Crazy Knights

I feel, more and more, like I live in Rivendell. My house is built into a hill on a ravine. The whole student village is surrounded by an ancient, dense forest. We are constantly beset by orcs and goblins and cave trolls. I was sure I spotted a nazgul riding one of the enormous seagulls that are everywhere.

The external factors are coupled with the language, which has a distinctly Elvish quality to it: compare this video to this video. The two are eerily familiar. At the church I go to, the first reading is always done in Welsh, and, closing my eyes, I picture Liv Tyler (which is not entirely a bad thing).

This morning, after mass, I took a walk through Penglais Forest that lies to the North and West of the Student Village. It makes for a less smoggy walk, and who doesn't like to walk through the forest? This particular forest seems to lend itself to my Tolkien Fantasies. The trees look like they could support entire villages of Wood Elves. I would not be entirely surprised to see the forest moving toward to the student village to exact the revenge for the severe amount of litter that this particular dorm cluster creates.

I bring my iPod with me everywhere, so I am often startled by other walkers, birds and the occasional woodland ground creature. This morning, I was again startled as I came around a bend and to part of the forest where the trees have created a little bit of a clearing. At one end of the small clearing, there was a group of people standing in a sort of circle, one of them on the stump of a tree, holding court. There are all sorts of groups of walkers and hikers around, so this was not immediately surprising. The closer I got, the more surreal the experience became.

The man on the tree had shoulder length blond hair, the front part pulled back into a ponytail. He stood over the rest of them, arms crossed and resting on the hilt of a sword. Is...is that...a sword? I wondered, as I got closer. Tucked behind another tree was a second group of people, standing listlessly, kicking at the dirt, making small talk. And inspecting their spears. Yes. Inspecting replica spears. They kept casting furtive glances at the other group, as if they were waiting for something to happen.

No, I thought, this isn't really happening. The closer I got, the more medieval objects made themselves apparent. Some people had brought helmets. A few of them had matching shields. These four-foot wooden ovals were painted with identical blue fluer-de-lis over a quartered blue and white field. The man who seemed to be in charge wore a light linen tunic secured with a hemp chord at the waist.

From a distance, things will often look more impressive than from up close. At a distance, it was hard to notice that one spearman wore hockey knee pads. Or that a good number of them wore hoodies in an effort to create the feel of a cape. And Nikes. No one had authentic footwear. I guess you can't fault them. It seems that each had spent a lot of effort on one item, trying to create an authentic feel one piece at a time: a really stoic looking helmet, or a gleaming spear coupled with wind pants and green hoodie.

Who I felt bad for was this one lone girl, dressed in jeans, an official Aberystwyth University sweatshirt, and wearing an embarrassed look of someone who clearly compromised her Sunday morning for someone she cares about very deeply. She sat nearby the collected group being lecture to, trying as hard as she could to blend in with the trees.

I, for one, was glad they were there. But, I wanted them to know, these were no mere orcs they were facing. These were Oruk-Hai.