Medievalism, music, and agency in The Wicker Man (1973)

Summerisle, the Scottish setting for The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973), is a place characterised by contradiction and ambiguity. The film’s narrative focuses on a community whose beliefs are neo-medieval, allegedly revived in the Victorian period by the grandfather of their current feudal lord. The murderous climax, as the policeman visitor is burned inside the wooden effigy as part of a Mayday rite, is prefigured by a diverse musical score that draws inventively on popular, folk, fake, and medieval song traditions; the story concludes with a performance of the thirteenth-century English rota ‘Sumer is icumen in’.