{"id":224726,"date":"2026-01-03T05:57:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T05:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/224726\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T05:57:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T05:57:07","slug":"excalibur-is-english-fantasia-unherd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/224726\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Excalibur’ is English fantasia – UnHerd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine, if such a scenario is not too outlandish, a broken and unhappy Britain, where poor governance has spread across the land like a noxious blight. Since the dawn of modernity, the scholar of nationalism John Hutchinson remarks<\/a>, at such moments of \u201cextraordinary crisis\u201d, across the Western world artistic \u201ccounter communities became the launch pads of revolutionary action, generating myths that legitimised the hegemony of new governing elites and nation-state structures\u201d. Nationalism was born after Western man lost his simple peasant faith in crown and altar: it has defeated every ideological challenger since, whether fascist imperialism, communism or now, it seems, liberalism itself. Yet that nationalism\u2019s appeal is dependent on myths is not, as many liberal or communist debunkers appear to assume, its weakness: it will not die, like one of J.M. Barrie\u2019s fairies, when a Verso editor declares his unbelief.<\/p>\n

Instead, as Hutchinson declares, it is precisely in mythmaking that nationalism draws its power, as disaffected intellectuals, and particularly artists, find themselves \u201cgenerating at times of crises novel myths based on romantic acts of sacrifice by heroic elites that legitimise new national projects\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such was the director John Boorman\u2019s explicit task with his 1981 epic Excalibur. It is \u201cThe Dark Ages\u201d, the title sequence flashes portentously over Wagner<\/a>, when \u201cThe Land Was Divided And Without A King\u201d. As academics have noted<\/a>, Boorman\u2019s masterwork was released \u201cshortly after Britain\u2019s winter of discontent\u201d, and \u201ccan be seen as a reaction to the economic and political crises of the 1970s, meditating on a Britain in decay, presided over by the female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher\u201d. Yet if Excalibur is a critique of Thatcher\u2019s Britain, it is not obviously one made from the political Left. The film\u2019s driving fixation with will, heroic destiny, and the mystical unity of land and leader is strikingly transgressive to postwar liberalism. \u201cI believe that the popular, lasting stories are really about great deep psychic events in human his\u00adtory that have bitten themselves into the racial memory and which we remember in our unconscious,\u201d Boorman would later write. \u201cThe retelling of these stories is like the rediscovery of them \u2014 it \u2018catharizes\u2019 and then gives solace.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Boorman\u2019s intention to reattach Britain to its mythical roots, and so restore the nation\u2019s mystic and psychic unity \u2014 the director is a convinced Jungian \u2014 Excalibur is overtly a work of cultural nationalism. Indeed, it is arguably the most deeply British, or at least consciously British film ever made: even more so for the fact that the names \u201cBritain\u201d or \u201cEngland\u201d are never once uttered. The ultimate, sacred source of yearning and duty is always \u201cthe Land\u201d, tapping into and devoting itself to something far older than the modern British state, now palpably withering around us.<\/p>\n

Excalibur\u2019s immediate genesis was in Boorman\u2019s failed attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings, whose \u201cgreat brew of Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth\u201d, the director declared, was \u201cthe Unterwelt of my own mind\u201d. Yet unlike Tolkien, who viewed Ireland<\/a> \u201cas a country naturally evil\u201d, haunted by a deep and ancient malignance emanating from its very bogs, trees and mountains, and only \u201cheld in check by the great devotion of the southern Irish to their religion\u201d, Boorman found in the dramatic mountain landscape that had become his home a source of great and regenerative artistic power. \u201cThe valley in the Wicklow hills where my house sits is as close to Middle Earth as you can get in this depleted world,\u201d Boorman would write, \u201cThe soft, feminine folds of the hills, the bleak bogs, the ancient oak woods, the black lakes, the urgent streams somehow corresponded to an inner landscape\u2026 It felt like a setting for the Arthurian legend.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, indeed, the Arthurian epic Boorman would create is dependent, for its visual appeal, on the Irish landscape surrounding his home: \u201cwith a few exceptions, all the scenes in Excalibur were shot within a couple of miles of my house.\u201d In Ireland, the director had found an aesthetic hyper-Britain where the hills were steeper, the forests gloomy and primeval wildwood, and, most importantly, water was ever-present. Excalibur is surely the dampest film ever made on land: battles are fought in ice-cold moats, knights clash in front of plunging waterfalls and babbling streams or, drowning, find psychic truths in the weedy beds of lakes. His characters crawl and die in mud, their glittering armour sinking into the land itself. The woods themselves, wet with dew or shrouded in lake-mist, their moss and lichen-covered trunks and boulders lit a lurid green to heighten the raw, natural power emanating from them, are palpably rank with leaf-mould and mildew: it is the only film ever to capture the uncanny magic of our native Atlantic rainforests<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even the air, and light itself, is heavy with water, for \u201cthe Irish climate is heartbreaking to a filmmaker \u2014 unpredictable, constantly changing, but mostly raining\u201d. It rained steadily for almost every day of the five-month production, Boorman said later, with the rare bursts of sunlight breaking through capturing a luminosity more intense for its doomed struggle against the Irish rain. Yet unlike Kubrick<\/a>, Boorman would later praise<\/a> the \u201cwonderful light in Ireland, because it\u2019s moist, because there\u2019s so much moisture in the air even when it\u2019s not raining that you get this refraction, this light, so you get a kind of softness\u201d. That, he suggested, lent the film a hazy dreamlike radiance that \u201cfelt like a myth rather than reality.\u201d In just this way, Boorman\u2019s understanding of his native England was refracted through Ireland\u2019s clarifying light.<\/p>\n

