Welcome goonlings to the Awful Book of the Month! In this thread, we choose one work of Resources: Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org - A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best. SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/ - A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here. For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM the moderation team. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2018, refer to archives] 2018 January: Njal's Saga [Author Unknown] February: The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle March: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders April: Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria May: Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov June: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe July: Warlock by Oakley Hall August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott September: The Magus by John Fowles October: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara November: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard December: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens 2019: January: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky February: BEAR by Marian Engel March: V. by Thomas Pynchon April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout May: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann July: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach August: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay September: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado November: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett December: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 2020: January: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair February: WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin March: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini April: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio May: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West June: The African Queen by C. S. Forester July: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale Current: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire, by Howard Pyle The best free online version is available here [high resolution scan]: https://archive.org/details/merryadventureso00pylerich Whatever version you read, be certain it is one with Pyle's original illustrations! If you want to spend money on a copy, your best bet is a Dover Edition, because most other versions don't include Pyle's original illustrations. You can find the paperback Dover editions here: https://store.doverpublications.com/0486220435.html (for some reason, this edition doesn't seem to be on Amazon) Dover kindle version here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A736AX6/ (costs same as print copy, but includes most illustrations). (If you can't find a copy with illustrations, I've put all the major illustrations up in an Imgur album here: https://imgur.com/gallery/bZZmBzs ) About the book This is my favorite book. Unless you're a medievalist, any Robin Hood you've ever seen or read -- from Disney through to Men in Tights -- likely owes a debt to this classic version. It's fun, it's funny, it's entertaining, it's just joy on the page. quote:The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire is an 1883 novel by the American illustrator and writer Howard Pyle. Consisting of a series of episodes in the story of the English outlaw Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men, the novel compiles traditional material into a coherent narrative in a colorful, invented "old English" idiom that preserves some flavor of the ballads, and adapts it for children. The novel is notable for taking the subject of Robin Hood, which had been increasingly popular through the 19th century, in a new direction that influenced later writers, artists, and filmmakers through the next century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merry_Adventures_of_Robin_Hood quote:“Long ago you made the best Robin Hood that was ever written.” -- Samuel Clemens writing to Howard Pyle https://howardpyle.blogspot.com/2015/02/mark-twain-and-howard-pyles-robin-hood.html About the Author Howard Pyle is relatively forgotten today, but he was an absolute giant of the American arts and letters in the latter half of the 19th century. He began his career illustrating for Harper's Weekly, achieved quite a bit of popularity, and was given a contract by Scribner to publish his first book, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. The book was a huge success and achieved international acclaim. Pyle eventually opened his own school to teach drawing and illustration; Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth were among his students. quote:“Do you know an American periodical called Harper’s Monthly Magazine? – there are marvelous sketches in it. I don’t know it very well, I’ve only seen six months of it and have only 3 issues myself, but there are things in it I find astounding. Among them a glass-blower’s and an iron foundry, all kinds of scenes of factory work. As well as sketches of a Quaker town in the old days by Howard Pyle.” http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let262/letter.html Pacing Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law. Please post after you read! Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Materials Here is an incredibly in-depth Robin Hood website, with everything from a google map of Robin Hood related locations (Little John's tombstone, etc.) to meta-analysis of the original ballads: https://www.boldoutlaw.com/ An in-depth blog just about Howard Pyle: https://howardpyle.blogspot.com/ A trailer for "Howard Pyle and the Illustrated Story", a Pyle documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE6-zk9_Yps For some discussion of Howard Pyle as an artist I'll be referring to Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered and some other sources. J.C. Holt's Robin Hood, which appears to be the premier scholarly work on the Robin Hood legend (he never mentions Pyle at all). I'll be making some posts based on this book later in the thread Some blog entries analyzing the five oldest Robin Hood ballads: https://christhorndycroft.wordpress.com/tag/ballads-of-robin-hood/ Suggestions for Future Months These threads aren't just for discussing the current BOTM; If you have a suggestion for next month's book, please feel free to post it in the thread below also. Generally what we're looking for in a BotM are works that have 1) accessibility -- either easy to read or easy to download a free copy of, ideally both 2) novelty -- something a significant fraction of the forum hasn't already read 3) discussability -- intellectual merit, controversiality, insight -- a book people will be able to talk about. Final Note: Thanks, and we hope everyone enjoys the book! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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# ¿ Jul 31, 2020 05:10 |
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# ¿ May 8, 2024 15:14 |
Just look at how fabulous this book is, just look: I don't plan on this being a strict "let's read" but I have so many thoughts about this book so it may kinda turn into that. First thing: This book is an aesthetic experience. It is lavish, it is lush. To a modern reader, it might seem a bit ridiculous at first. It's that too. It's ridiculous and awesome, like a pimp's purple velvet suit. Enjoy the strut. The rich flowing detail in the illustrations. The elaborate pseudo-elizabethan language. The little inset vignettes beside every few paragraphs "narrating" the text (a huge help if you're an eight year old kid trying to read that pseudo-elizabethan language!). This is why it's so important to read an edition that reproduces Pyle's original illustrations and layout -- it's all part of the experience. When I call that experience "aesthetic," I'm not just being descriptive -- I'm also being somewhat technical. Art historians generally classify Pyle as part of the "Brandywine School" movement, after the school Pyle founded. This particular book, though, really needs to be seen in the context of the broader international art movements of the period -- the aesthetic movement, the "Jacobethan" and Tudor Revivals, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, etc. In the same period this book is published, William Morris is printing deluxe editions of Icelandic sagas; Tennyson is reviving the almost-forgotten Morte D'Arthur in his Idylls of the King. Pyle had even published his own illustrated version of Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott in 1881, just two years prior to the Merry Adventures. So compare the flowing borders on the title and "Preface" page above, with, say, the Acanthus leaf patterns of William Morris: Or compare Pyle's pseudo-Elizabethan prose -- language as anachronistic for a Robin Hood set in the England of the 1100's as it is for us today -- with Tennyson's pseudo-archaic Arthurian poetry. Even the art style Pyle is using here is a deliberately archaic choice: quote:Pyle's illustrations constitute the most distinctive feature of the book. In choosing his models, style, and design, Pyle openly rejected the latest innovations in printing and in children's books, which would have allowed him to incorporate lavish color plates and drawings. Instead, his drawings (like those of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott Press) reflect the work of the earliest engravers and illustrators in the history of the printed book – artists such as Durer, Holbein, and Burckmaier. He even chose to sign and date his drawings in the manner of these first masters of printed illustration. https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4602 Compare, e.g., Durer's Samson Rending the Lion, printed in 1497: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336212 So just as the Victorians almost aways depicted the 7th-century King Arthur in the rich, complex arms and armor of the High Medieval or Renaissance eras, Pyle is here representing a 12th-century Robin Hood in an art style associated with the 15th and 16th (and, in the process, staking out a claim for himself as an artist on par with historical greats like Durer). And in doing so, Pyle is actually being, in the context of the time, fairly avant-garde. And because Pyle's version achieved wide popularity, that anachronism and style has been reflected down the years in pretty much every other version of Robin Hood you've ever seen (to one degree or another). What Mallory did for Arthur -- syncretizing a bunch of disconnected stories into a unified whole, and in the process stamping that whole with a particular style and tone that has persisted into all later versions -- Pyle in many ways did for Robin Hood. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Jul 31, 2020 |
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# ¿ Jul 31, 2020 05:11 |
