by Kevin Carpenter

The English legend of Robin Hood, which originated in the Middle Ages, has undergone sometimes drastic changes in each new generation. The character of Robin Hood in particular has been rewritten several times. The dangerous highwayman of the earliest ballads became a disinherited nobleman, then an Anglo-Saxon patriot fighting against the Normans and in modern times a champion of social freedom and justice. The numerous Robin Hood books and films of recent years prove that the legend has lost none of its worldwide popularity and none of its enormous potential for representation and interpretation. This is also shown by an exhibition about Robin Hood, which was conceived by the author of this report and, following its presentation in Oldenburg (November/December 1995) and Berlin, will also be shown in England, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark and Poland.

To date, it has not been possible to prove that Robin Hood actually existed as a historical figure. However, more detailed information is available on the early form of the legend. It was widespread in England by 1261/62 at the latest, but the oldest surviving source texts - ballads and ballad fragments - only date from the period between 1450-1500. In these late medieval ballads, Robin Hood appeared as a bold robber who was constantly involved in bloody battles with the powerful, greedy abbots and bishops. At this time, he was by no means portrayed as a protector of the poor and oppressed (he had to wait several centuries for this role), nor as a disinherited nobleman (an invention of the Renaissance dramatist Anthony Munday). The original locations of the plot were not Sherwood and Nottingham, but Barnsdale and the surrounding area in the county of Yorkshire, as well as the difficult-to-monitor military and trade route that led through this area, which was considered extremely dangerous at the time, to the north of England and Scotland. The Sheriff of Nottingham was added later, possibly through the merging of two ballad cycles. Some of Robin's companions such as Little John, Will Scarlet and the miller's son Much were part of the legend from the beginning, but Robin's companion Marian, who comes from medieval French pastoral poetry, and the fun-loving brother Tuck were missing. These two characters first appeared as dancers in the English May plays before they were absorbed into the legend, slowly forming the contours of the Robin Hood legend, which was performed by ballad singers for centuries to entertain broad sections of the population.

The most important source text is certainly the Gest of Robyn Hood, a verse epic in 456 stanzas of 4 lines each. Three printed versions (around 1510-15, 1515 and 1560) are preserved in the Cambridge University Library and in the National Libraries in London and Edinburgh. Several ballads from the late Middle Ages have also survived, some in fragments. Robin Hood and the Monk in manuscript form from around 1450 is unfortunately incomplete. The oldest completely preserved ballad manuscript from the late Middle Ages, Robin Hood and the Potter, written around 1500, is also in the University Library in Cambridge. New adventures were added until about 1700, until the total corpus eventually comprised40 ballad titles. Exactly two hundred years ago, the folklore researcher Joseph Ritson compiled all the ballads and ballad fragments known to him and published them in a large-scale work, of which the Oldenburg University Library owns a copy of the first edition. Thereafter, further attempts were made to reproduce the old ballads in as correct and complete a form as possible. The eight-volume collection of English and Scottish folk ballads (1882-98), compiled by the Harvard folklorist Francis J. Child, which is still regarded as the standard edition, is particularly worth mentioning. Although Ritson's anthology of 1795 no longer meets today's editorial standards, together with his life story of Robin Hood, whom he stylised as a social rebel, it nevertheless shaped the image for several generations. Ritson had the strongest influence on the portrayal of the outlaw in a novel by Walter Scott that was popular throughout the world, extremely influential and made into several films.

In his novel Ivanhoe (dated 1820, but already published in 1819), Scott created a new role for RobinHood, who was actually a marginal character in the work. During the reign of King Richard the Lionheart, he now becomes the leader of the defeated Anglo-Saxons, the "real" Englishmen, who defend themselves against the Norman invaders. There is no historical basis for such a military-political scenario at the end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century. Like Robin's noble origins, however, his role as a patriotic resistance fighter is one of the most enduring features of the legend. Scott was not the only writer of the time to turn to the Middle Ages. The Romantic poets John Keats and J.R. Reynolds exchanged Robin Hood poems in their correspondence, in which they expressed their longing for a free life in a nostalgically romanticised Middle Ages. Artists also found inspiration in newly discovered medieval material. The Anglo-Irish painter Daniel Maclise took up a scene from Ivanhoe - the feast with an unknown crusader (King Richard) in Sherwood - and in his oil painting of 1839 emphasised not only the loyalty of the outlaws to their country and their king, but also the masculine camaraderie and closeness to nature of the outlaws in the deepest medieval English forest. At the beginning of the 19th century, poets and novelists had a lasting influence on the further development of the legend, especially on the stylisation of Robin as a national hero. So it is certainly no coincidence that the first Robin Hood children's books date from this period.

