Nicholas Chase’s Locksley, published in 1983, was one of the first books to reclaim Robin Hood as a character for adult historical fiction. Taking a format that has often been used in historical novels (the central character, as an old man or woman, sits down to write his memoirs), the author produced a clever narrative that intertwines the legend with the real history of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Nicholas Chase, actually a pseudonym for two brothers, Christopher and Anthony Hyde, chose the most common period in which to set the story and its hero, despite the new adventures in which he was involved, was recognisably the familiar Robin of myth and legend. Other writers have made more radical changes to the basic material. Parke Godwin’s 1991 novel Sherwood overturns tradition by setting the story not in the era of Good King Richard and Bad King John but in the years immediately following the Norman Conquest. Robin in this version is Edward of Denby, a Saxon thane forced from his land in the wake of William the Conqueror’s invasion, who takes refuge in Sherwood Forest and becomes known as ‘Robin Hood’. Godwin, who had previously written a trilogy of novels re-interpreting the Arthurian legends in the context of the Roman departure from Britain, had a certain historical logic on his side in that the bitter confrontation between Saxon and Norman, so long a central part of the Robin Hood story, makes more sense in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest than it does in the late twelfth century. Sherwood was followed two years later by a sequel entitled Robin and the King.
Like Parke Godwin, Stephen Lawhead sets his ‘King Raven’ trilogy (Hood, Scarlet, Tuck) in the years immediately after the Norman Conquest but he transfers the stories to the border region between Wales and England. Lawhead’s previous work included the ‘Pendragon Cycle’, a sequence of novels re-telling the Arthurian legends in a firmly Celtic context, but the attempt to do something similar for Robin Hood (his Hood figure is a Welsh princeling named Bran ap Brychan) can sometimes seem wilfully perverse. Robin is fundamentally an English figure in a way that Arthur need not necessarily be and it is very difficult to recast him as Celtic. Michael Cadnum’s In a Dark Wood, published in 1998, looks at the legend through the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Marketed as a ‘young adult’ novel, this is a narrative that succeeds rather well in turning the traditional story on its head and allowing readers to sympathise with the Sheriff and his teenage squire rather than any of the outlaws they must face. Forbidden Forest, published four years later, is by the same author and returns to the legend. Once again Cadnum uses not Robin but another character (this time Little John) as the focus for his story.
With the noticeable increase in popularity of historical crime fiction over the past three decades, it was inevitable that so familiar a character as Robin Hood would be hijacked for use in mystery novels. The Assassin in the Greenwood by PC Doherty has the author’s recurring character Hugh Corbett investigating the murders of royal tax collectors and a sheriff in Nottingham. Corbett is soon on the track of Robin of Locksley, an outlaw previously pardoned by the king who has returned to his old haunts in Sherwood Forest. Interestingly, Doherty, a medieval historian by training, chooses to set his Robin Hood story in the reign of Edward I rather than the time of Richard the Lionheart and adds an afterword to it in which he argues vigorously that this is the correct chronology for the outlaw. Clayton Emery is an American author who has been drawn repeatedly to the outlaw legend over the course of his writing career. Since the late 1980s he has published new ‘Tales of Robin Hood’, many of which involve the outlaw hero in Robin of Sherwood-style encounters with magic and sorcery, but his most original contributions to the modern development of the character are probably the stories published in magazines in the States in which Robin and Marian act as detectives. In a typical example like ‘Dowsing the Demon’, which first appeared in ‘Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’ in November 1994, Robin and Marian are visiting Lincoln to buy cloth to make new outfits for the Merry Men when they are drawn into the furore surrounding a double murder in the town.
Even science fiction, fantasy and horror, unlikely genres to accommodate a medieval outlaw, have their examples of Robin Hood fiction. Esther Friesner’s The Sherwood Game, for instance, is a novel in which Robin is a character in a computer game created by a nerdish programmer named Carl Sherwood. During the course of Friesner’s largely predictable but occasionally entertaining narrative, Robin escapes from the game and joins Carl in the real world. As noted above, some of Clayton Emery’s Robin Hood stories contain elements of fantasy and Emery was also one of the contributors to a 1991 American anthology entitled The Fantastic Adventures of Robin Hood which despatched Robin into space and plunged him into other SF and horror narratives. The recent Robin Hood vs the Plague Undead is a book for older children which cheerfully mashes up different genres into an oddly satisfying brew and tells the story of what happens when Robin has to battle against the zombies that Prince John has recruited to fight for his claim to the throne.
