I expected, before going to the 54th annual Minnesota Renaissance Festival last weekend, to have conflicting thoughts about the place. To be overwhelmed both by the crowds and muck and by my professional obligation to give an event I find annoying a fair shake. To be physically uncomfortable but dizzyingly free socially. To be both myself and not myself at the same time.
What I did not expect, while trudging through three-inch-deep mud and crowds of elves in a desperate multi-hour search for a store called Junque In Thy Trunque, was to be thinking about whether or not the Enlightenment was in fact a good thing.
Quest the Zeroth: The Querent’s Complaint
Let me back up for a second.
Despite having only gone to the MRF once before, I’m kind of famous among my friends for being a hater about it. Part of that is the narcissism of small differences: I’m someone who theoretically should be in the MRF’s target audience, which makes the fact I had a bad time there last year sting more acutely. I’m a queer dork, gay-married to the rare person who loves to yell about Star Trek even more than I do. I am not and have never been a Theater Person, but somehow Theater People always seem to find their way to me. I’m shy and oversensitive and exactly the kind of person who theoretically should love a festival where I could assume a new identity for a day, leaving that shyness behind.
Every year around this time, I’ll have three or four interactions with lifelong Minnesotans who, upon hearing that I’m excited for the State Fair, will smile halfheartedly at me, say they think the State Fair is fine, then wax rhapsodic for a quarter of an hour about how the MRF is the place to be, about how it’s the place I’m supposed to be, spiritually.
And yet it’s a place that feels alien to me.
Much of that, to be fair, is my own bias. I’m allergic to fantasy literature and film; I find its tropes annoying, pat, and often extremely self-satisfied (problems science fiction has never had, of course). I have trouble watching any movie, regardless of genre, set any time before1800 without having intrusive thoughts about how bad everything must have smelled. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction why it’s interesting that elves and dwarves hate each other, or even why they hate each other. It is just Not My Thing, and just because a hot, dusty fair where the main attraction is getting to hang out in a pretend version of Medieval Fantasy World holds negative appeal for me doesn’t mean it’s objectively unappealing.
So on my heroic return to the MRF, my goal was to take it as much as possible on its own terms. To put it in language a wizard would understand: The festival is a fearsome beast, stronger than any that might oppose it. It will not bend to your will; it cannot be vanquished by those who detest its nature. To conquer this creature, first, I would need to grow to understand—nay, love—it.
I would need to Become Elf.
Quest the First: Histories of the Realm
As someone with a B.A. in history who nonetheless frequently forgets when the 18th century was, I knew that the first step of Fantasyquest 2025, well before the 30-minute drive to Shakopee, was to approach the problem from primary sources. So when Olivia (my close friend, bridesmaid, and wedding DJ, pictured here doing finger guns with/at Goldy Gopher) vaguely suggested we should watch a Lord of the Rings sometime, I knew the answer could only be yes.
Important learnings I took from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001):
- My instincts were correct: I had to be an elf, not a dwarf or a hobbit or something, for the ren faire. Elves, like me, are kind of tall, wear their hair in a variety of stupid ways, and get really fussy if made to live outside of dense, walkable environments. (Also, my aforementioned sister owns elf ears, and I am incapable of growing a beard, so.)
- To be a successful elf, one must:
- Speak kind of cryptically.
- Not die unless you meet a really hot dude.
- Know some magic.
- Shoot a bow.
- Be bilingual.
- Hate dwarves for reasons the movie did nothing to elucidate.
- Know British character actor Hugo Weaving and be on sort of tense terms with him.
- Never leave your hometown unless you really have to.
- Traditional elfy-dwarfy fantasy can be extremely good if it has strong characters and beautiful visuals and Elijah Wood looking like you ran his face through one of those yassify filters 20 to 25 times in a row.
- On the other hand, IDK man those orcs are really coded. Didn’t care for that.
- Cate Blanchett!!
The Fellowship of the Ring significantly increased my confidence that I could Be Elf.
