Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  Henry particularly loved Robin Hood, according to historian Cornelia Baehrens. During a May 1515 shooting trip, “Robin Hood and his merry men” met Henry and his retinue, led them to their forest hideout, and served the nearly two hundred people a banquet of venison and wine. On the way home, the group met women dressed up as Lady May and Lady Flora—personifications of wild nature—who sat in a carriage drawn by costumed horses, each of which had a singing child sitting atop it.

  If Henry VIII was not quite a larper, he was close to it, proof that people—even kings—have long wanted to live the mythic and heroic lives that escape a mundane human’s grasp. And while larp itself is a modern creation, derived from a peculiar Prussian war game of the nineteenth century (more on this later), its spiritual heritage lies, perhaps, in Renaissance Europe in the fabulous pageants, disguisings, and outdoor entertainments thrown by and for Europe’s monarchs.

  Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter, presided over some of England’s most opulent examples of the outdoor entertainment. During her reign, Elizabeth and her court made a series of journeys across England, known as progresses. Having a mobile court allowed her to maintain her visibility among the common folk and to keep the scheming nobility—many of its members capable of raising a standing army—on its toes.

  The cost of putting up the queen and her hundreds-large retinue was daunting for many of the nobility, but not as daunting as the rich gifts they were expected to present, including entertainments. In 1575, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, threw Queen Elizabeth an entertainment so ostentatious that it would put the most vulgar modern-day displays of wealth to shame. He reportedly paid about £1,000 per day for board and entertainment during Queen Elizabeth’s visit, and she stayed for at least seventeen days.4 It’s hard to measure what the cost of £17,000 would mean in present-day terms, but an estimate would be something on the order of £3.2 million, or roughly $4.5 million.5 For comparative purposes, in Elizabethan times, a soldier earned about five pennies a day, a pound of beef cost about three pennies, and theater tickets cost between one and three pennies.6 For the same amount of money that the good earl probably spent on Elizabeth’s entertainment, he could have fielded an army of nearly 1,000 soldiers for an entire year, purchased 566,000 pounds of beef, or gone to the theater between 566,000 and 1.7 million times.

  When Queen Elizabeth arrived at the castle on the evening of July 9, Dudley stopped his castle clock to illustrate that the queen’s greatness transcended the boundaries of time. 7 A sibyl, a mythic prophetess, clad in white silk, met Her Majesty at the gate and recited a poem written for the occasion by the queen’s chaplain, predicting that her reign would be full of virtue, peace, and the love of the people. Passing along farther, she met an excessively tall porter, Hercules, also dressed in silk. At first he berated her for making so much noise with her retinue, but then he recognized her and humbly knelt to beg her pardon. He cued a band of trumpeters eight feet tall, probably papier-mache figures with real trumpeters inside or behind them.8 Beyond the trumpeters, the queen passed by the Kenilworth castle lake, where the Arthurian Lady of the Lake, accompanied by two nymphs—all in silk, of course—appeared to glide over the water to her, conveyed by a moveable island lit by torches.9 When Elizabeth finally made it into the castle, she was greeted by decorative posts left as gifts by seven mythic gods. A small boy explained the significance of the gifts in poetry composed for the occasion.

  Then the entertainments really got serious, with fireworks, hunting, bear baiting, acrobats, fake jousts, and plays, with figures from folklore and myth periodically popping out of the shrubbery to praise the queen. On July 10, for example, the queen encountered a folkloric Savage Man on her way back from hunting. The Savage Man was played by poet George Gascoigne, who was responsible for much of the verse recited during the entertainment. He arrived “with an oken plant pluct up by the roots in hiz hande, him self forgrone all in moss and Ivy,” according to a letter about the event that the merchant-adventurer Robert Laneham wrote.10 The Savage Man was talking to Echo, the figure from Greek mythology, about the events at the castle since the queen had come to visit. Eventually, the figures recognized the queen’s presence, knelt, and humbly praised her.

