Arthur Pendragon, Eco-Warrior LAURIE A. FINKE AND MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN This essay explores the environmental agendas and ambitions that motivate John Timothy Rothwell, 'a mad biker chieftain wielding an axe,' who, claiming to be a 'post-Thatcher' King Arthur, changes his name and links his political struggles against the state to myths that mourn the lost original purity of ancient Britain. This article looks backward to authoritarian values his ecocriticism should interrogate. (LAP and MBS) W hat 'patienr labor of mourning' divides English Heritage's fantasy of Britain'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 chieftain wielding an axe, who, in a moment of revelation, in a twentieth-century squat,' claims to be a 'post-Thatcher' King Arthur, who changes his name to reflect (create) that reality, and who links his political struggles against the state to myths that mourn the always already lost original purity of ancient Britain, invoking 'a time, long before history, when the people knew their place in the Universe, not as the centre, but as parts of a greater whole'?' This is 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 by Pendragon and Christopher J. Stone. King Arthur (and when we refer to King Arthur in this essay, we are referring to this late twentieth-century return), wearing Druid robes, a crown, and wielding Excalibur, has since the late 1990s been involved in ecological conflicts with such keepers and maintainers of the mythologies of the British past—and British monuments—as English Heritage, Parliament, and even the Monarchy, in his desire to reclaim the sacrality of the land. Ronald Hutton, the University of Bristol historian of neo-paganism, describes Arthur Pendragon as 'a major figure in modern Druidry' and deserving of'an equally important place in the history of groups concerned with environmental issues and civil rights.'^ Taking as his battle cry John Boorman's mantra—through Jessie Weston—that 'the king and the land 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 of worship, where men and women communed with the earth, into little more ARTHURIANA 2 3 . 1 (2OI3)  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 the antique past, in forms of nostalgia that become a means to forge political communities of all kinds, but most particularly, the community of the nation. While we do not claim to be experts on ecocriticism or green cultural studies, we hope to bring our expertise in medievalism to bear on the trope Timothy Morton has called ecomimesis—the techniques through which nature writers speak for and represent nature—to investigate its investments in nostalgia as an expression of ecological nationalism.' Ecomimesis is an authenticating device, but it is also 'a pressure point, crystallizing a vast and complex ideological network of beliefs, practices, and processes in and around the idea of the natural world.'* The 'patient labor of mourning' with which we opened is the phrase Bernard 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 fuels King Arthur's self-described 'mad fantasy.'^ In both his protests and his memoir, 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 nostalgic kitsch. In a 2011 review in postmedieval, Carolyn Dinshaw observes that, by dismissing nostalgia, by failing to theorize it in discussions of medievalism, we contribute to its derogation by both writers and literary theorists.' The term becomes simply a convenient 'rubbish bin' to collect what we want to throw away: the trite, the sentimental, the kitsch, the chauvinistic, enforcing distinctions between elite and popular culture. She notes that, in its negative connotations as superficial emotionalism, nostalgia 'is too blunt an instrument with which to tease out the temporal and affective complexity of...our complex and ever fascinated relationships with the so-called past.''° We agree with her appraisal, which constructively pushes us to articulate more precisely the ways in which King Arthur, a largely undereducated, marginalized, self- consciously absurd—yet strangely compelling—figure deploys the public's nostalgia for England's medieval past in often subversively sophisticated ways that uncover the temporal dislocations, what Linda Austin calls the 'imbricated succession'" that interleaves the past with the present, the natural with the built environment, in physical relics that survive in England as ruin, remnant, restoration, and re-creation (in both senses of that term). While we appreciate the ways in which Pendragon's tactics combine 'yearning with hints 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 past organic societies, however sophisticated the imagination, can be anything but retrogressive, tying us to the authoritarian values ecocriticism should interrogate. Although Pendragon's remediation of Arthurian legends to support ecological protests have received scant attention from the academy, his antics have been widely reported by the media in the UK, making him a figure worthy of attention not only from practitioners of ecocriticism but from medievalists as well—not as guardians of some mythic Arthurian purity, but rather as scholars interested in the Arthurian legend as a social and political instrument, simultaneously reflecting ctiltural fantasies even as it has been used to direct those very desires. The first part of this essay examines the rhetorical techniques through which this 'king of shreds and patches''^ forges a royal identity out ofthe fragments of Arthurian romances he has never read. The second part takes up Arthur's conflicts with English Heritage over Stonehenge, battles that continue to this day. In the complexities of Pendragon's nostalgic remediation of Arthurian legend, we outline the contested space of the ecological nationalism of the British Isles. The tropes of ecomimesis erase its artifice as writing, promising the reader immediate access to nature itself. Such a posture, however, comes at a cost. Morton writes, 'Nature writing partly militates against ecology rather than for it. By setting up nature as an object "over there"—a pristine wilderness beyond all trace of human contact—it reestablishes the very separation [between natural and human environments] it seeks to abolish.''