Robin Hood

By -
Robin Hood: Green Lord of the Wildwood, by John Matthews

A little while ago, I had to buy a 'history of Robin Hood' book for the college library to replace the one that had been lost.  It's a little tricky to purchase something like that, because you know the majority of what's out there is going to be...kind of woo-ey.  This looked like the best of the bunch.  And then one day I was in the mood to read about Robin Hood, so I brought it home for the quarantine and gave it a try.  I do think it's a little bit woo-ey, but mostly not -- and although he walks right on the border, usually when he crosses over and quotes something really out there, he points out that it's wild speculation and seems unlikely.  I'm not entirely sure how seriously to take it, but it was pretty interesting.

I was expecting more of a literary/dramatic history of Robin Hood, and what I actually got bore a startling resemblance to The Golden Bough.  Matthews figures Robin Hood is kind of an amalgam of people and legend; probably more than one outlaw took on the name Robin Hood because it was known, but the figure of Robin also gets mixed up and in with all kinds of other things like Jack-in-the-Green, the Green Man, trickster figures, and it all goes back to that favorite theme -- folk magic and rituals around the forces of nature.  He thinks of Robin as an aspect of unbridled, wild Nature with a capital N and the birth of spring.

So we go through a whole bunch of examples of practices and legends, mostly connected with May festivals, which (I didn't know) were often called Robin Hood games.  Morris dances* and the traditional characters connected with them, fertility folk practices of various kinds, stories about mummers and flower brides and so on.

And it ends up with Robin Hood and Maid Marian being King and Queen of the May, connected to much older things behind that.  Some of it I found persuasive, some of it not so much.

The text itself is only a couple of hundred pages; the second half of the book consists of a tremendous number of Robin Hood ballads, arranged as chronologically as possible.

It was very interesting.  I had fun, even if I didn't buy everything he was selling.

Reading this book put me in the mood to watch Robin Hood, or maybe The Court Jester, which is a favorite of mine.  Of course, if you live around these parts, there's only one Robin Hood movie -- the one with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.  A lot of the Sherwood Forest bits were filmed here in our park, and the Merry Men hang out in the Hooker Oak -- a massive tree which has been gone for 40 years, but remains prominent in city history and affection.



-----------------------------------------------------
*At some point along this path I looked up the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, which is a Morris dance where they wear these antlers.  It's been going continuously for centuries, and the 'horns' are actually reindeer antlers -- which have been carbon-dated to about a thousand years ago.  So that blew my mind.




Comments

  1. Michelle AnnJune 4, 2020 at 10:00 AM

    I do get concerned when some historians say that people who were remembered by oral tradition did not exist because there are no surviving contemporary written records of them. Most people could not read or write in dark age and early medieval Britain, and history was passed down verbally. What little writing there was, was generally reserved for religious or legal documents, not current affairs.

    This has been said about Robin Hood, Lady Godiva and King Arthur, and I'm sure others, who were all first mentioned when history started getting written down years after they were said to have lived. A recent TV programme stated that from lawless Dark Age Britain, (400 to 600 AD), only a few scraps of parchment survive, including the names of only ten people in all those 200 years, but because King Arthur was not one of them, he obviously did not exist!

    We cannot check verbal history, and it may have been embellished over time, but to categorically state that these people were myths or composites is making as big an assumption as saying they definitely existed. All we can say honestly is that we cannot prove they existed.

    Incidentally, there is one piece of contemporary written evidence that Robin Hood may be real, as a court record of that time states a fugitive of that name and period had his goods seized. See https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Robin-Hood-Robin-Longstride

    ReplyDelete
  2. Joy Weese MollJune 10, 2020 at 12:47 PM

    This sounds fascinating. I did a little research on Robin Hood the last time I saw the Errol Flynn/Olivia de Haviland movie, but didn't come across all of these connections. Now, I'm picturing Olivia and Errol as the May Queen and King. That works!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more