Even still, only England could have made him. In Boorman\u2019s personal mythology, both woods and water are central, fitting for the director of both the riparian horror of Deliverance and the pre-lapsarian fantasia of The Emerald Forest. Growing up in wartime London \u2014 his film memoir of the time, Hope and Glory, opens with the future director playing with a toy knight and wizard in the suburban rockery that served as mountain forest to the child\u2019s imagination \u2014 Boorman was formed, he tells it, in a once-enchanted land that had only just lost its magic. As he writes in his autobiography, Suburban Boy, the \u201cTudor gables, leaded panes, bow windows\u201d of suburbia \u2014 \u201ceclectic fragments from pre-Industrial Revolution England\u201d \u2014 masked the hard truth that \u201cThis was a new land and the England of old was gone for ever. Oh, what the English inflicted on the English: misery, deprivation and bondage on a scale quite equal to that visited upon their colonial vassals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mocking the attachment of his father, George, to the Union Jack-and-Royal Family patriotism of the Westminster state, the young Boorman nevertheless remarks with wonder that, in his youth as a soldier in the Great War, like a warrior saint, the \u201cyoung George, who lived to see a man walking on the moon, rode into battle against the Turks with a drawn sword on an Arab mare\u201d. Though of London\u2019s low church lower-middle class, Boorman\u2019s parents would send him, for unromantic and practical reasons, to a cost-effective Catholic private school that was \u201cmy first contact with Irishness in all its glory and grim horror\u201d, so seizing his imagination that \u201cIreland was to have an insidious influence on my life and work, drawing me and keeping me there for thirty years almost against my will\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring my Catholic schoolboy experience,\u201d Boorman observes in his second memoir, Conclusions, \u201cI used to study the holy water in those little enamelled troughs that hung on the wall of the chapel. You dipped your finger in and crossed yourself. Here was a magical mystery: a priest could pray over ordinary water and invest it with spiritual power.\u201d For Boorman, inverting Tolkien\u2019s moral view of Ireland, \u201cI felt Catholicism was only skin deep, that underneath it was a pagan place.\u201d It could just as easily be said that Boorman\u2019s English paganism had developed a markedly Irish Catholic flavour. Either way, the war would soon give Boorman his own watery baptism into the old ways.<\/p>\n

Released from suburban boredom by the German bomb that destroyed his unloved house, the young director and his family moved to his grandfather\u2019s wooden bungalow along the wooded stretch of the Thames at Shepperton. Skipping school, playing in and along the river, once he fell into the rushing waters of an open lock: \u201cI opened my eyes to a turbulent green world\u2026 I exhaled and sucked water in again. No longer struggling, I felt a perfect ease as I breathed my beloved river. I was the river.\u201d Rescued by his brother, \u201cI resented the violent intrusion into my communion with water.\u201d We see this scene recast in Excalibur, made mythic, in the drowning vision of Sir Percival, shedding his armour in the weeds, which permits him to find the secret of the Grail<\/a>, that \u201cYou and the Land are one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once, idly shooting a kingfisher with boyish callousness along the Thames\u2019 wooded banks, Boorman \u201cwas consumed with shame and remorse. I had killed the spirit of the river, god\u2019s messenger: the kingfisher. Something broke in me. I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored,\u201d a quest he would seek in filmmaking. For all Ireland\u2019s influence, then, Excalibur is the product of his deeply English imagination: \u201cmy childhood in river and oak forest had been steeped in the legend.\u201d Even so, like many others before and after him, from Edmund Spenser to Paul Kingsnorth, Boorman\u2019s Irish exile crystallised his English romanticism into something harder, and sharper.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I came to this simple Georgian house in the Wicklow Hills of Ireland some thirty-four years ago, the ancient oaks I inherited cast their spell on me. They rooted me to the place,\u201d Boorman writes. In his extraordinary film autobiography, I Dreamt I Woke Up<\/a>, the director pens a dreamlike ode to the Church of Ireland rectory and 100 acres of forest he called home, set above the wooded, holy fjord of Glendalough. We see him planting trees, conversing with bog bodies and roguish peasants, setting up carved standing stones and swimming with a friendly priest in his own private stretch of the river Avonmore. The enclave, a wild and haunted place, was sacred to the Irish mystic and hermit Saint Kevin<\/a>, revered for his attachment to nature, and long before him, at least in Boorman\u2019s personal mythos, it had been a site of great power in native Irish belief. Even in Boorman\u2019s own time, he writes, the local Church of Ireland vicar reverted to Druidism under Glendalough\u2019s spell, now blessing births and weddings with oak fronds in the flowing waters. \u201cThe druids, the Dark Ages, the monks in the monastery up the way; the cruelty of man and nature,\u201d all here came together in Glendalough\u2019s primeval oak forest, for Boorman \u201cthe atavistic homeland, the repository of fairy tales and myth\u201d.<\/p>\n