* Morton's poetics of ecomimesis attempt to expose the rhetorical techniques central to nature writing, which as he points out, is just as much about writing as it is about nature. Arthur's skill at manipulating the rhetoric of ecomimesis is apparent from the book's first sentence. The Trials of Arthur opens: 'C.J. [Christopher James Stone, Arthur's co-author] first heard about King Arthur—the late 20''^ century version—on a sunny Saturday aftrernoon in the late summer of 1994, on the pavement outside a pub in the café quarter of Cardiff, the administrative capital of Wales, where, maybe, the real historical Arthur—if he ever existed—^would have visited in his adventures, chasing pigs, fighting Saxons, lusting after maidens, drinking and carousing with his faithful warband'(i). The 'as I write' trope invoked in 7rzÄZf'opening sentence, in which C.J. locates himself by describing his surroundings, attempts to counteract the artificial dimension of writing—its deferral of presence—ofîfering readers unmediated access to the scene of a long ago past. 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' Arthur whose activities—however redolent of the dirty Middle Ages''—suggest the possibility of a more organic connection to the past than that on offer in the yuppie centers of late twentieth-century Cardiff. However, ecomimesis, as Morton reminds us, renders nature. 'Rendering attempts to simulate life itself: to tear to pieces the aesthetic screen that separates the perceiving subject from the object.''* Rendering convinces us that we are perceiving an immediate world: 'All signals that we are in a constructed realm have been minimized.'*'' But this is an always self-deconstructing trope. In splitting the subjectivities of the text's collaborators—the T of King Arthur, the longed-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 for a more complex response than simple nostalgia. It offers up nostalgia for an exciting legendary past animated by the charisma of the book's subject, but with a knowing wink. Throughout the passage the 'real historical' Arthur's existence is simultaneously asserted and denied by parenthetical comments like 'maybe' and 'if he ever existed,' a tactic repeated at regular intervals throughout the text. The first hundred pages of the book, even as it gives us, in the genre of romance, Arthur's parentage, childhood, apprenticeship, initiation, and ascent to legendary status, also describe C.J.'s quest to locate and meet an elusive King Arthur, whom he seems always to nearly glimpse, always just missing him. Arthur's story and the political tactics he deploys against the heritage industry simultaneously invoke and complicate nostalgia, fashioning a rhetorical space for Britain as a site that oscillates between the historic 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 of class. Arthur's parodie performance of kingship inhabits an uneasy space between what he imagines as the natural world of the medieval warrior and the postmodern cyborg. Medieval Arthurian romances celebrated aristocratic values of birth equals worth and the hegemonic masculinity of the warrior at a time when those prerogatives were zealously guarded by rigorous training and arcane rituals of initiation.'^ As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues, the medieval knight 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 rises from the fusion of man and machine— a mythology of working class male empowerment in which the motorcycle occupies the place of the horse. The Trials of King Arthur íáenúfLes the 'rockers,' outlaw bikers, as the first postwar British youth subculture: aggressively male, 'working class and proud, they were 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 jackets and denim jeans, motorcycle boots and silk scarves. Even the obligatory handkerchief dangling out of back pocket had a practical purpose. It was to wipe your hands on after working on your bike' (31). For King Arthur, the 'rockers' and later the 'greasers' constituted a new assemblage, a modernist chivalric identity machine uniting man, bike, leather, denim, and tools to produce a new 'knight' (and bear in mind the knight is not the man but the assemblage) 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 Association in 1964, that 99% of motorcycle enthusiasts were good citizens. The outlaw clubs were declaring their allegiance to the 1% of the biker population that the AMA refused to acknowledge (32). These bikers literally wore their class politics on their sleeves: 'the leathers were like armour, and the bikes like iron steeds. They were the barbarian hordes 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 out a 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 violated them 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 ecomimesis becomes a performance of masculinity, reproducing much of the hegemony he seeks to oppose. We are made more than a little nervous by the gender politics of the ebullient romance narrative that has been crafted for this leftist eco-warrior, a narrative that replicates—and reiterates—the inequalities of both medieval chivalry and the contemporary ecology movement he channels. As leader of the Loyal Arthurian Warband (LAW), King Arthur offers a mythology of rnasculinity as a 'protection racket,' in which warriors engage in battle over an environment troped as feminine, ultimately seeking to dominate that very environment. Like the overtly phallic engine in Walt Whitman's 'To a Locomotive in Winter,' King Arthur's fossil-fuel-burning technology functions as a 'type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,' roaring through a feminized nature.