The legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood are the only two literary legacies of the Middle Ages still strongly present in popular culture. Stephen Lawhead wrote his version of the Arthurian story some years ago, very creditably and, for this reviewer, very enjoyably. Hood is the first volume of a projected "King Raven" trilogy, which does not promise so well.

It is true that the Robin Hood cycle, though so often reproduced by moviemakers, producers of tv series, and children's authors, has long presented the most serious problems of adaptation. To start with, there is no clear story of Robin Hood, in the sense of a connected sequence of events like the conception of Mordred, the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere, the vengeance of Sir Gawain, the Morte Arthur itself. Instead, what we have is a powerful scenario: outlaws, greenwood, merry men, longbows, inept officers of justice like the Sheriff of Nottingham. Merry Men are captured and rescued, the rich are robbed to feed the poor, traps are set and escaped from, in the end the king turns up and forgives everyone. But there's not much story in it, and there's no canonical version like Malory's Arthur.

Another problem (now significantly so unwelcome as to be all but forgotten) is that while the earliest literary versions we have may be weak on narrative, they are remarkably clear about their social positioning. The figure of the man in the greenwood, Robin Hood, or Robin 'Ood, or (T.H. White's idea) Robin Wood, may go back centuries into the time of myth, but Robin as we have him in the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages is a representative of the yeomanry. His weapons are the cheap ones of the rural peasantry, bow and quarterstaff. Sometimes he has a sword, but he never wears armor and does not ride to battle. His social prejudices are those of the rural peasantry as well—and this is where the embarrassment starts for the modern rewriter. Medieval Robin has nothing against the aristocracy at all, indeed he likes them, and is ready to assist them, as long as they are real aristocrats (i.e., men who have inherited their rank from old time), and as long as they are prepared to be "good fellows." His enemies and victims are tax-collectors, officers of the central government, the upper ranks of the clergy, especially abbots of well-endowed monasteries, and in particular lawyers: the literate classes, in other words. Modern writers, perhaps uneasily aware that they themselves would get very short shrift from a modern Robin, find this hard to sympathize with, while Marxist and sub-Marxist academics feel that Robin is much too like the surly, independent, white male Republican or Conservative citizens who voted in Presidents Bush, Bush, and Reagan, and Mrs. Thatcher too.

The medieval ballads indeed seem very clearly to spring from a particular time, the time of Edward, "our comely king," as they loyally call him. Which Edward? Surely Robin's archery gives the answer. It is Edward III (d. 1376), whose smashing,  unexpected, and successive victories over Scots, French, and Spanish relied as heavily on the unique skills of the English bow-using yeomanry as they did on the more familiar ones of the English armored aristocracy—with whom the yeomen (as in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales portraits) formed both a social unit and a weapon-system. That cohesion did not last long, dissolved by cannon and handguns, and the yeomanry's moment in the sun soon passed, to be remembered only in the titles of some British military units, recruited for generations from the upper ranks of the rural peasantry, officered by the rural gentry, and, like their redneck successors, always ready for an excuse to break the heads of the urban proletariat whom they despised.

    All clear enough, but a deep embarrassment to even 19th-century liberals, and with little appeal to modern urban consumers of fiction. And then there is the basic contradiction: Robin hates all officers of the crown, but is totally loyal to the king. Again, this is perfectly familiar in certain circles even now, where the "support our troops" bumper sticker may well co-exist with utter hostility to all agents of the government, and especially the irs. But it's not a nice scenario. Accordingly, Walter Scott replaced it. In his version, in Ivanhoe (1819), Robin is an outlaw during an interregnum, during that period when King Richard Lionheart was absent on crusade or in prison, and England was run by his wicked brother John. Rebellion against the government was then compatible with loyalty to the Crown, and moreover—in Scott's version—the whole matter was basically ethnic. The rulers were Normans, the oppressed were Saxons, Robin was a Saxon guerrilla, the future was a coming together of the races as represented by the Saxon-descended but culturally Norman Ivanhoe. To this more modern versions have added the post-medieval notion that Robin must be an aristocrat himself—though of course a very democratic aristocrat, like Kevin Costner rapping out "Don't call me 'Sire'!"