Conveniently close to Dublin society, Boorman\u2019s bohemian village of Annamoe was also once a favoured spot for Anglo-Irish literary artistic converts to Irish cultural and political nationalism. The Gaelic Revivalist playwright J.M. Synge,<\/a> whose brother was once Annamoe\u2019s Protestant rector<\/a>, \u201cwrote in this room where I now write\u201d, Boorman is pleased to relate. Iseult Gonne<\/a>, Yeats\u2019 muse, had lived there in \u201cthe smallest castle in all of Ireland, a castellated doll\u2019s house\u201d, with her husband, the writer Francis Stuart, who would spend the war making propaganda broadcasts on Nazi Germany\u2019s Redaktion Irland radio service (while Iseult, from whom he was separated, would harbour a German spy<\/a> in her faux-medieval folly). The Edwardian British imperialist and thriller-writer Erskine Childers<\/a> was a scion of Glendalough\u2019s landowning family, and following his conversion to Irish revolutionary nationalism, was hunted down by the forces of the Free State in his own family\u2019s Big House: before being executed as the military commander of the anti-treaty IRA. What made these children of Ireland\u2019s Protestant ruling caste, so dependent on British rule, in Glendalough nevertheless throw in their lot with a highly-mythicised and Irish nationalism? Whether quirks of personal temperament, the grand and impersonal logic of social forces, or simply of the spirit of place, the same strange magic also cast its spell on Boorman.<\/p>\n

And so, in Excalibur, we see Boorman create in Ireland his highly aestheticised hyperreal Britain, in which he restores his rejected, blighted native land to the world of myth. The film, which asserts itself to be an adaptation of Mallory, in fact plays with the entire Arthurian corpus: Tennyson\u2019s \u201cIdylls of the King\u201d are in there, along with T.H. White\u2019s The Sword in the Stone, Tolkien\u2019s syncretic national dreamtime, and even Monty Python\u2019s then-recent satirical effort. Boorman is not retelling the myth, but playing with the building blocks of myth itself. Setting the film at a moment when, as Merlin puts it, \u201cThe one God comes to drive out the many gods, the spirits of wood and stream go silent,\u201d Boorman nevertheless spurns the Romano-British historicising of Rosemary Sutcliff<\/a> for a dream of the High Middle Ages. \u201cWe were taking it out of time, out of period, into the world of myth,\u201d Boorman would later remember. \u201cIt\u2019s a great mistake trying to make it real [because] the myth is much stronger than the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Hutchinson, undercutting the attempted debunking of nationalism\u2019s demonstrable power by advocates of the modernist thesis like Hobsbawm and Gellner, observes, \u201cmany theorists have regarded nationalists as inventors of tradition and their claims to continuities with the past as either self-delusion or a form of deceit\u201d. Yet this is simply a category error. Instead, we should see nationalism\u2019s conscious appeal to myth as something akin to Boorman\u2019s creative process, \u201ca quest for an alternative world which is more satisfactory than the one we live in\u201d, as the director states, \u201chopefully a bit better, braver, more beautiful than it was\u201d. In the 21st century just as much as the 19th, a shimmering dream of the past stands as both a rebuke to the dysfunctions and humiliations of the present, and as a vision of the future to come. Rather than a retreat to past glories, real or imagined, as its detractors assume, nationalism\u2019s appeal to myth is a modernising, futurist mission, which recreates the present as an anomalous Dark Age to be overcome. Just as Hutchinson observes, against the dead hand of tradition, at moments of national crisis, historically\u00a0 \u201cnational revivalists argued that it was a misunderstanding to conceive of tradition as a passive repetition of custom. Traditionalists must recognise that tradition had continually to be renewed.\u201d We see just this process in Boorman, beating together the varied ancient and modern components of the Arthur myth, to forge something new in service of his own spiritual and opaquely political purpose of personal and national regeneration. Or as he pithily declared, \u201cRealism is limited and boring \u2014 and fundamentally dishonest. It doesn\u2019t tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, light gleams from his heroes\u2019 burnished Gothic armour, beaten from polished aluminium for added brilliance, as if glowing from within. Boorman would later write that the 19th-century fantasia of Neuschwanstein, a classic product of German romantic nationalism, is far superior to any medieval relic. His is an extraordinarily Victorian dream of the Middle Ages, drawing from the same cultural wellsprings as the Gothic Revival, of Young England<\/a>, whose romantic Tory peers would joust in armour to banish industrialism and its democratic excesses, as the pre-Raphaelites whose visual imagery Boorman would freely plunder, and indeed from the Wagnerian epics whose most bombastic sequences punctuate the film\u2019s soundtrack.<\/p>\n

