as outside of and opposed to mainstream society; and that the adoption of fairy mythology helps to justify their counter-cultural morality. I begin by introducing neo-tribal theory.

Neo-tribal theory is a body of theory which aims to determine the processes of sociality and group formation as we move from a modern society to a postmodern one. The term "neo-tribe" was introduced by Michel Maffesoli and developed by Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman 1993; Maffesoli 1996). Bauman predicts that the neo-tribe will be the most important expression of sociality in a society in which traditional community and family groups have been fragmented. Neo-tribes are predicted to coalesce over single issues, and to be short-lived, not outliving the lifespan of its members, this latter point being the opposite of that which occurs in anthropological tribes:

   Typical examples of tribus are not only fashion victims, or youth
   subcultures. The term can be extended to interest-collectivities:
   hobbyists; sports enthusiasts; and more important--environmental movements
   (Shields 1996, xii).

Neo-tribal theory is instructive in helping us to understand how groups come to form their identity. Shields notes that:

   Unlike anthropological tribes, our contemporary social life is marked by
   membership in a multiplicity of overlapping groups in which the roles one
   plays become sources of identity which, like masks, provide temporary
   "identifications" (Shields 1996, xii).

In many ways, road protesters formed a very good example of a neo-tribe. They coalesced over a single issue (the movement was in practice short-lived, lasting only as long as there were road building schemes to oppose [12]), and adopted a temporary identification, in this case as fairies. Three key features emerge from this identification.

Firstly, in romanticising themselves as "the little people," protesters were invoking the age-old myth of a downtrodden minority able to defeat their oppressors. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, the parochial and placid hobbits return from their travels to find their rural idyll in their native land, "The Shire," desecrated by industrialisation instigated by the evil magician, Saruman. Emboldened by their adventures, they are able to incite an uprising and "scour the Shire" of oppression. In many ways, this is how protesters viewed themselves and subsequently came to be portrayed by sympathetic journalists:

   The roads protests have already taken their place in the folklore of these
   islands; the 1990s will be remembered as the time when the gargantuan
   monsters of corruption and repression were slain by the little folk
   (Monbiot 1998, 9).