Stephen Lawhead's Hood is now advertised as an entirely new representation, the real Robin at last, rescued from the blurs of antiquity, but it isn't. It's Walter Scott again, with a further ethnic shift. Lawhead has decided that Robin was not originally English, but Welsh—though he prefers the term "British," "Welsh" being an ignorant Saxonism. The Welsh invented the longbow. The Welsh resisted the Normans for centuries, where the Saxons caved in. The Welsh had impenetrable forests, where England had been turned into pasture and garden. It all fits together! And it does, as long as one stays within the realms of comic-book history, as also comic-book geography, botany, sociology, and economics.

Lawhead in fact curiously repeats even Walter Scott's errors, though these were seen and complained about almost two hundred years ago. He sets his story in the reign of William Rufus (d. 1100). On p. 63, however, a fat cleric turns up, "one of the order of begging brothers whom the Ffreinc called Frères and the English called Friars. They were all but unknown among the Cymry." Not just the Cymry, since the Franciscans were not founded till at earliest 1209 and the Dominicans a few years later. But Friar Tuck is in the traditional scenario, so Lawhead has to have him. Lawhead, however, seems completely vague about the medieval church. One of his characters is the head of a monastery, Bishop Asaph. The Celtic church had its peculiarities, but a bishop heads a diocese, not a monastery, the latter controlled by an abbot. To even matters up, later a wicked Norman abbot comes on the scene—an abbot without even a tenuous connection to any monastery. On p. 152 a Norman earl imagines a future scene when civilization shall have been established, churches, "perhaps a monastery or two as well. Maybe, in time, an abbey." What does Lawhead think an abbey is, a cathedral? All this might not matter, if it did not have so much to do with money. As Robin Hood could have told him, monks, unlike friars, depended on large endowments of land, were notoriously rich and notoriously grasping landlords: that's why he targets them.

The same sort of Never-Never Land vagueness extends to the greenwood, with its man-high tangles of thorny bilberry, or so we are told: British bilberries are thornless and rarely grow past your knee. The pseudo-archaic dialect of some of the speakers creaks as well, with "thou" forms inserted or dropped at random. There is one strange scene where Normans are greeted by British peasants talking Latin. You'd think that would make anyone smell a rat, but they don't. And the vagueness becomes serious when it comes to military matters. The Normans in Lawhead's version are the obliging baddies of Hollywood, cruel, yes, but effete, guileless, inept, standing round like dummies to be shot down by the mighty longbow. If one remembers King Harold with the arrow in his eye, it becomes clear that missile weapons were part of the Norman weapon-system too, whether breast-bows, longbows, or crossbows; and one cannot help thinking that if the Normans were as poor soldiers as all that, it's surprising that they won. And if the Welsh (or British) are the heroic warriors of Lawhead's afterword, how did they manage to lose most of the island?

To be brief, Lawhead's story also follows the Hollywood pattern. Bran son of Brychan, the Robin-figure, is not a truculent yokel but a prince. His taking to the greenwood is motivated by the standard atrocity-scene, the killing of his father by overwhelming numbers of Normans. Wounding—lucky escape—nursing back to health by a witchery woman—recruiting of the band, Little John, Friar Tuck, what looks like Will Scarlett, with Maid Marian (Mérian) around but not yet integrated into the plot—and then the guerrilla campaign founded on psychological warfare: it's the plot of Dune, without the technology. Lawhead has also grafted in a good deal of Celtic mythological reference, with bits of the Mabinogion repeated by Angharad the witch, and Bran clearly due to be identified in some future volume of the "King Raven" trilogy with Bran the Blessed.

It's a pity to see a story so evidently essentialist—I spare Lawhead the word "racist" because it's clearly unthinking. The British are good (all of them), the Normans are evil (all of them), the Saxons somewhere in between but not very interesting. People brought up on plotlines like that find it hard to cope with real-world politics, as we see so often.

Tom Shippey is Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University. He is the author of The Road to Middle-earth (Houghton Mifflin) and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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