Isolated prose versions of the legend for children were probably published before the turn of the 19th century; although they are listed in bibliographies, they must almost certainly be considered lost. However, the flood did not come until after the Romantic period had made the folk tale acceptable and declared popular culture edifying. Robin Hood then became the hero of countless picture books and stories for the children of middle-class families. The popular youth literature of the 19th century, those cheap and poorly printed magazines, staple novels and booklet series so popular with working-class children, also spread the exciting adventures of the outlaw of Sherwood. The best known of these novelisations is The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) by the American Howard Pyle, a book that reached an astonishingly wide worldwide audience and is still available today in several editions in German. By and large, these children's books offered a largely uniform picture of the English Middle Ages, of a "Merry England", in which Robin Hood restored feudal happiness after his glorious victory over the conquerors.The thesis that the Middle Ages serve as a projection screen for the fears, tensions and dreams of the present in many new versions of the legend - and not only in children's books - can be substantiated by many texts and films. A well-known American film version will be discussed here as an example.

In 1938, the Robin Hood film of the 20th century was made: The Adventures of Robin Hood (German cinema title: Robin Hood - King of the Vagabonds), starring Errol Flynn. The effective contrast between cheerfulness, conviviality and humanity in the colourful Sherwood (the film was shot in Chico, California) on the one hand, and greed, hatred and tyranny in the expressionistically dark castle on the other, can be attributed not only to a change of director - after the exterior shots were completed, William Keighley was replaced by Michael Curtiz - but rather to an intended level of meaning in the film. This version of the film took up the animosity between Normans and Anglo-Saxons that had been handed down since Ivanhoe, but added a contemporary political accent, as the brutal Norman officers and soldiers clearly bear fascist traits, with Robin Hood himself becoming a cunning and determined resistance fighter against a (brown) regime that despised humanity. However, the film not only commented on European conditions at the end of the 1930s, but also contained a specifically American dimension. With his politically correct humanitarian impulses, Flynn's Robin Hood seems like a pioneer and trailblazer for the New Deal, the economic and social reform programme that President Roosevelt - a close friend of film producer Jack Warner - tried to push through. The Keighley/Curtiz film thus portrayed an image of the Middle Ages that had been traditional since Walter Scott, while at the same time making a strong reference to the national and international political situation at the time.

The state of research can be quickly summarised, for apart from numerous essays on the subject, there are only three important monographs on the Robin Hood legend. Rymes of Robyn Hood, a critical edition of the most important text, the Gest, as well as some of the ballads and texts from the later tradition, was published by the historians Barrie Dobson and John Taylor in 1976 (new edition 1989). In 1982, after twenty years of research, James C. Holt published his book RobinHood (new edition 1989; German translation 1991), in which the historian examined a whole quiver of Robin Hood candidates and also compiled evidence of the legend's origins in the north of England in the mid-13th century. In 1994, the literary scholar Stephen Knight provided the first well-founded overview of the overall development of the legend from a socio-cultural perspective with his Robin Hood. The legend's dazzling potential for representation and interpretation invites further academic research, for example on the following topics: the spread and development of the legend in comparison to other medieval legends; the depiction of the rebel in children's and youth literature; popular culture and differently weighted versions of the rebellion; the ennoblement of the outlaw analogous to the case of other "noble robbers" (such as Schinderhannes, Schinderhannes and Schinderhannes).The list of possible research topics includes questions about the Europe-wide fascination with the Middle Ages and the international popularity of the Robin Hood legend in books and films; the function of the positive associations of the Robin Hood symbolism as found in advertising (e.g. "Maggi soup"), caricature, toy production, etc. The list of possible research topics can be extended indefinitely.

The exhibition Robin Hood - The Many Faces of the Noble Robber is currently being prepared at the University of Oldenburg as a joint project between the subject of English Studies (Department of Literature and Linguistics) and the University Library. Around 400 exhibits will document the development of the legend from the Middle Ages to the present day. After opening in Oldenburg in November 1995, the exhibition will be shown in five other European countries: Denmark (Aarhus), Holland (Groningen), England (York), Poland (Torun) and Switzerland (Zurich). Historians, literary scholars, media experts and educationalists from Great Britain (Cambridge, Car-diff, Lancaster and Leeds), the USA (Purdue) and Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg, and six colleagues from Oldenburg) have contributed to the extensive catalogue, which is funded by the British Council. Two award-winning writers for young people who have recently written Robin Hood books will report on their reworking of the legend: Robin McKinley (USA) and Tilman Röhrig (Germany).

However, this is by no means the end of the subject, as literary and cultural studies have only just begun to adequately research and explain the popularity of the Robin Hood legend, which has endured for more than seven centuries, and its worldwide spread.

Dr Kevin Carpenter (47) works as a lecturer in the subject of English Studies at the university. He studied English, German and comparative literature in Manchester and Kiel and completed his doctorate in Oldenburg in 1983 on the 19th century English novel for young people. The exhibition RobinHood, which he is currently preparing in collaboration with Bianca Jung, follows his two previous exhibitions on English youth magazines and comics (travelling exhibition 1981-84) and historical adventure literature (travelling exhibition 1984-86).