My neighbor and I were at the Michiana Renaissance Festival, watching an ensemble called The Knights of the Rose don plate armor and fight with dull swords. I was sitting on a bench with my friend to my left and an empty seat to my right. A man and his three little daughters were sitting nearby. An old woman in a fanny pack approached me, and — because of how all of us were arranged — she misunderstood who the girls’ father was, asking me whether I was saving the open seat for my daughters, and if not, asking whether she could take it.
“They’re not mine,” I had to explain, loud enough to be heard by an old person but quiet enough not to disrupt the show. Instantaneously, it occurred to me that if I had gone to welding school instead of Notre Dame, I would’ve graduated a year ago, and had enough time to find a wife and raise some daughters. It also hit me that if I had gone to welding school, I’d probably make enough money to buy a house one day — not a sure bet when you’re a medieval studies major.
Then, the portly knight hit the smaller knight really hard on the head with a mace — which was sick — so I snapped out of it. At the start of the show, the knights mentioned that they were in the employ of King Edward IV, implying that we were somewhere between 1461 and 1483 in the thick of the Wars of the Roses. This information proved upsetting to me, as we soon encountered a group of reenactors dressed (impressively accurately) as a camp of Polish hussars — the Polish hussars didn’t pop onto the scene until the 16th century. I felt unmoored.
Later, walking from a Punch and Judy puppet show (which the kids loved because Punch and Judy are essentially ye olde brain rot) to a joust, we encountered another disaster: Queen Eleanor.
“Then who’s the monarch of this fair!” I worried. “Is it King Edward or Queen Eleanor?” Edward had a wife, but she was named Elizabeth, and there were rival claimants to the English throne, but none of the Lancastrian pretenders were named Eleanor as far as I know.
I gave up on my attempts to reconcile these inconsistencies when I saw Queen Eleanor drinking a smoothie and going on her phone during the joust. I was crushed.
Nerds often have a penchant for pedantry. Usually, they’d go nuts for technicalities like these, but at the Renaissance fair, they let loose. It’s a big tent, one with room for every nerdy pastime and intellectual property. It’s a “Renaissance” fair, but there’re also people doing fantasy cosplay, wearing furry attire, selling sci-fi paperbacks and hawking Pokémon merchandise.
The Renaissance fair really brings out the best in nerds, who are generally good people — it’s the people who weren’t quite cool but weren’t quite lame, who unlike nerds were socially conscious enough to be aware of and insecure about their own inadequacy, whom you have to watch out for.
At the Renaissance fair, guys who didn’t do much drinking in high school can drink mead and potion-themed rum beverages with utter abandon. They can sit on bleachers next to sporty guys who live near the 4-H lot at which the fair is held without feeling awkward, bound together by the solidarity of how sick it is to watch a portly knight hit a smaller knight really hard on the head with a mace.
Last week on X.com — Elon Musk’s everything app — Democrats were saying that JD Vance was lame in high school, and they have pictures to prove it. In contrast, they say, Gavin Newsom was a chad through and through, which they also have pictures to prove.
At the Renaissance fair, there were a lot of guys who looked like JD Vance when he was a teenage nerd, there with their D&D groups. There were also guys who looked like Gavin Newsom when he was a high school baseball player, there with their daughters because they wanted to meet a queen. At the Renaissance fair, unlike on X.com and in Congress, these demographics consort with carefree joy.
The Renaissance fair is a sort of eschatological paradise in this way, like that verse of C. W. McCall’s “Convoy” when the truckers and the hippies team up against the police. The lion lies down with the lamb.