^" In this, Pendragon reproduces the gender dynamics that have marked twentieth-century ecocriticism, fusing what Timothy Morton calls the 'masculinity mêmes' of American ecomimesis—'rugged individualism, a phallic authoritarian sublime, and an allergy to femininity in all its forms'—to 10 ARTHURIANA the biological essentialism of the mythopoetic men's movement.^' Pendragon and his followers offer a hard-bodied masculinity defining itself as 'outdoorsy and 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 monuments like Stonehenge? Aren't these fossil-fuel-burning machines the problem from which the environment must be protected? In contrast to the rugged masculine posing and noisy machinery of the biker culture that subtends Arthur's narrative, any number of passages chosen nearly at random reveal the heady mix of ecological kitsch, neo-pagan spiritualism, and new age posturing of an ecomimesis that casts the Earth as something like the Courtly Lady of medieval romance: 'Putting something called Nature on a pedestal,' Morton reminds us, 'and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman.'^' In Trials of Arthur, Nature is narrativized as the damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued by these now mechanized knights. One might consider that, in this formulation, what women, what the earth, need the protection of men from is men—and not necessarily other men. Chivalry has always been a protection racket in which the reward for protecting women and the land (always imagined as metonymically connected) is ownership of their bodies. This gender narrative is 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 no mystery there. There's no invisible God who you can't see or hear or feel, who nevertheless imposes his demands upon you. The pagan goddess isn't at all invisible. You don't need a priesthood to interpret her. Do you want to meet her? Then go out of your front door right now. That's her out there, in the trees, in the bushes, in the landscape, in the soil, in the wind, in the rain, in the buds, in the shoots, in the clouds, in the air, in the very Earth that gave you birth, that sustains and nourishes you in all her fierce beauty, in her majesty and splendour, in all her moods, from quiet calm to raging stormy anger, in all her changing aspects, her seasons and her cycles, and her lovely, curving form. (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 course nurturing; 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 worth pausing over the rhetorical slight of hand by which this passage slides from an 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 a materiality that the concept can never possess, precisely because the idea of Nature is, as Morton suggests, meaningless: 'useful to ideologies of all kinds in its very slipperiness,' its immateriality.^ Having established the métonymie connection between women and land, the trope can insinuate itself into the narrative tacitly. Arthur and his Loyal Arthurian Warband (LAW) can claim to be 'forging their identity from the body of the Earth, creating stories for themselves and then living them' (130), and we read in his words the warrior ethic 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 of the Earth waiting to give up what these men desire. The active male forcefully takes from the passive female body (earth) what he needs, exerting his will over her at the same time he claims that this is what she really wants. In his search for a myth of origin in the remote past. King Arthur, like so much of the nature and ecology writing he is imitating, grounds his ecomimetic narrative in a regressive gender dynamic that protects both women and the land by subordinating them to the desires of^a particular masctiline hegemony—^which differentiates itself from other masculine hegemonies only in how it structures its rhetorics of domination (in this case through the mêmes of Arthurian legend). The stories on which the latter-day King Arthur builds his identity as ecowarrior were always about powerful men imposing their wills on both women and on the earth. His revisions offer nothing to change that. II If Arthur Pendragon is, as he imagines himself, a 'trickster' figure, his primary tactic of subversion has been to manipulate the rhetorics of a history that never was and a nature fashioned as lover/mother into a political discourse potent enough to disturb—though by no means destabilize—the powerful institutions that define English nationhood. Deriving his status from the linkage of the Matter of Britain, 'a set of unstable signs appropriated by differing cultural groups to advance differing ideological agendas'^' and a mystical vision of voluptuous nature. King Arthur satisfies his followers' desires to live in the past, live with the past, and envision a 'new age,' a new England receptive and open to the economically marginalized. His various and varied demonstrations call for his followers to reject the conservationist technologies of the heritage industry as elitist, consumerist, and anti-nature, even as these demonstrations impose other equally dangerous technologies—thousands of motorcycle-riding revelers who leave sites littered with beer cans and other sorts of waste—on the environment they offer to protect. The King deploys the semiotics of carnival—the interplay of'new age' historicism and costume event that provides the backdrop for, say, Goddess conventions in Britain's Glastonbury—to disrupt and re-imagine the ways England's institutional 12 ARTHURIANA authorities have constructed the idea ofthe past. As King Arthur frames the struggle, his methods place him in opposition to stodgy, tired, necrophiliac antiquarians. His involvement with the legend creates a vibrant political party. Pendragon appropriates Arthurian myth to connect his environmental activism to England's heritage, the imagined community constituted by a sense of'place' projected back into the distant past: 'Eco-warriors,' the Loyal Arthurian Warband web site proclaims, 'never stop caring about our lands, it's [sic] sacred sites and places we treasure.'