  It got even larpier. The following Monday, as the queen returned again from hunting, she encountered the sea-god Triton as she passed over the pool that lined one side of the castle. He swam up to her in a merman costume and explained, in verse composed for the occasion, of course, that the Lady of the Lake had been imprisoned in the lake by Sir Bruce, who was trying to rape her in order to avenge his cousin Merlin, whom the Lady of the Lake encased in rock in punishment for his inordinate lust. According to Triton:

  Yea, oracle and prophecy,

  say sure she cannot stand,

  Except a worthier maid than she

  her cause do take in hand.

  Lo, here therefore a worthy work

  most fit for you alone;

  Her to defend and set at large

  (but you, O Queen) can none:

  And gods decree and Neptune sues

  this grant, O peerless Prince

  Your presence only shall suffice

  her enemies to convince.11

  Luckily for the Lady of the Lake, the queen was a “worthier maid,” whose presence scared off Sir Bruce. The lady glided over the water on her moveable island to thank the queen again. As the queen walked farther over the bridge, the mythical musician Arion appeared out of a twenty-four-foot-long mechanical dolphin with a six-piece band hidden inside it, a boat made up so that its oars appeared to be its fins. The Greek god Proteus sang to Elizabeth to thank her for saving the Lady of the Lake. While George Gascoigne and Laneham thought the scene was delightful, another report says that the man playing Arion was hoarse and tore off his disguise to tell the queen that he wasn’t Arion but “honest Harry Goldingham,” here to welcome Her Majesty to Kenilworth.12

  In royal pageantry, as in a larp, not everything goes according to plan. Gascoigne writes that the scene was supposed to be introduced by a naval battle between Sir Bruce and the Lady of the Lake’s forces that never came to fruition. Likewise, Gascoigne wrote a play about a nymph and had the actors all ready to perform. A Savage Man was supposed to introduce the play in the forest by pleading with the queen to help remove his blindness. The play never went off, most likely because it rained for several days and the opportunity never arose.13

  Sixteen years later, in 1591, the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham put on a similar entertainment for Elizabeth, albeit a shorter one, during which mythical figures also met her at the gate. The entertainment featured a crescent-shaped artificial lake, dug for the occasion, complete with a “Ship Isle,” a fort, and a “Snail Mount”—whatever that is—from which mythical ocean gods offered her gifts and which served as the backdrop for a battle between the sea gods and wood gods.14

  Such Tudor pageants are similar to larp in terms of structure and presentation. The action isn’t presented for an audience locked behind the fourth wall; it’s dispersed, presented dynamically, with costumed actors appearing in the woods, on a pond, behind castle walls, and so on. The queen is in the midst of the action, and she is involved in the outcomes of the various plots. It is her presence that banishes Sir Bruce and frees the Lady of the Lake. As in a larp, planned spontaneity governs the event. Not every plot point actually occurs—it rains, and so Gascoigne’s play is canceled. The actors, essentially NPCs, have to predict where the queen will be and wait there in order to surprise her with their speeches. As the modern scholar David Bergeron puts it, Elizabeth was often an “active participant in the outcome of the dramatic presentation. She is an ‘unscheduled actor’ in the sense that no part is explicitly written for her; on the other hand, it is intended that she will be an ‘actor’ in the whole dramatic scene.”15

  The sentiment behind the Tudor pageants is also comparable to larp. The pageants of Elizabeth I and the disguisings of Henry VIII look backward toward a mythical p
ast, including the past of King Arthur and Robin Hood that so many larpers seek out today. Furthermore, this mythical past does not exist in a vacuum; larpers sometimes use scenarios to represent, re-create, or work out real-life issues. The organizers of Elizabeth’s entertainments had real-world goals—first, of course, to honor and flatter the queen by elevating her to mythical status. Elizabeth’s courtiers also used the pageants to advance political and personal causes by way of allegory. During the 1578 Lady of May put on by the Earl of Leicester, who also threw the Kenilworth entertainment, a woman with two suitors—a shepherd and a forester—surprised Elizabeth in the woods and asked for help in choosing between them. Sir Philip Sydney had written the scene to advance Leicester’s agenda with the queen during a moment when Leicester was in ill favor. Leicester had once been considered a possible husband to the virgin queen, and Sydney wrote the forester to resemble him. In selecting the shepherd as the woman’s fiancé during the scene, Elizabeth made a political statement. In 1624, King James I canceled the performance of the entertainment Neptune’s Triumph because he disagreed with the coded message it was sending about policy toward Spain.16

