Reading Notes: Robin Hood A

Reading Notes: Robin Hood

This week for the British and Celtic Units I chose to read the Robin Hood section. I was torn between choosing Alice in Wonderland and Robin Hood, but since I plan to read the full Alice in Wonderland Novel I went with Robin Hood. In the reading I found a few stories that I would be interested in retelling, including Progress to Nottingham.

Progress to Nottingham

In the story Progress to Nottingham Robin is only 15 years old and is already skilled with a bow and arrow. The main idea of the story is that some foresters do not believe that Robin Hood could possibly be that skilled with a bow and arrow since he is so young and so they challenge him to shoot in the King's shooting competition. Robin Hood made a wager with the men and won, but when they did not pay up he shot them all. I was definitely surprised to see him more of a villain type rather than the steal from the rich to give to the poor image that he has been portrayed as. The story was also different because it was written in the form of a ballad in old English, which honestly made it a bit more difficult to read. If I were to retell the story I feel like I could go two different directions. On one hand, I could change the story so that instead of Robin Hood killing all of the men they could have paid up and he could have given the money to the poor. On the other hand, I could fully embrace the more villainous Robin Hood and retell this version of the story out of the ballad form.  I think if I were to keep the villainous version of Robin Hood I could go into more detail of why he was wondering the forest alone at fifteen years old.

(Young Robin, credit to Mike Peel)

Bibliography

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads,Francis James Child. (1882-1898) link