Rating: 4 out of 5 Huzzahs. (Two Huzzahs subtracted for orc racism and almost no women, one Huzzah added because one of the women was Cate Blanchett.)
Quest the Second: Ye Olde Garb for the Journey
Next, of course, was finding a costume to befit a valiant young elf such as I. As I don’t drive and the natural environment of ren faire type clothing is, of course, a suburban mall, my sister sallied quick to my lodging upon her noble steed (a Toyota Corolla named “Mr. Sensible”) to bring me forth to yon Mall of America.
As we drove to the mall, I looked through an email my sister had sent me of possible ren faire clothing styles she’d observed in the wild. These included:
- Loudly patterned dress with boots and a big hat and blue jeans for some reason.
- Leather armor and dress shirt.
- Cloak and long skirt and vaguely ruffly top.
- Some sort of corset situation.
- Plague doctor?
Of these, I decided the most elven was clearly No. 3. (Also, I already owned a vaguely ruffly top and my sister had offered to lend me both elf ears and a cloak, and being a sellsword scribe such as myself in this fuckin’ media landscape, I am reluctant to part with my hard-earn’d coin.) This meant our quest was to find me a long cotton skirt in earth tones. My sister’s well-tuned elven intuition, possibly a result of a bargain with the fae, led us immediately to Ragstock, a store where like half their inventory is long cotton skirts in earth tones.
My outfit for the day:
Rating: 3 out of 5 Huzzahs, since it would have maybe been more fun if finding the costume had been more work.
Quest the Third: A Bill of Enchantments
The day before the MRF, my sister and I grabbed coffee at Uptown’s Moona Moono and made a plan. We would eat a quick breakfast at my apartment around 7, then drive to the fair early to beat the crowd. A day in which I would give the MRF a fair chance to win my affections, we decided, must include:
- At least some fair food. I’m a vegetarian, so turkey legs were out for me, but apparently everyone loves ren faire pickles, so that went on the list.
- Go to plenty of vendors.
- Shoot/throw/swing some sort of weapon.
- Talk to street performers, in character if possible.
- Watch a show.
- Watch a joust.
- See a special theme day event.
- If possible, go to the ONE DAY ONLY PENN AND TELLER SHOW!!! that was happening at 2 p.m. I am not a Penn & Teller fan (or hater, or anything; I basically just know about Desert Bus, but the MRF was hyping this like crazy, so I figured I might as well.
Our aims set, we brought forth our palantirs and scryed the next day’s weather: storms in the super early morning and cloudy all day after that. Hey, less sunscreen AND less dust!
Rating: 4 out of 5 Huzzahs. (One Huzzah subtracted because Moona Moono doesn’t have decaf espresso drinks and the café au lait I got instead was kinda watery.)
Quest the Fourth: The Voyage Across Storms, The Mire of Malice
But lo! The next morning, as my alarm clock crowed its plaintive melody, I opened my groggy eyes to see a monstrous flash of lightning burning through my apartment’s weird, kinda dirty roller blinds! Rain spilled forth from the heavens, swelling the bounds of Bde Maka Ska and Lake Chipotle alike. I checked my laptop and hark! Alas! The wrathful bolts of the cloud-sprites were not to cease until like 2 p.m., and even then there was still a 45% chance of thunderstorms.
After some discussion with my fellowship, we decided we’d wait a few hours to see if the storms passed. And yea, Apple Weather continued to prove fickle, possibly as a result of some sorta gnome; despite its dire warnings, the rain had let up just about entirely by 10 a.m.-ish. In Mr. Sensible we journeyed forth, serenaded from afar by bards of renown (mostly Doechii), making sure to stop at a gas station to buy bottled water because the MRF only lets you bring in a single, factory-sealed bottle of water.