  The Tudors were far from the only figures to stage the mythological past in spectacular fashion. The Victorian era brought a craze for everything medieval, from fake Gothic ruins put up on the property of nobility, to the Gothic novel, to jousting tournaments. The jousting tournament had been a staple of British royal entertainments from the Middle Ages on through the Tudors—Henry VIII was a notorious fan of and participant in tournaments, and Queen Elizabeth presided over a tilt nearly every year of her reign.

  In the early 1800s, driven by his love of medieval lore and literature, and at the height of the Gothic revival, Archibald Montgomery, the Earl of Eglinton decided to host a tournament. The tournament took its inspiration from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819). Scott had also written a romance, Kenilworth, based on the earlier entertainment thrown for Queen Elizabeth.

  The tilt at Eglinton Castle was years in the making. At the end of 1838, Lord Eglinton had assembled a roll of 150 young men who wished to compete—the same number of knights who swore to honor the rules of Arthur’s Round Table—and they met to discuss the terms of the fight. They eventually settled on a tournament in the style of the sixteenth century—a civilized joust rather than the brutal melees of earlier centuries. More than half of the knights resigned in protest on the spot.

  In the coming months, driven by the heat of the Gothic revival, the press got word of the upcoming tournament and published sensational gossip about the knights, their custom-made armor, and the arrangements being made. In an era that lauded privacy, Lord Eglinton became a tabloid celebrity. As historian Ian Anstruther put it, the tournament “had made him a national figure, and within the limits of those days when important people still had privacy, everything he said and did was published in the press.”17

  The tournament itself was a disaster. Lord Eglinton had been prepared for about four thousand people to make the journey to his Scottish estate to see the tilts, but the rural area was overrun with one hundred thousand spectators. No food, drink, or lodging could be had in the small town for any price. A freak torrential downpour clouded the spectators’ views of the tournament, and the biblical amount of mud on Lord Eglinton’s property ruined the lovely medieval costumes that many women wore to the event, ensuring that the Eglinton Tournament would go down in history as an infamous failure.

  Why did Lord Eglinton go to the extravagant expense of holding such a tourney? According to Anstruther, his romantic temperament was to blame: “One of the deepest yearnings of all people with romantic temperaments in the 19th century was the urge to experience every emotion personally; and the great ambition of every Gothic revivalist was to taste the drama of medieval life in as many ways as possible—in hawking, archery, in a Merry Xmas in the Baron’s Hall with a yule log, malmsey wine and a boar’s head; and also, naturally enough if given the opportunity, in wearing armour and taking part in a tournament.”18

  The yearning to experience personal emotion is one of the hallmarks of the larp movement today. Many larpers want to experience emotions—the loss of a friend, the thrill of battle, the pain of betrayal—that they would never have occasion to feel in everyday life.

  If the spiritual heritage of larp as performance is somewhat ancient, its formal, gaming roots are unapologetically modern. It is difficult to trace the precise lineage of larp, and there is no single “mother larp” that started the craze; instead, it rose up like some grassroots political campaign, with people in different areas of the United States and elsewhere spontaneously deciding to hit their friends with padded sticks in backyards. The first blade of grass poking its way to the surface nearly forty years before the rest of its kin is Atzor, an early larp mentioned in the March 3, 1941, issue of Life. University of Nebraska student Frederick Lee Pelton created the idea for this foreign world in 1934.19 Originally, the planet Atzor had two countries, but by the time the Life article was written, seven years later, it had ten, “each governed by a Lincoln, Neb. boy or girl with a good imagination and willingness to activate Frederick Pelton’s dream.” The monarch or monarchs of each land designed their own stamps for mail and issued their own currencies. The article’s accompanying photos show the players dressed up as nobility circa World War I, with women in flowing gowns and sashes and men in military uniforms or coats and breeches, wearing medals hung on ribbons. The pictures also include the method for resolving war: naval battles were decided with small models, and night naval battles, the caption notes, are staged in a “blacked-out basement” with the opponents “actually firing ships.” Tactical troop movements took place with opponents hammering pins into a topographical map and an umpire measuring the distance between the pin and the intended target to determine whether it had hit. The Life article concludes that, to the players, “Atzor is incomparably more real, more absorbing than Lincoln, Neb. Their parents sometimes wonder how it will end,” a sentiment that could describe many modern-day larps and larpers.

