Each summer, as the days stretch out long and the nights simmer with warm possibility, I find myself drawn back to the local renaissance faire. Far from unique among Pagans, I am drawn to the romance and the flawed reenactment of another time, the costumes and the ribald revelry. I always spot hammers and pentacles in the crowd, and many is the bodice that cantilevers a pair of heaving bosoms inked with a tattoo of the triple moon, the triquetra, or Celtic knotwork.
What I’m saying is: we’re out here. I’ve seen us. I’ve raised my frosty glass of mead to several besom-toting folk who just rolled up to the historically accurate blacksmith to buy a coven sword.
Lobby card for KNIGHTRIDERS (1981), featuring Ed Harris and Amy Ingersoll [Laurel Entertainment]
When I see Pagans at the faire, I think of George A. Romero’s 1981 overlong opus, Knightriders. In the middle of the career that brought us genre-shaking works such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Creepshow (1982), Romero took the time to write a modern love letter to Arthurian myth, chivalry, and living life on one’s own terms. It stars a very young Ed Harris as King William, the head of a traveling troupe of dirt bike jousters, who bring with them a girl mechanic, a gay emcee, and a Merlin played by real-life mystic and performing artist Brother Blue.
Knightriders does its best to disorient the viewer, filming Harris nude in the forest, seeking kingly wisdom, before a smash cut to dirt bike knights showing off for small-town yahoos. The plot unfolds in a strange way: King “Billy” William has had a dream of his own impending death and watches for the sign he saw: a double-headed black eagle on a shield. His queen, Linet (Amy Ingersoll), does her best to comfort and anchor him to reality, but the writing is on the wall the moment we see her in all her Guinevere glory. We know these two won’t make it.
As Billy moves toward his own death, his troupe contends with heckling fans (one notably played by horror novelist Stephen King, with whom Romero would work again and again) and corrupt local law enforcement, who beat members of the troupe severely in their hunger for bribe money. Medic and mystic Merlin comes around, both to soothe injuries and to soothsay: here we have the spiritual anchor of the whole piece.
Lobby card for KNIGHTRIDERS (1981), featuring Brother Blue [Laurel Entertainment]
Brother Blue was a performer and storyteller who studied at both Harvard and Yale after serving in WWII. Through his studies, he came to believe in and to preach a bardic tradition of storytelling as a cultural and religious obligation that he took quite seriously.
Knightriders is something of a silly movie before Blue steps on the scene. The itinerant bike folk argue about “selling out” to a larger organization for showy entertainers stoking the BMX stunt show craze of the 1980s. The troupe members’ sexualities are subjects of speculation and ribbing, rather than being presented in a serious light for an audience just beginning to open to such things. Billy’s preoccupation with death seems ridiculous; he’s still a young man.
In an all-blue tent, with blue morpho butterfly tattoos on his face (real, not for the film), our blue Merlin comforts the obsessed king as best he knows how, trying to separate the physical from the metaphysical. “Magic ain’t got nothing to do with organs and glands and busted necks,” says Merlin. “Magic got to do with the soul. Only the soul got destiny. It’s got a way, it’s got to fly. The body’s just got a few minutes down here in the dirt with the rest of us.”
Suddenly, we’re in a different movie. A philosopher, a magician, is telling us a story we already know, but in a new way. He’s telling us that destiny and probability are probably the same thing. Playing the harmonica, he retells the story of King Arthur’s prophesied end at the hands of his own son, weaving it through the massacre of the innocents ordered by the biblical King Herod during the birth year of that one guy who was born in Palestine. The old story works like a cane to lean on, and Billy regains his feet, just missing his wife making eyes at a young knight with a full head of hair. We’re hearing the old story while we’re in it, living it all over again.
After Brother Blue brings in the recursive beauty of the tale under the tale, the tone shifts. The troupe’s existence goes from a weekend LARP to a group of people fighting to live the way they want to live.
I joke that I go back to the renaissance faire because I like corseted women and day-drinking, but this ethos of freedom and purposeful anachronism, a more romantic way of life and the concept of honor are there, just beneath the coating of road dust. I, too, camped out over summers to work at the faire when I was younger. I slept in tents and layered my skirts in order of cleanliness. I called regular dudes “milord’ while selling them their outfits for the festivities, trying out names they might wear for as long as they kept that doublet, that jerkin. Everyone at a renaissance faire is engaging in an exchange of ritual. We’ve agreed to use different words, to wear different clothes, to participate in and perpetuate for one another a long altered state for the purposes of merriment and joy. It is its own seasonal marker, bounded by the local climate and culture. As a Pagan in my 20s, I wanted it as bad as I wanted Samhain.
Lobby card for KNIGHTRIDERS (1981) [Laurel Entertainment]
As the knights move from town to town, the obstacles remain the same. The allure of selling out to become a medieval Evel Knievel plays against the difficulty of living on the road, camping in the woods and “fighting the dragon,” as Billy mysteriously puts their crusade against living a mainstream life. As the films revs and jumps along its two and a half hour runtime, one member of the merry band tries to explain. “This isn’t just a roadside carnie anymore, not for us. If you can’t get something spiritual out of this, then you belong with that loudmouth hype artist.”
The black eagle keeps hunting King William, and in the end it will get him. Try as we might to live and love in new and interesting ways, it will get us all.
Knightriders is about a queer found family, like almost every coven I know. It’s about a white couple who try their best to keep this band of misfits safe and together while their marriage falls apart, like almost every coven I know. It takes place at the intersection of dressing up like fantasy nerds, hating the cops, and trying to make a small part of the world more tolerable for weirdos, like almost every coven I know. It is a playful and strange artifact with something serious at its heart.
Like almost every coven I know, I hope it’s still around in a hundred years, for those who seek it.