Feminist versions of Robin have provided some of the most interesting and original takes on the character in recent decades. Of course, Robin Hood fiction has not been an exclusively male preserve since at least the turn of the twentieth century. The Boy Foresters by the appropriately named Anne Bowman, a novel which focuses on the adventures of three orphaned children who are taken in by Robin’s outlaw band, was published in 1905 and, as we have seen, many of the children’s versions of the stories that appeared between the 1920s and the 1950s were written by women. In the last thirty years, female writers of all kinds have continued to find inspiration in Robin Hood in books aimed at children. Catherine Storr, author of the classic Marianne Dreams, provided the text for a picture book on Robin in 1984. Rowan Hood, by the prolific American author Nancy Springer, is the first of a series of books published in the last decade which feature a young girl, the unacknowledged daughter of the outlaw, who takes to Sherwood with her own gang to rival that of her father.
For some women writers of breathless historical romance, life in Sherwood has also had its attractions. Introduce a beautiful young woman into the midst of all those merry men and heaving bosoms and panting passion are soon in evidence. In Diane Carey’s Under the Wild Moon, for example, the heroine arrives in the greenwood to join Robin’s band. Little time passes before she is getting intimately acquainted with Will Scarlet (‘she moaned with pleasure as his gentle touch made her forget that he was one of Robin Hood’s bandits’) and re-introducing him to delights that have long been absent from his outlaw life. Other novels, such as Gayle Feyrer’s The Thief’s Mistress, made the most of the opportunities offered by a love triangle between Marian, Robin and Sir Guy of Gisbourne.
However, it was those novels which tried to reinvent the legend from a feminist perspective that provided it with a genuinely new direction in which to travel. Robin McKinley’s The Outlaws of Sherwood was published in 1988. In some ways, this seems like a fairly straightforward re-telling of the stories and it includes familiar elements (helping a knight named Sir Richard of the Lea to repay an unfairly arranged loan, combating a ruthless mercenary named Guy of Gisbourne) which go back as far as the old ballads. Most editions of the book carry a jacket illustration of Robin in traditional greenwood pose, dressed in Lincoln green and carrying his bow. And yet the characterisation of the outlaw is far from traditional. This is Robin as New Man, emotional and aware of the needs of others. No longer the brilliant archer of a thousand versions of the story, this Robin is a poor shot with the bow (he was outlawed in the first place because he accidentally killed a man with it when he merely intended to wound him) who realises that he stands no chance of winning the golden arrow in the Sheriff’s archery contest. McKinley’s Robin is an ordinary man transformed into hero almost by accident. The most forceful and memorable character in her book is undoubtedly Marian. A better archer than Robin, she bears no resemblance at all to the anaemic Marian, who appears in so many twentieth-century tellings of the tales, loitering in the background of the action and awaiting a word
or smile from her paragon of a lover.
Jennifer Roberson’s Lady of the Forest, which appeared five years after The Outlaws of Sherwood, has sometimes been packaged by its publishers to look very much like the kind of novel in which the Nottinghamshire earth will regularly move – on one dust jacket a hunk with flowing blond hair and shirt open to the waist is clutching a medieval maiden in an amorous embrace – but it is actually a more intriguing book than the cover designers suggest.
It is an attempt to do for the Robin Hood story what Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon had done for the Arthurian legends – to give it a new relevance for a modern female readership – and, in most editions, it carries a recommendation from Bradley herself. Again Marian is the strongest character in the novel. Robin, in Roberson’s book, has returned from the Crusades a damaged and haunted man and it is Marian who has the resources to support him as he struggles to turn himself into the hero we all know. Roberson returned to the legend half-a-dozen years later with Lady of Sherwood, set in the period just after the death of Richard the Lionheart when Prince John’s accession to the throne changes the fortunes of the outlaw leader and his lover.