When we got to the MRF grounds, ready to fork over $28.95 each for admission to the past plus $18 for parking, things looked auspicious. The sky was cloudy but not grim; grass sprung verdant from the loam beneath the parking lot; birds chattered beneath a humidity that wasn’t great but y’know wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. As uncomfortable, physically and spiritually, as I was with being all Elfed Out, I was hopeful. I was with friends—Olivia, my sister, and my wife. I was prepared. I was going to have a good attitude. Nothing could stop me!
Upon cresting the hill that led to the fair, we saw the first of many things that would stop me: This goddamn mud.
I really cannot overstate how disgusting this mud was. The kind of algorithmically beautified photography you get from an iPhone cannot do it justice. It was, in some places, half a foot thick, horribly squelchy, and the color and texture of human diarrhea. My boots were spattered as hell within five minutes.
I can do this, I told myself as I fidgeted with my elf ears in line to have my ticket scanned. I will not think about how I could be at home eating Baba’s and playing three to five hours of a video game. I am an elf, and elves do not give up… I think?
Rating: 0 out of 5 Huzzahs, obviously.
Quest the Fifth: The Cartographer’s Lament
And then: There we were. The Ren Fest. People in armor and long dresses and robes and cloaks and occasionally cargo shorts milling beneath colorful pennants on a muddy street. I could delay no longer. It was time to Elf Out.
The rain delay meant we’d missed our first event of the day: an act called the Danger Committee that promised to combine juggling and improv comedy into something I was sure would test my resolve. But we’d at least arrived in time to get to the rest of our schedule. Soon, we’d be at a joust, and after that, if our luck held, we’d watch Penn & Teller do their (possibly libertarian?) stage act, the true nature of which I still could not describe with any certainty.
First, though, we needed to find our way to our noon engagement: an apple pie eating contest. (Olivia: “If there’s one thing the early modern period was known for, it’s having a surplus of food.”) If it wasn’t too far a journey, I figured I’d also like to swing by the restrooms, and Olivia, who’d come to the ren faire in large part to buy some nice taper candles for her apartment, wanted to see if there were any candlemakers near the pie-eatin’ region. So we headed for the info booth, where we grabbed some maps.
The thing about the ren faire maps, though, is that they’re beautifully illustrated yet supremely unhelpful. Their red dashed-line routes were not, to my eye, visible anywhere on the actual grounds; the landmarks on the map are often poorly labeled in real life and/or don’t actually resemble their illustrations; the astute squire may notice that, for some reason, the map has west at the top.
Wracking my feeble intellect to try and make sense of the map, I found myself thinking back on the many dinner-table conversations from my daughter-of-two-professors childhood about what was lost and/or gained when the Enlightenment laid a framework of skeptical rationality atop the natural world. My beloved Minnesota State Fair, sweaty and animal-poop-smelly as it may be, is a bastion of post-Enlightenment thought, where the achievements of horticultural science and a bountiful harvest born of manmade fertilizers are served up to the public on named and neatly gridded streets.
The MRF, on the other hand, celebrates a quasi-Romantic idea of the past, where a certain irrationality in logistics can, at best, lend the place a sense of the magic lost in a world that is too well known by science, which is something I certainly understand! But, like, sorry to Wordworth or whatever, but in that moment, I definitely found myself longing for the State Fair’s nice orderly ways. I can sacrifice the fairies dancing in the moonlight for the ability to actually know where stuff is.
Anyway, as I was being a stupid nerd and thinking about all that: Olivia found a candle shop listed in the program at a booth number that didn’t appear on the map. She asked a woman at the information desk about it, who spent three minutes studying the map from various angles before saying, “I don’t know, that map isn’t really helpful,” shrugging her shoulders, and giving up.
Rating: 2 out of 5 Huzzahs.
