unfortunately, “it’s complicated” continues to be the correct answer to most questions worth asking. yeah I’m annoyed about it too
me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU
my grandfather for me. he's the gentlest man i've ever known. (detail from 'The thankful poor' c. 1894 by Henry Ossawa Tanner)
"The problem with trying to be historically accurate, is that history doesn't care"
So much of the time we think of historical cultures as being very uniform, but people have always been weird, and our expectations of past behaviour don't always match the reality!
my astronomy professor just told us that whenever he sees the sun rise he says “Hello again, old friend”
Any recommendations on where to start for someome who wants to know about Robin Hood?
Sure thing!
The thing about Robin Hood is that, because what we have are later written recordings and remixes of an older oral tradition, the sources are somewhat spread out between multiple texts. So what you want is a good collection of different sources, and preferably one that's a modern translation with regularized spelling (unless you like struggling with Middle English).
Waltz' The Gest of Robyn Hode: A Critical and Textual Commentary is a good place to start, because it not only has a modern translation of the Geste (the earliest written text of Robin Hood), but also a wealth of context and analysis.
Knight and Ohlgren's Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales also has a good selection of the Robin Hood ballads that introduced important characters like Guy of Gisborne, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, and so forth to the narrative, as well as some of the 16th and 17th century Robin Hood plays that were responsible for the whole shift from the yeoman Robin Hood to the noble Robin (or Robert).
I can also recommend Ritson's Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant Relative to That Celebrated English Outlaw, which was the first scholarly attempt to collect and collate and make sense of the disparate historical texts and attempt to fit them into a coherent narrative.
Finally, you should probably read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, which is the work of meta-fanfic that made Victorian medievalism the massive fandom that it was.
naw. i think the monkey part of my brain just thinks that trees are Safe. besides god would have needed to climb up the tree if he wanted to smite me, which would’ve opened him up to getting kicked in the head. if the romans could kill him for three days with t-posing im pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to make it up my tree, which would’ve turned the whole thing into a siege, and i can say right now there’s a 0% chance of god being able to out-wait an autistic kid in a tree. he’s gonna get called away on some godly task in an thirty minutes tops but that kid has nowhere to go until lunch. easy win.
I can't debate this logic it's pretty sound
Knut ♤ He/Him ♤ 2005
Profile picture is mine and header is creative commons
i wonder if jesus searched for judas when he came back to life. i wonder if jesus cried when he found out judas was gone. i wonder how bitter he felt that the man he loved was so racked with guilt for what he’d done he couldn’t live with himself.
even though it had always been god’s plan for judas to commit the betrayal.
You know, museums lend exhibits to each other all the time so it's not like the British museum would be completely without exhibits from other cultures if they returned the stuff people are asking for. Unless they've made so many enemies that nobody wants to lend them exhibits I guess.