McKinley and Roberson are by no means the only women writers of the last few decades to turn their attention to the intertwined stories of Robin and Marian. In Elsa Watson’s Maid Marian (2004), the heroine is a teenage widow, her fate in the hands of the king’s mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, who flees to the forest to escape an arranged marriage and there begins to fall for the greenwood hero. Once again, the story revisits many of the familiar elements of the legend but they are all seen through the eyes of Marian who is very definitely the focus of the novel. Theresa Tomlinson published The Forestwife in 1993. Marketed to a young adult readership, it was, in many ways, the most radical of all the feminist reinterpretations of the Robin and Marian story. In Tomlinson’s book, Marian is Mary de Holt, a fifteen-year-old girl who finds her destiny in Barnsdale when she inherits the role of forestwife, or herbalist and healer, from the old woman who takes her in. Adopting the name of Marian, she becomes the centre of a female community in counterpoint to Robin’s band of men. She becomes the Green Lady of the Woods in the same way as Robin has so often been seen as the Green Man. She and Robin are close but there is no question of her relinquishing the position of forestwife to become no more than an outlaw’s submissive helpmeet. This is Marian as career woman whose life has a significance and a purpose that are not dependent on her relationship to Robin. Tomlinson has gone on to publish two more volumes – Child of the May and The Path of the She Wolf – which further follow the characters from The Forestwife.
As women writers have explored ideas of a feminist Maid Marian and reinvented Robin as a ‘New Man’, what have male writers been making of the story in recent years? One response has been to emphasise the brutality of the era in which it is set. In some ways, this is a return to the Robin of the ballads. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the world revealed in a work like ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, with its casual violence and murder, is far from the familiar image of greenwood chivalry we all recognise. Yet there is also a new insistence in recent fiction that Sherwood must have been a place where life was all too likely to be nasty, brutish and short and that, to survive and thrive in it, the outlaw leader must have been a very different man from the exemplary hero we see in most versions of his story. A ruthless, anti-hero Robin is in evidence in recent novels as different as Angus Donald’s Outlaw and Adam Thorpe’s Hodd.
Donald’s blood-filled adventure novel, published in 2009, is narrated by Alan Dale, a teenage cutpurse in Nottingham, who joins Robin’s band and begins a slow transformation into warrior minstrel. Most of the other traditional characters are present in the story, although often in slightly altered form. Little John is a foul-mouthed giant with a taste for elaborately blasphemous curses (‘By God’s hairy bollocks!’) and sexual innuendo; Maid Marian is Marie-Anne, Countess of Locksley. Robin has a brother, Hugh, who has accompanied him to Sherwood and plays a central role in the plot of Outlaw. In providing Robin with an identity, Donald makes use of the long-established theory, first suggested in the nineteenth century, that the outlaw’s real name was Odo. Robert Odo, or Robin Hood, in Donald’s novel is a charismatic figure to whom narrator Alan is irresisistibly drawn but, for those brought up on kinder versions of the outlaw, his most distinctive characteristic is his capacity for cruelty and violence. He cuts out the tongue of an informer. He orders the limb-by-limb dismemberment of Sir John Peveril, a rival guerrilla leader who has trespassed on his territory. Friar Tuck tells Alan of an occasion when Robin cold-bloodedly initiated the slaughter of a group of priests. This is not the genial captain of the greenwood familiar from so many other tellings of the tales. Donald’s Robin is contemptuous of Christian beliefs and a man drawn to the old gods but, again, his paganism is not the faintly New Age mysticism that can be found in, say, the Robin of Sherwood TV series. This Robin is comfortable with violent ritual and one of the more memorable scenes in the book shows him playing the horned god Cernunnos in a frenzied ceremony that culminates in a human sacrifice. Angus Donald has since written sequels to Outlaw. Holy Warrior has Alan Dale following his master Robert Odo, now pardoned by Richard the Lionheart, to the Holy Land and fights in the Third Crusade. King’s Man records the outlaws’ involvement in the ransoming of Richard from his imprisonment.