Quest the Sixth: Sour’d Fruit of the Winding Vine
But what delight! On my way to the pie-eatin’ contest by way of the restrooms, what did we find on our path but a pickle vendor. He was not wearing a shirt, which seemed less than ideal for a food service profession. I was feeling kind of self-conscious being as visibly Elf as I was (a stupid fear, I know, considering I was at the fuckin’ ren faire), so I got my sister to buy a pickle. A good choice on my part, because it turned out this guy was EXTREMELY intent on doing bits with you as you bought your pickle, which I would not have been game for. His howled, pickle-themed rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin’” continued long after we’d left his booth.
My review of the pickle: It was literally just a pickle. I don’t tend to like eating pickles as a snack, since I find them way too salty and acidic, and this was no exception. Still, because the pickle was apparently an MRF must-do, I tried my best to get a dignified, elflike photo of myself eating it. Below, please find the least-suggestive one I managed to take. It is still pretty bad.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Huzzahs
Quest the Seventh: Privy Problems
I think “taking a piss in a long skirt and polyester cloak in a port-a-potty that’s tilted like way backwards and full of flies and fifteen degrees warmer than outside and creaks in a really unnerving way when you sit down” is a sentence federal judges should be allowed to impose as an alternative to prison that still serves as an effective crime deterrent.
Rating: Fuck. You.
Quest the Eighth: A Panoply of Victuals and Varied Delights
After extricating myself from the worst bathroom situation west of the Mississippi, I found my group again and we headed over to the pie-eatin’ contest. The crowd there was sparse but enraptured as a group of six children and two large adult men took the stage. A stagehand in a Howl’s Moving Castle costume handed out large slices of what I learned from backstage whispers was just one of those big pies you can get from Costco, along with bottles of water to lubricate the pie on its way down.
Only when the actual eating began did I learn the contest’s twist: the participants would not be allowed to use forks or their hands during the contest, instead stuffing their faces directly into the pies like dogs or something. I guess this makes sense because they didn’t have forks in the Renaissance, I thought, incorrectly. While everyone onstage made a valiant effort to best their pies, it swiftly became clear that one particular heavily bearded dude wearing a linen vest and no shirt was the champion in waiting. I think his defining quality was probably his lack of shame; while his competitors nibbled tentatively at their pies, trying to tear off bits of crust with their front teeth, this dude stuck his entire face completely horizontal into the paper plate and just went to town. I don’t feel ethical putting a photo of his pie-eatin’ technique in this article since I didn’t get his name or permission, but DM me on Bluesky and I’ll send it to you. It’s astonishing.
Anyway, the pie-eatin’ contest rocked, and after the victor (our bearded hero) had been crowned, we wandered over to another very positive MRF experience: the fairy houses. These were little dioramas, usually built in logs or the like, of teensy little cottagecore living spaces. I love a craft contest, and both the adult and children’s entries were brilliantly made. I felt like I could just give everything up, become three inches tall, and live in one of the houses full-time, and not just because my sister told me that elves have fairy ancestry and I was going as method as I could by that point.
After the fairy houses, I was in a fantastic mood. I was smiling broadly, no longer anxiously fiddling with the elf ears, and annoying everyone around me by speaking in sort of old-timey language. My wife hypothesized that this was because the port-a-potties had broken my spirit in a manner not entirely unlike military boot camp, leaving my body a shell to be filled by the vital spirit of the MRF.
Whatever the cause, I was giddy enough to even find the annoying things at the MRF exciting. One fun MRF quirk is that virtually every booth is staffed by the surliest and least competent teenagers in the state of Minnesota, with food items often taking many minutes and scowls to be handed to you from a big bin that’s literally three feet away. Our trip to get coffee after the fairy houses (“Lily, do you want coffee?” “Verily! Anon, to the beanmonger!” “Jesus Christ.”) was the epitome of this dynamic: The maybe-15-year-old behind the counter responded to “Can I get a cold press?” with an audibly irritated “I don’t know, can you?” And even this, dear reader, was a delight to me at this point! This new Lily was an elf in her elf-lement. She loved the MRF.
Rating: 5 out of 5 Huzzahs.
Quest the Ninth: Folke of the Realm
“Oh my God, guys,” whispered Olivia as we wandered down the street. “He was white.”
