Cpk.robin Hood - Blog Posts
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.
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Knut ♤ He/Him ♤ 2005
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Illustrations by Greg Hildebrandt for children's retelling of Robin Hood by J. Walker McSpadden