^'^ Despite their disagreements, Arthur and the heritage industry share certain beliefs about what we might coyly call 'the matter of Britain,' that is, the material culture (the buildings, artifacts, and landscapes) that 'belong to and largely define a group.'^^ Heritage, as David Lowenthal notes, 'more and more means what we hold jointly with others' and what defines us as a people.^* Arthur Pendragon's activism defines itself against 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 'sacred sites' belong to 'the people of Britain—to the stars, to the Earth—not some unaccountable government body whose only motivation was to fleece the tourists and make money' (84). Heritage 'may be "people's history" in one manifestation, it may be about New Age travelers or saving old buildings and landscapes from road developments and property barons,' but, as Lowenthal reminds us, it is also entrepreneurial: 'Tourist profits are the "prime duty" of English Heritage.'^' The goals of the heritage industry, which came into its own in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, are expressed in the National Heritage Act of 1983 that founded the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, more commonly known as English Heritage. English Heritage's four statutory responsibilities'"—to preserve, restore, teach, and sell British antiquity—create a 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 and collective gazes, ritual and recreation (re-creation), kitsch and camp, nostalgia and irony, use value and commodity value. Heritage depends upon a sense that the past—whether natural or built—is done and finished; it must be preserved and certified 'authentic,' despite the complexities that designation entails. To 'update' or renovate a heritage site is heresy To allow the present to mingle with the past is to destroy the object's (or landscape's) aura, which derives from its remoteness.'' What makes an item (a site, building, relic) 'heritage' is in some sense its removal from the contemporary world. It survives as a ghost, a trace, of a closed oflF—and oft:en unknowable—past, material but unusable, 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 further objectified through 'photographs, postcards, films, models and so on,' that is, through reproductions sold in ubiquitous gift shops.'^ These practices set the site or object apart from the everyday experience of the viewer and confer upon it its aura, but they also destroy it. Heritage promises, if nothing else, 'authenticity.' After all, the heritage industry is the custodian of 'real' prehistoric stone circles, the tomb where Arthur is 'really' buried, the 'real' field on which the Battle of Shrewsbury took 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 objects to mobilize people's imagination about the past for political ends. For King Arthur, the once and future king, the past visits the present as 'mythical return.'" In Arthur's version of England's heritage, past and present are mutually constitutive. While the heritage industry attempts to rationalize and order the past, as well as its human 'visitors' (the tourists whose entry fees help pay for the monument's upkeep), King Arthur wants to imagine the past as wild and undomesticated—but usable. Because in his philosophy, the objects of the past are meant to be used in the here and now. King Arthur's performances shrewdly complicate and even send up claims made on behalf of historical objects to authenticity. For example, to complete his transformation from outlaw biker to legendary King of England, Arthur requires Excalibur, which he initially evokes in all of its nineteenth-century Tennysonian romanticism. The Trials of Arthur describes Arthur and his followers awaiting in vain 'an ethereal boat, with the Lady of the Lake in it, complete with white, drifty, medieval clothing, like some Pre-Raphaelite goddess....She would climb out, while strange music drifted 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 hyperreality and siniulacra. Our hero happens upon a shop in Aldershot called the Casque and 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 the sword that had performed the very ritual described above—in a movie. When the 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 only sell it to 'the real King Arthur, if he ever returned.' Arthur presents him with his passport to authenticate his identity and the owner, recognizing royalty when he sees it, sells him the sword, valued at about £5,000, for one hundred quid (57). Unlike Monty Python, who in 'Holy Grail' mock the Lady of the Lake 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 and camp, attesting to Arthur's canny ability to use cultural nostalgia to 'shake up the historical myths, revealing the mechanisms of seduction and mass hypnosis, the codependency of personal and official memory' that fuel the heritage industry.''