As we wandered away from the fairy houses toward the joust, Olivia had spotted a guy in full samurai gear walking down the street, his face hidden by his helmet. Delighted by his outfit, Olivia had run over to ask if she could take a photo with him, and, in addition to learning this guy’s race, she’d also learned that he didn’t know who Akira Kurosawa was. This guy, like many of the fair’s fascinating denizens, became part of our shared language for the rest of the day; after spending a while thinking of a fitting slur for a white samurai, I dubbed him Saoirse Rōnin.
The MRF verily blossoms with New Types of Guy. In the hour we spent wandering the grounds before the joust, looking for the still-unfindable taper candles (and fans, since the sun had begun to break through the clouds and the day was getting ungodly humid), we met oh so many of them. Here are a few:
- The stiltwalkers! Loved them! They were from the Minnesota High Court and, after asking if I could chat with them for a sec for Racket, one of them (stage name: Peg Standish) told me she was a science journalist in her out-of-costume life, and we had a fun chat about the struggles of freelancing that made me briefly forget that I had elf ears on. Rating: 5 out of 5 Huzzahs.
- Sir William, I think? He was the main guy at the joust, but it was just about impossible to see anything there and just as difficult to hear anything. People mostly cheered when Sir William appeared, which was nice, and he managed to break someone else’s pole (?) which I think is the main objective of jousting maybe. Rating: 4 out of 5. Huzzahs. (One subtracted because I am not sure any of the above details are “accurate,” per se.)
- Puke and Snot, the MRF’s long-running comedy duo. I was actively trying to avoid seeing these guys, since their whole act seemed so eminently not my thing, but we were passing by their stage and, with the Danger Committee’s show scuttled, I didn’t know if I’d get another chance to see a show at the fair, so I stopped in, and it took them 45 seconds to make, like, a really transphobic joke. The name I used to refer to them after this is not suitable for a family publication. Rating: 0 out of 5 Huzzahs.
- A guy walking a huge tortoise. Rating: 5 out of 5 Huzzahs.
Quest the Tenth: A Dim, Detestable Ration
The joust watched, I realized quickly that my limbs were growing much-weary’d from walking around in the mud and also that I hadn’t had any food since the pickle. On the advice of the stilt-walkers, we stopped into a storefront selling tamales and burritos, where I got a veggie burrito. Bad choice, me! It was Midwest Taco Night mild, contained none of the salsa it promised on the big wooden sign, and I accidentally ate a little bit of the foil, which I guess is technically “on me” but which I blame the burrito for anyway.
Rating: 1 out of 5 Huzzahs.
Quest the Eleventh: Hell Yeah Bitches It’s Crossbow Time
As we headed to Penn & Teller, we wandered past the feats-of-strength section of the MRF. There were places to throw axes, places to perform a test of strength with a big comedy mallet, places to toss shovels for some reason, and, to my delight, a place to shoot crossbows. I immediately went for the crossbows, owing to: a) no upper body strength required; and b) it would make me feel like Buffy Summers instead of Sorta Out-of-Shape Elf Who Just Had a Really Bad Burrito.
And guess what? Shooting a crossbow rules! You shoot it and an arrow just goes flying out! I wasn’t great by any means but I was better than the guy ahead of me in line, which felt nice! Plus the booth was nice and shady, which let at least a little of the sweat pooling beneath my cloak dry off. On my way out, I googled “places to shoot crossbows Minneapolis NOT ren faire” in case I ever get the itch again.
Rating: 5 out of 5 Huzzahs. (Honestly, it should be more but I don’t wanna break the scale.)
Quest the Twelfth: A Wander Through the Blighted Lands
Once the high of the crossbow wore off, though, I was confronted by two “dragons” (problems) I had no idea how to “slay” (deal with appropriately).