  Atzor is an early example of larp, though it is not described in those terms, demonstrating that the idea of creating one’s own world for imaginative play is not a new one. The renaissance of larp was still decades away.

  Modern larp came out of a propitious cultural moment in the 1970s and early 1980s, decades marked by the rise of genre fiction, sci-fi and comic book conventions, the beginning of cult fandom in the form of the Trekkers, and by the watershed moment when Star Wars was released in 1977, events that enflamed the imaginations of Americans, offering heroic alternate worlds for fans to imagine themselves into.

  The era also saw the invention of the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, which allowed players to enter and affect an imaginary world themselves. According to performance studies researcher Daniel Mackay, Dungeons & Dragons arose indirectly from a game that the nineteenth-century Prussian military required its officers to play. Mackay reports that in 1811, Herr von Reiswitz and his son, who was a Prussian military officer, modified the rules to a game called War Chess and in doing so re-envisioned it as a strategy game, which they intended to help train Prussian officers. The new game, called Kriegsspiel, involved a miniature landscape populated by counters that stood in for different sorts of troops. An impartial umpire decided which side won each encounter by following a set of rules. Dice rolls simulated the unpredictable elements that attend any real-world event. The game was quickly adopted by the military and proved a success—the British attributed the prowess of Prussian soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War to it and developed their own tactical game to train officers, which is still in use today.20

  Kriegsspiel, which is German for “war game,” eventually evolved into a leisure activity enjoyed by the late Victorians. In 1913 the writer H. G. Wells transformed concepts from Kriegsspiel into a war game meant for amateurs called Little Wars, which featured tiny figurines instead of the abstract counters in Kriegsspiel.21

  F
or the next five decades, war gaming garnered a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts, and while rules didn’t radically depart from Wells’s Little Wars, they became ever more complicated in order to simulate battlefield conditions with increasing accuracy.

  In 1968, the next big development arrived in the form of Dave Wesley, a war gamer on the Minneapolis-St. Paul scene, who was fed up with the way that war games would often degenerate into arguments about the rules. According to game designer Lawrence Schick, Wesley “became interested in the theory behind simulation games and undertook his own course of study into games and game theory” and investigated “multiplayer games, where different players have different abilities and goals, and nonzero-sum games, where players can get ahead without cutting each other down.”22 In the course of his research, he read Strategos: The American Game of War by Charles Adiel and Lewis Totten, a war game from the 1880s that recommended a disinterested referee who could settle disputes and control information.

  Wesley synthesized his research into a war gaming session with Napoleonic miniatures that featured the fictional town of Braunstein, which was caught between two armies. Different players represented factions in the town and advance elements of the two armies, each with their own separate abilities and goals. The players quickly became embroiled in intrigue, and the game ended chaotically, with Wesley believing that Braunstein had been a failure. His players disagreed and begged him to run another session.

  Wesley ran more Braunsteins, and eventually his players started refereeing their own versions. In particular, a gamer named Dave Arneson began to run Braunsteins, but by 1971 he was ready to try something new. He incorporated his love of Lord of the Rings into his gaming by running players in a medieval fantasy setting, each one controlling a single character instead of a battalion. Arneson had been corresponding with a game fan named Gary Gygax, an insurance underwriter in his mid-thirties who had written a series of medieval war-gaming rules called Chainmail. They collaborated, play-testing the rules and setting, and in 1974 they published Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s first role-playing game. Over the next five years, it went through several versions and spawned a host of imitators.23