‘Magicians responsible for the magic spaces on screen’: Landscape Guardians in A Canterbury Tale, Excalibur and A Field in England

In British literature and film the figure recurs, manifesting as a patriarchal male sorcerer, of a guardian of the land. This character appears as Merlin in the work of Malory, Burne-Jones, Kipling and T. H. White, and as variations upon him in three distinctive British films: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). This article proposes to contrast these films’ use of the liminal magus figure in order to interrogate what is contained within their triangulation of masculinity, magic and landscape.

In A Canterbury Tale, Thomas Colpeper is an equivocal, even disturbing, character: the local magistrate who, as well as lecturing visiting American soldiers about the history of the Kent landscape, is unmasked as the Glueman, a nocturnal assailant of women temporarily stationed in his village. In Excalibur, Boorman’s cinematic reimagining of Malory, Merlin is explicitly non-human, an alien wizard protecting the primal oak forest, intoning that he is ‘a dream to some – a nightmare to others!’ And in A Field in England, O’Neil is a necromancer held captive in the eponymous field during the English Civil War, until a small band of Cromwellian soldiers unknowingly frees him and, now enslaved, must dig at his behest for buried treasure.

A comparison of the films’ similarities and differences in their portrayal of this recurring guardian figure illuminates how they map shifting notions of what Kipling, in his novel Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), called ‘Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye’. The use of this morally ambiguous magus figure asks questions of the films’ preoccupation with time past, present and future in the context of the landscape and its history. Beyond this, Colpeper, Merlin and O’Neil qualify as what Andrew Moor calls: ‘magicians … responsible for the magic spaces on screen’ (2005: 14).