• Excalibur is a prop sword, but in his hands it becomes Excalibur. A hyperreal fake, reminiscent rather than remnant of the past, authorizes Arthur and is in turn authorized by him: 'Without it, he couldn't represent 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 up his overheated brain' (191). Real and fake, vision and mad fantasy oscillate through the text, but, contrary to those who believe deconstruction to be politically nihilistic, this oscillation creates a surprisingly effective mechanism to mobilize 'the lost people, the rejected people, the lonely people, the druggies, and the drunkards, the homeless people, the dispossessed' as the 'true aristocrats of the heart, with something more valuable than gold to share: their own shining humanity' (191).The sword figures not only in the battle over Stonehenge and the road protests, but 'taking up...the British legal system...in a mighty battle of symbols' (206). On trial for Violent Disorder following road protests at Newbury bypass in 1997, Arthur and the other defendants refuse to swear on the customary Bible, arguing that they would swear oaths only on the sword Excalibur. Arthur's lawyers, calling upon customary laws that likely hadn't been evoked since the Reformation, succeed in challenging the Oaths Act of 1978, convincing a judge to allow the 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).The ruling gives Arthur's protest substance and validity within an English court of law (leading ultimately to the case's dismissal). Arthur's conflict with English Heritage over the people's access to Stonehenge crystallizes the differences between the King and the heritage industry. In 1996 David Lowenthal described the joint management of this monument by English Heritage and the National Trust as 'a self-confessed national disgrace.''' He quotes then-English Heritage chair Jocelyn Stevens: 'We've managed to separate the stones from their setting. We've surrounded a great monument to the genius of the early British with the worst excesses of the twentieth century.''* Desirous of protecting the monument from what Lowenthal refers to as 'a motley crew of New Age cultists, commune nostalgists, ley-line mystics, and drug addicts' who 'camped in nearby fields, got stoned and laid, and left behind condoms, needles, and excrement,' the guardians of the monument created a four mile exclusionary zone around the stones: 'Razor-wired, dog-patrolled, and arc-lit, Stonehenge was cleansed of 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 attending the 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 clubbed with truncheons, as were those holding babies... .It was extremely violent and very sickening.''*The very brutality of the 'Battle of the Beanfield' highlights the differences between King Arthut and English Heritage in their concerns for preserving both the land and the monuments that reside on that land. It points to the extreme sacrifices—of persons, reputations, ideals—both parties are wifling to endure. In this conflict, the newly minted King Arthur had found 'a battle worthy of his name' (85). Having collected and connected the objects necessary to reinvigorate working class masculinity, having prepared himself (Rothwell's biker years are described as his apprenticeship), all that is required to create a new knighthood is the call. Paradoxically, it is the call of nature not the machine that galvanizes the rough but determined 'band of brothers.' John Timothy Rothwell and his mates are interpellated by Stonehenge to translate their raw outlaw hypermasculinity into a higher calling, to mold them into King 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 more fundamental. As if they grew psychic roots that buried [sic] down into the earth, into the remote past, to draw up a kind of spiritual water, to refresh and revive a dried up part of their souls. After a while they stopped being cowboys on 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 masculinity into a new chivalry? Causes them to become 'starlight inspired, moonlight inspired, sages of the campfire sour(33)? The cause is left intentionally vague, 'something.' The elusive power of these 'remote stones, so mysterious, so implacably ancient' is the power (whose power? the stone's? the viewer's?) to call upon the 'spirits of the ancestors' to 'commune' with these 'modern day revelers' (33). The passage never reveals who or what calls on the ancestors to 'join them [the bikers] at the party,' who or what links these mechanical knights' carousing to 'a party that has been going on at the time of the Summer Solstice for thousands of years' (33). For Arthur and his Druid acolytes, Stonehenge's sacrality is rooted in its ability to connect past and present, in the Druidic rituals performed there on particular days like solstice and equinox. Arthur would free the stones for the Druids and 'the free people of the Earth.' He would gain complete public access 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' with his protest—camping out near the stones and passively refusing to move—a protest he describes as 'a strange kind of battle: one befitting the superficiality of 2O'''-century life' (85, 89). Although by 2000, the Druids had been allowed access to Stonehenge for religious ceremonies, in 2008, Arthur once again takes 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 a perfect ground-zero for twentieth- and twenty-first century conflicts over nature, social class, and religion. Even more than the structure itself, its literary supplement makes Stonehenge a compelling target. Dating back to 3,000 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 monument merges into the plain on which it sits, creating a 'natural' landscape that is the perfect screen upon which to project the nostalgic fantasies of scholars, poets, artists, photographers, and nature writers of all stripes. 