A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth and Folk Tales in Fiction - U Is For Under The Greenwood Tree(Robin Hood)

 Okay, I’m cheating slightly, but “Under The Greenwood Tree”is from the Shakespeare play As You Like It (In fact, it’s the title I gave my Robin Of Sherwood fanzine), but also from the opening lines of the poem Robin Hood And The Monk. It opens with a pretty description of the spring including how nice it is to hang around “under the greenwood tree”, then goes on to be one of the nastier, more violent of the Robin Hood tales.

So, today, I will be talking about the folk hero Robin Hood and where he fits into fiction. 

Just for the record, Maid Marion didn’t turn up until the May Games of the 15th century, just as Sir Lancelot was late into Arthurian fiction. Nobody seems to worry about it these days. She has become a part of the legend.

There are a number of mediaeval poems about him, some of which   later made their way into books and films. For example, the 1950s TV series The Adventures Of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene, had an episode called “The Knight Who Came To Dinner.” This story is based on the mediaeval poem A Geste Of Robyn Hode. In both poem and TV show, Robin is like King Arthur in deciding he won’t eat a feast until something interesting has happened. So he sends a couple of his Merries out to look. They encounter a knight(played in the TV series by Ian Hunter, who was Richard the Lionheart in the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie) and take him back to camp. He hasn’t the money to pay the traditional half of his purse towards the meal. When they find out why - he owes money to the church and will lose his lands - the outlaws offer to help him. Which they do. 

Mediaeval Robin is not a fan of the church, though he does devoutly worship Our Lady. The TV series had a pretty left wing attitude to rich lords and abbeys. There was a reason for that: the people who wrote and produced the show were Americans who had fled the McCarthy witch hunts for England . But not so different from the original. As I recall, the Sheriff of Nottingham was involved in trying to prevent the knight, Sir Richard of the Lea, from paying his debt.

There are a number of children’s books which feature Robin Hood. 

Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager is set in the 1940s. A group of children, siblings and cousins, are taken to see the film of Ivanhoe. After it, they go home and play with some toys - a castle with knights and ladies - and decide that the figures are characters from Ivanhoe. That night, with the help of magic, the characters come to life as the characters from Ivanhoe, including Robin Hood and his band. It’s very funny, because the kids fiddle with the castle and knights during the day, which affects what they find when they return to the world of Ivanhoe that night, including Ivanhoe having a flying saucer(an actual saucer). Hilarious stuff!

The whole series is available on Apple Books, including a radio play of Half Magic, a novel about the adventures of these children’s parents.

Another children’s book with Robin Hood in it is Geoffrey Trease’s Bows Against The Barons. This is a story of Robin’s last great adventure, when he is an old man, seen from the viewpoint of a boy who joins his band. It’s a left wing retelling of the tale, in which Robin tells his followers that it shouldn’t be about Saxon against Norman but about poor against rich. He leads a rebellion against the rich. I have an early paperback of the novel and it’s illustrated but missing a picture with a huge crowd of peasants waving their tools, including a cheekily drawn crossed hammer and sickle. This is Trease’s first novel but he wrote a lot of wonderful historical novels for children, including Cue for Treason, set in the Elizabethan era, with a girl disguised as a boy who gets into Shakespeare’s company. (Shakespeare picks up she is a girl, but doesn’t give her away). I have the audiobook of that, read by Clive Mantle(Little John in Robin of Sherwood). Bows Against The Barons is, alas, well and truly out of print, but there are a fair few copies available on ABEBooks. 

 In Lady Of The Forest by Jennifer Roberson, Robin is shown as a sort of Vietnam veteran with PTSD, after the Crusades. I read this years ago, but gave away my copy. It’s out of print, but you can get the audiobook on both Apple Books and Amazon. The Apple Book is cheaper.

Robin McKinley’s Outlaws Of Sherwood is one of the gentler retellings of the legend. There are women in his band, apart from Marion, something I don’t think we saw again until the BBC Robin Hood series, in which the Merries include a Saracen woman  called Djaq. She is a strong, gutsy lady who refuses to do the cooking and ends up having to rescue her team mates in one episode. She eventually marries Will Scarlet and they settle in the Holy Land(she proposes). 

Outlaws Of Sherwood is available in print on Amazon, Kindle and audiobook. In fact, if you buy it in Kindle you can also buy the audiobook cheaply.

Parke Godwin wrote two Robin Hood books, Sherwood and Robin And The King. It’s amazing how this American writer could write such wonderful novels about British heroes.  His Robin lives in the time of William the Conqueror. No reason why not - it was, as I recall, Sir Walter Scott who gave us the version of Robin in the time of Richard the Lionheart. 

Robin, a country gentleman, loses his lands when the Normans invade - which did happen to Saxon landowners. William had a lot of followers who were younger sons or bastards(like William himself); he had to give them lands as rewards for their help, after all. Robin is outlawed when trying to help one of his tenants. However, his lands and tenants are well looked after by, would you believe, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Ralf FitzGerald, who is a decent man in this duology. The two meet in the dungeons of the Earl of Huntingdon, whom Robin refuses to support in his planned rebellion because it will lead to civil war. He now supports King William. Ralf marries Robin’s cousin Judith, who is a lot higher in the aristocracy than Robin. The two men become friends.

Robin And The King, the sequel, is rather too sad for me, but it’s implied that it’s Robin who creates an early version of Magna Carta.

Again, out of print, but you can get it. Amazon has some copies and it’s worth checking the second-hand site ABEBooks.

There are so many Robin Hood books, not possible to talk about them all here, so just one more.

You probably know about the villainous Guy of Gisburne if you are at all familiar with the legend. In the poems he is a mercenary who wears a horse skin coat. 

In Toby Venables’ Hunter Of Sherwood books, he is the good guy and Robin, who used to be his friend when they were serving together as mercenaries, is the villain - and, in fact, responsible for that horse skin coat, having killed Guy’s war horse. Guy worked as a mercenary to pay the bills, having nothing left after King Richard took his lands to raise money for his Crusade. 

When we meet him, Guy is working on some missions for King John, as a sort of cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond, something the author admitted. King John is basically M, while Guy has his own Q, a Welshman, who creates gadgets for him to use. The series is great fun and I’m pleased to say you can buy it in print or ebook. Two of the three books of the trilogy are available as an omnibus in Kindle or Apple Books. 

Put this one on your TBR pile!