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Legend endures Robin Hood a balance By BARBARA TANDORY Special to The News Was Robin Hood a real hero or a story book character? If the popular legend has you confused, don’t worry because it’s not the point. As portrayed in the recent movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the legendary hero is given a real-life 12th centu- ry setting of the Crusades during the reign of King Richard the Lion-Hearted. In the continuing popularization of a medieval tale, the movie at least settles the question of whether he was a villain or hero, presenting a socially relevant version of Robin Hood as a rebel hero rising against authority on behalf of the com- mon folks. of myth and history “a king of the wiches.” He further suggests that life imitated legend when an historical character born in the 13th cen- tury as the son of Adam Hode the forester renamed his wife Mathilda Marian and together they played up the existing legend. According to Graves, the main contribution of the later medieval versions was to introduce the concept of romantic love. A contemporary U.S. folklorist, Thomas Bullard, found Robin Hood along with Santa Claus and Cinderella to be one of the most endur- ing universal legends, found in all cultures, at all times of human history. 2 And English authors Michael Baigent. and Richard Leigh have Although historians in tried to. fit in Robin the last 50 years were [ CASNEWS FEATURE Hood and his sidekick able to trace him to a Prince John into the Saxon nobl n named Sir Robert of Locksley, Robin Hood’s historical origin is far from settled. In folklore it never is. Castlegar folklorist Mark Mealing says there’s truth in both sides of the dispute. “If you said Robin Hood was historical, you’d be right,” said Mealing, who teaches — ‘If you said Robin Hood was histor- ical, you'd be right. And if you said he was fictional and mythical, you’d be right also. If there’s a question, it’s of just how much of the one or the other.’ —- Mark Mealing, Selkirk College anthropology instructor Holy Grail legend in the context of the Scottish Sinclairs and the Gyp- sies, who performed the May fertility play at Rosslyn Castle. In their book The Temple and the Lodge, they also trace Robin Hood to a pagan god of the fairies: “Robin Hood, all through the Middle Ages in England and anthropology at Selkirk College. “And if you said he was fictional and mythical, you’d be right also. If there’s a question, it’s of just how much of the one or the other.” To folklore students like Mealing, the legend goes further back in time than the first Norman occupation in England and the times of Anglo- Saxon “guerrilla warfare” of the 11th century. Although it crystallized in folk ballads only in the Middle Ages, folklorists insist the Robin Hood legend originated much earlier, in the pagan fer- tility ritual. In fact all sources agree on this point. Known as Green Robin or Robin of the Greenwood, it was he who at the summer solstice presided over licen- tious fertility rites practiced in England and Scot- land in medieval times. The poet Robert Graves, an authority on poetic myth, suggested Robin Hood was, to begin with, Here's My Card... Scotland, was only sec- ondarily the ‘outlaw’ of subsequent story. Pre-emi- nently, he was a species of ‘fairy’ derived ulti- mately from the old Celtic and Saxon fertility god of vegetation deity, the so-called ‘Green Man.’” The legend has always drawn on the mood of the times. In Switzerland, the folktale emerged as a legend of William Tell, a symbolic hero of the struggle for political and individual freedom. Mealing points out that the Robin Hood legend appears to enjoy greatest popularity “in times of change, when there’s disorder in government.” Most recently, he says, it was in the late 1960s when it focused on the figure of the revolutionary hero Che Guevara. In general, notes Mealing, the legend focuses “on the more or less tragic individual who is an outlaw but who is closer to the heart of law than the people who administer it.” STEVE WHITTLETON Soles Representative 2849 Fourth Avenue Cestlogse, B.C. Vin 284 368-3563 August 26,1991 Castlegar News A7 A watched pot never boils. But the heat is definitely on. Coming September 7 . . .dramatically different, infinitely improved . . . a 7 7 ah Nev The newspaper-you've come home to since: 1947.