Hodd, first published in the same year as Donald’s very different work, is a novel that plays sophisticated games with narrative and with ideas of history. (Hodd was not the first novel on the subject of Robin in which the author turned his back on conventional narrative. There is an interesting work from 1981 by Peter Vansittart entitled The Death of Robin Hood which moves backward and forward in time to show Robin as an archetypal figure in English history, his presence felt both in the medieval forest and in later social struggles such as the nineteenth-century Luddite riots.) The main body of Thorpe’s book purports to be a manuscript that was discovered in a French church by a soldier during the First World War. In peace time the soldier was a Cambridge-educated scholar of medieval history and, after the war was finished, he retired to a small English village and translated the manuscript from Latin. This translation, complete with scholarly footnotes, is what we are supposed to be reading. The text itself is the work of an ancient monk, more than ninety years old in 1305, the year he picks up his quill, who is looking back to his youthful experience of meeting a strange, unpredictable and intermittently violent outlaw named Robert Hodd. In fact, the narrator turns out to be the familiar character Much (although he is not quite Much the Miller’s Son as recorded in the ballads and later versions of the legend) and some of the events he relates echo the story told in ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’.
The Robin of Hodd is a man of violence in a violent world. When the narrator, as a teenage boy with a gift for playing the harp, is captured by the outlaws, one of his fellow prisoners is a ‘tregetour’ or conjuror who annoys the gang’s leader. The man is forced to climb a tree and is later pinned to one of its branches by an arrow through the hand. He dies a slow and painful death up in the forest canopy, the target of Hodd’s cruel mockery as he does so. Later in the book, the outlaw mutilates and cuts the noses off other captives. Yet this Robin is also a strange and remarkable man. He is a heretic who denies the existence of God and sin and believes that he himself has attained a state of perfection in which he can do no wrong. (The fictional scholar who is providing a commentary on the manuscript suggests that Hodd’s ideas are similar to those of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a heretical group in early-thirteenth century Europe, and the outlaw later admits to having travelled on the continent as a young man.) Despite his fear of Hodd and his horror at his ideas, the narrator also finds himself drawn to the charismatic outlaw and he becomes, for a time, one of his followers. As a musician, he even composes songs celebrating his exploits and, in an ironic twist that unsettles his old age, these songs become the means by which Hodd’s
reputation grows in the decades after the outlaw’s death.
In their different ways, the books by Angus Donald and Adam Thorpe both demonstrate how alive and how adaptable the Robin Hood legend remains. Writers of all kinds can continue to find inspiration in it. Outlaw shows that Robin can still form the basis for what is, beneath its gory modernity, a rather old-fashioned adventure story. Hodd, a work of great sophistication and linguistic ingenuity, and arguably the best novel about Robin to be published in the last fifty years, reveals the extent to which the old stories can be reworked by an imaginative and ambitious writer.
Robin on the Screen
Cinema
The very first Robin Hood films were produced before the First World War. In Britain, the pioneering director Percy Stow was responsible for over 200 shorts between 1904 and 1915, all made by the Clarendon Film Company which had studios in Croydon. One of these, made in 1908, was entitled Robin Hood and His Merry Men. Unfortunately the film does not survive and, since it was not common practice at the time to credit the actors in such movies, we have no way of knowing the name of the man who first played Robin Hood on screen. Judging by a brief summary in the trade press at the time, Stow followed what had become, by the early years of the twentieth century, the standard narrative for the outlaw by making him a dispossessed nobleman in search of justice. In the USA, Robin Hood of 1912 was a thirty-minute-long film, starring Robert Frazer, an actor who was still active more than three decades later, appearing in low-budget Westerns and cheap serials well into the 1940s. Made in Fort Lee, New Jersey, then one of the centres of American filmmaking, the movie still survives and has been given public screenings several times in the last few years. The plot focuses on Robin’s rivalry with both the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisbourne but the film is perhaps most notable for its curious use of special effects. Years before Disney animators decided that Robin was a fox and the Sheriff a wolf, the makers of this silent chose to illustrate a character’s nature by briefly fading to a shot of an animal when he or she first appeared. In 1912, another American company, the Thanhouser Film Corporation, produced Robin Hood and Maid Marian starring William Russell and Gerda Holmes in the title roles, which can probably claim to be the first film about the outlaw to be turned into a novel. The following year The Pluck Library, a British boys’ weekly which regularly advertised its ‘Stories from the Cinema’, published a seven-part adaptation of the movie written by William Murray Graydon, a prolific author of such adventure fiction.
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