First: There was no goddamn way we were getting into Penn & Teller. The line to the theater stretched, legitimately, as far I could see, and those were people waiting for the 4 p.m. show; the 2 p.m. was already happening. I jumped as high as I could to see over the crowd and glimpsed what I assumed was either Penn or Teller (I don’t know what they look like), but upon reviewing the photos I took it appears what I saw was, in fact, a tree.
Second: The day had gotten ungodly hot. Beneath my cloak, I was as sticky as I assume people who go to raves are. My compatriots, even my sister, had grown quiet. In a moment of contemplation, I realized that the elven pep in my step I’d had earlier had given way to, uh, elf sadness. The MRF, in keeping with the traditions of renaissance faires and the actual Renaissance period, does not have any easily accessible air-conditioned buildings, and having a cold drink would possibly lead to me having to pee in the Hell Toilet again, which I wanted to avoid at all costs.
That left Olivia’s unfulfilled desire for a fan, which had only grown more urgent as the day had grown hotter and it had become increasingly clear that none of these merchants would have tasteful, Crate & Barrel-ish taper candles on offer. After asking a handful of employees where to buy one, she finally got an answer: There was a store called *deep elvish sigh* Junque In Thy Trunk, “sort of by the Mermaid Cove,” where you could get a fan.
And thus began our long trudge. Considering the map’s unreliability, Olivia proposed (correctly, I think) that the safest way to get to the Mermaid Cove without getting lost would be to follow the park’s perimeter counterclockwise instead of cutting across the grounds. And so we walked, and walked, and walked. My notes tell me this only took 45 minutes, and yet in my mind it takes up eons. The mud had hardened to a more horse poop-like texture, which only made walking more treacherous since this increased the grip it could exert on your shoes. The stores we occasionally ducked into to hide from the sun were grimmer by the minute. When a shop called Pens & Things turned out to be, somehow, a right-wing joint featuring both “spiritual pens” and pencils made out of bullets, it was hard to keep myself from letting out a mad cackle.
In those moments, I hated the fair. I hated its useless map and its muddy paths and its stupid pre-Enlightenment attitude and more than anything the fact that everyone around me seemed to be having such a good time. I'd managed to eke some joy out of the day earlier, sure. But once again, the MRF had broken me.
Rating: 1 out of 5 Huzzahs.
Quest the Last: A Dream of Air Conditioning
…or maybe I was just suffering from heat exhaustion?
We got, finally, to Junque In Thy Trunk (it pains me as much to type that as it does for you to read it) and made a group decision: It was not worth paying what would work out to be $100 for four paper fans (which, yes, turned out to be most of what Junk in Thy Trunk sold) when we were all completely wiped already. We would find some way to cool down and then head home. Thankfully, we were right next door to the Castle Creamery, which had thoroughly decent ice cream and a shady area nearby in which to eat it.
We said very little as we stood there, brave adventurers who deserved ice cream more than anyone ever has before or will ever again. Yea, the MRF had tested us, but we would leave it with our tired heads held high, weary victors every one.
The trudge back up and down Shit Gully to get to the parking lot was even worse with the afternoon sun and the newly super-thick mud, but by god, was it ever worth it once we found Mr. Sensible and turned the AC down to 60 degrees. Slowly, I felt my soul return to my corporeal form. I took off the elf ears and cloak, leaving me looking still kinda ren-faire-ish but more in a Tara from Buffy way at least.
As my friends chattered about the white dude samurai and the stupid fucking Cybertruck we’d seen in the parking lot, I took a moment to reflect on the day. Had I done what I’d set out to do? Had I given the MRF a fair chance to win my heart? Well, in the past six hours, I thought, I had shot a bow many times. I had interpreted the cryptic directions of mysterious strangers with sagacity and patience. Above all else, I had yearned for my people’s orderly home (Minneapolis) as I bravely undertook a great quest across a land I found strange and chaotic.
I may not have completely obliterated my hater’s spirit. I may even have grown more hateful toward the MRF in some new and memorable ways.
But by God—I had Become Elf.
