Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography

Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography is a 2003 study of Britain’s most popular folk hero by Stephen Knight, an academic at the University of Melbourne who is regarded as a leading expert on mythic literature, and on Robin Hood in particular. Starting from the premise that no historical Robin Hood ever existed, Knight traces the development of the Hood myth from its earliest medieval origins to the outlaw’s emergence as a Hollywood hero. He argues that each incarnation of the Hood myth reveals something about the kinds of hero different historical periods require, and the different ways British society has understood heroism over time. Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography was awarded the 2005 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies.

Knight begins by setting out his argument that there are several distinct versions of the Hood myth. Each belongs to a different historical period or periods and was transmitted in a different medium (oral literature, written ballads, novels, cinema, etc.). Although these myths overlap and inform each other, Knight argues that the development of the myth cannot be properly understood unless the different versions are considered separately. He contends that Hood scholarship generally reveals a bias towards one Hood or another: one writer favors the good outlaw, another the nationalist rebel. This produces skewed accounts of the myth and its history.

The first chapter of the book, “Bold Robin Hood,” begins with an examination of the earliest available sources for the Hood myth: stories and ballads written in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and based on orally transmitted tales. Knight points out that the character that emerges from these sources is nearly unrecognizable to us. This Hood is not a robber, from the rich or otherwise. He doesn’t have a band of Merry Men or a Maid Marian. Rather, he is simply a man of the woods, focused on day-to-day survival. When he forges alliances with other men, these alliances are temporary and transitory. When he fights, it is with a sword or a staff, because in the period from which these sources date, archery was largely a recreational activity.



As more references to Hood begin to appear in the later fourteenth and fifteenth century, the character begins to take on a more familiar character as an outlaw, although not necessarily a virtuous one. Knight analyses his sources to show how Hood’s outlawry is shaped by the pressing social and political concerns of the era. For example, in “Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford,” Hood and his men steal £603 from a traveling party of clergymen who turn out to be hypocritical “false pilgrims.” Knight points out that this ballad is contemporaneous with an upswell of indignation about the self-indulgence and hypocrisy of clergymen.

The second chapter, “Robert, Earl of Huntingdon,” considers the Hood who emerged in the sixteenth century, now a figure of courtly literature as well as popular folklore. In order to make Hood more palatable to aristocratic audiences, writers begin to portray him as a gentleman in distress rather than a woodsman of unknown origins. Knight traces the beginning of the image of Hood as a temporary outlaw to Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon. In this period too, Hood’s female companion appears for the first time, in conformity with the contemporary literary genre of pastoral, which generally set romantic stories in rural settings.

Chapter 3, “Robin Hood Esquire,” explores the proliferation of Hood myths in the nineteenth century. During this era, Hood becomes more emphatically a figure of the medieval past rather than a folk hero of the present. Many writers, Knight notes, went to great lengths creating pseudo-historical documentation for Hood’s existence, including epitaphs, genealogies, and elaborate assertions of the whereabouts of his grave. At the same time, Knight observes the expansion of the Hood myth’s focus on nature and natural living, in accordance with the rise of English Romanticism.



The book’s final chapter, “Robin Hood of Hollywood,” concerns cinematic portrayals of Hood, including the many parodies the original movies have spawned. Knight notes that the cinematic Hood is now by far the most influential, and he carefully traces the elements of the older myths that have been preserved by the cinema and the new elements inspired by the cinematic medium and by the changing political concerns of twentieth-century life. For instance, he notes that in the twentieth century, Marian has come to the fore as an equal partner to Hood—although he also notes that in fact, some of the earliest sources mentioning Marian also show her as his equal.

Knight’s “biography” of Hood is not only a study of a particular myth but also a case study in the way different societies and eras use myth to their own ends. The figure of Robin Hood provides a lens through which to examine a huge sweep of historical change in Britain and beyond.