'While Geoffrey of Monmouth imaged Stonehenge as a war memorial, ingeniously constructed by Merlin, Wordsworth described it in 'Guilt and Sorrow' as an 'inmate of lonesome 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, as well as the tourists, tacky gift shop, and nearby motorway, so ecomimesis seeks to erase the conditions of its own making. Stonehenge tends compulsively to 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. Cohen attempts to explore the life of stones. Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialities within the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence our fascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across a temporal duration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices, such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers have been obliterated. Stonehenge has outlived the peoples of the Bronze and Iron ages, as well as the Romans, the Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans.... Stonehenge may even be a human collaboration with rock formations found in the Preseli Mountains, where dolerite stands in architectural pillars arranged by no human hand.'*' Cohen suggests that Stonehenge 'communicates' something. But how does it communicate 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 our acceptance ofthe illusion itself.'-*^ Stonehenge's power to awe us depends on us simultaneously accepting that it communicates, and that we cannot know the substance it communicates. What is left are the conclusions we draw from the silence, or perhaps the conclusions we impose on it. King Arthur's description of Stonehenge carries the same Aeolian promise of revelation that 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 such an effect? That their message—whatever it is—has carried down the ages, inspiring new generations to join the chorus? They speak of something that went before, before the time of ignorance and stupidity, when the people were like holy scientists, observing the immeasurable Universe with diligence and care, 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 place in the Universe not as the centre, but as parts of a greater whole, circling in the circles of the heavens like the eternal stars. (82) This ekphrastic slight of hand rejects the crass commercialism of contemporary life only to invent a history that mourns 'the impossibility of mythical return, the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values.'« It suggests that we make ourselves and our world better by rejecting the present as a time of 'ignorance and stupidity,' only to prefer instead a past that never existed, 'when people knew their place in the Universe...circling in the circles of the heavens like the eternal stars.' But really, if a man is to take on the identity of King Arthur, he should, at the very least, be aware of the profound ignorance, stupidity, and horrific destructiveness of the civil wars that produced Ceofïrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae or Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. As Morton notes, we need to be able to argue for 'a progressive view of ecology that does not submit to the atavistic authority of feudalism or 'prehistoric primitivism' (New Age animism). It requires that we be nostalgic for the future, helping people figure out that the ecological paradise has not occurred yet' (emphasis in original)."^ The question we leave you, the reader—with the question both King Arthur and English Heritage avoid—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's and Gender Studies at Kenyon College, is one of die editors of die Norton Anthology ofTheory and Criticism and author o( Feminist Theory, Women's Writing and Women's Writing in Middle English. She has published in £;cfOT/>¿7níí, Theatrefoumal. Theatre Survey, Arthuriana, and Signs. l8 ARTHURIANA Martin B. Shichtman is Director ofJewish Studies and Professor of English Language and Literature ar Eastern Michigan University. With Laurie A. Finke, he has written Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film and King Arthur and the Myth of History. He is co-editor, with James P. Carley, of Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, and, with Laurie A. Finke, oi Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers. He has also authored numerous articles on medieval literature, contemporary literary theory, and film. NOTES 1 Arthur Pendragon and Christopher James Stone, The Trials of Arthur: The Life andTimesofaModern-DayKing, (Element, 2003), pp. 50-1; subsequent citations will be noted parenthetically in the text. j 2 Taken from a witness statement for the trial of Arthur Pendragon, Southwark Crown Court, November 1997, contesting Arthur's right to carry the sword Excalibur, Pendragon and Stone, Trials of Arthur, p. 241. 3 The phrase is from Boorman's 1981 film, 'Excalibur'; for a discussion of Boorman's debt to Jessie Weston, see Martin B. Shichtman, 'Hollywood's New Weston: The Grail Myth in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and John Boorman's Excalibur,' 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 Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 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 unconscious and an impersonal mode of remembering, as public memory, it fabricates or simplifies history to form false consciousness in the form of public memory; as the impulse toward art, it purveys the overfamiliar and simulated...Nostalgia results in bad art because it falsifies the past and skirts "genuine" emotion' (Linda Marilyn Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917 [Charlottesville: University of Virginia 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 Middle Ages 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 the Concept,' 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 of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 60. 28 Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, p. 60 29 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.