Writing and filming his epic in an Irish setting that inspired the romantic nationalism of disaffected intellectuals, Boorman thus draws directly from the same Romantic aesthetics and impulses as England\u2019s abortive and Germany\u2019s ominous classical nationalism, essentially leaning on them for his film\u2019s mythic power. He even openly reworked the aesthetics of fascism in his bricolage, as just another source of primal, irrational power, to some disquiet from critics. Knights kneel, as lightning strikes, before a blood-red solar cross; the inlaid marble knotwork patterning of the Round Table owes more, visually, to Wewelsburg, favoured castle of the SS, than it does to Tintagel. Indeed, the film was particularly poorly received in West Germany, where its imagery of torchlit ceremonies, and of glittering knights riding forth under red pennants to battle for their sacred leader, all set to the most stirring excerpts of Wagner and Carl Orff, did not chime with the mood of the moment. What is the meaning of Percival\u2019s Grail revelation that \u201cyou and the land are one\u201d, after all, but nationalism\u2019s great mystery of faith for which men sacrifice themselves? Boorman draws on the headiest strain of politics for his art, plundering nationalism for effect, as a dark and double-edged magic of fearsome power.<\/p>\n

And like nationalism, when viewed from those outside its spell, the film is utterly ridiculous. It possesses, throughout, a definite end-of-pier quality. The performances are strange and stilted, Nicol Williamson\u2019s Merlin is oddly camp and slapstick, and the whole thing is in the worst possible taste, a monument to excess as absurd as anything by Ken Russell. As a narrative, it barely hangs together; yet it is driven forward by imagery of strange and compelling power. Battles in bluebell woods, dead knights hanging from Mordred\u2019s thorn tree, food for crows; the glittering, barely Christian wedding sequence, as if overseen by Glendalough\u2019s renegade vicar; the apple orchards blossoming back into life as, restored by the Grail, Arthur leads his knights towards their final battle: and everywhere the presence of gushing, living water. We begin to believe, despite ourselves, that Boorman has indeed tapped into some Jungian essence, something that could only spring from the deep memory of these islands.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re in that state of grace where you\u2019re wholly concentrated on making the film, you can draw on unconscious forces to help you,\u201d Boorman writes, with absolute sincerity. \u201cFor a century now, we\u2019ve been rushing headlong into the future; we\u2019ve made a cult out of progress and we\u2019ve forgotten our former selves, our former patterns of behaviour, whose origins can be traced to the Middle Ages. We no longer have roots,\u201d he mourned, and so, purely for our own survival, there is now \u201ca pressing need to investigate the Matter of Britain\u201d.<\/p>\n

And it is only because of Boorman\u2019s sincerity that any of it works. The vision of the just and rightly ordered state, of the Grail, and the restorative power to be found, if only searched for, in the land itself: he means all of it, with religious fervour, and it is enough to carry us along with him. A London mystic like Blake, he had found in Ireland not his Jerusalem but a dream of Camelot, sleeping dormant in the native woods and waters of these ancient, sacred isles. In Excalibur, more than any other modern adaptation, the great tradition has been worked on, made anew and handed on, glittering, to us. \u201cI felt great satisfaction in having made it against all the odds,\u201d Boorman writes, \u201cIt was a lifelong quest: I had found the Grail.\u201d Like any national revivalist of the 19th century, or Anglofuturist of today, he perceived that the only way to cut our way out of the wreckage of modernity lay in reshaping the myths of a golden past to arm us for the great struggles ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Imagine, if such a scenario is not too outlandish, a broken and unhappy Britain, where poor governance has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[9442,5040,93,115681,61,60,115682,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-224726","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-cinema","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-excalibur","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-john-boorman","15":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}