So with that general introduction out of the way, let's turn to the text. First, the preface: Let's take that seriously. This is supposed to be a fun book. Don't take it too seriously. Compare, e.g., with the epigraph for Huckleberry Finn: quote:“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. And note that Huckleberry Finn was published the year after this -- in December 1884 -- and we know that Twain read Pyle's Robin Hood to his children earlier that same year because we have a letter, dated February 1884, from author George Washington Cable describing Twain's wife reading it to their children: quote:Mrs. Clemens is reading aloud to Mark & the children Howard Pyle’s beautiful new version of Robin Hood. Mark enjoys it hugely; they have come to the death of Robin & will soon be at the end https://howardpyle.blogspot.com/2015/02/mark-twain-and-howard-pyles-robin-hood.html So Twain and Pyle are keeping company here. This is a book intended to be fun. We're going to take it seriously as a work of art, but we're also going to take it as intended. After the preface, the prologue: quote:
This is the only mention of Maid Marian we're going to get in the whole book. There are a few possible reasons for this. One is that Pyle was basically writing this for young boys and, in the words of the Princess Bride, "kissy stuff" doesn't fit. The bigger problem though is that Maid Marian herself doesn't really fit. There are basically five known early Robin Hood ballads -- 1) A Gest of Robyn Hode, dating to around 1450, which contains eight subsections or "fyttes," and is going to provide most of the source material for this book ("Gest"[ being a medieval word from which we derive words like "quest" and 'jest") 2) Robyn Hoode his Death, a short fragment of only twenty-seven verses, 3) Robin Hood and the Monk, which is actually mostly about Little John; 4) Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne, and 5) Robin Hood and the Potter Maid Marian isn't in any of those; she's mostly from a french tradition of shepherd and shepherdess romance stories and doesn't get added to the the Robin Hood corpus until, like, the 1700's and 1800's, after Robin has started showing up in May Games and plays all the time. There is one recorded Maid Marian ballad, but it's a late addition and an unpopular ballad everyone agrees is pretty awful. So Pyle gets her woven in and mentioned right at the beginning, so that's dealt with. Robin's already got a girlfriend, that's not his problem. What is his problem? COPS. quote:
Earlier, Robin was described as carrying a "yew bow," that is, a high quality English longbow, and "clothyard shafts." What the hell is a clothyard shaft? quote:The clothyard, or clothier's yard, was a unit of length measure from the times of Medieval England. It was an important unit in that many sources available tell us that it was the commonly accepted length of the arrow used in the British Longbow, a critically important technological and sociological weapon from around the era of the Hundred Years' War. It is fixed in popular culture, as the introductory quote demonstrates, by its use in the tale of Robin Hood, whose arrows were described to be of such length. https://everything2.com/title/Clothyard The important thing is, the "clothyard" is military length standard. Robin is walking around with the period equivalent of an AK on his shoulder. It's ok, though, because he's going to a shooting competition. He's not looking for trouble. quote:
They're not just pissed because they lost a wager. They're pissed because Robin just tricked them into lettting him Do A Crime -- a capital crime -- right in front of them. Before the Norman Conquest, anyone in England could hunt deer freely on their own lands. When William the Conqueror came in, though -- and remember, we're set in the reign of Henry II, so that's just like a hundred years prior and change -- William enacted Norman traditions of hunting rights that limited *all* hunting in the "royal forest" : quote:The royal forest embraced not only wooded areas, but also large tracts of arable land and even towns and villages. Anyone dwelling or holding land within the forest bounds was subject to a complex set of regulations, implemented by royal officials answerable only to the king. They were prevented from hunting freely . . . https://earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/reference/essays/forest-law/ "Suspensus est" there, of course, meaning hanged. Pretty much everybody except the king hated the Forest Law -- it was a big topic section in the Magna Carta -- but the king liked it and he was the king. For scale on the money and on the debt a good rough estimate is that a laborer in medieval england might earn, say, two pounds a year, total. One pound was twenty shillings, a shilling was 12 pence, and a "mark" was about two-thirds of a pound (i.e. about 13 shillings). So forty marks = about twenty-six pounds -- about a decade's wages. (It's a little silly to pretend historical accuracy for the currency values here, but, what the hell). So Robin basically just made a hundred-thousand-dollar bet with some Deer Cops that he could shoot a deer right in front of them, and then he did it. How do the cops react? poo poo hasn't changed, man. quote:
Fuuuck. Shot a deer and a cop. Pyle makes one of his biggest changes to the source material here; in the original ballad sources (part of the Gest and a later ballad from the 1600's, "Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham"), Robin kills all fifteen foresters, no regrets, cops stepped to him, cops die. Here instead Robin's killing only in self-defense and only when goaded and he only kills one dude instead of engaging in mass slaughter. Nice Robin. quote:"Alas!" cried he, "thou hast found me an archer that will make thy wife to wring! I would that thou hadst ne'er said one word to me, or that I had never passed thy way, or e'en that my right forefinger had been stricken off ere that this had happened! In haste I smote, but grieve I sore at leisure!" And then, even in his trouble, he remembered the old saw that "What is done is done; and the egg cracked cannot be cured." No use crying over dead cops Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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# ¿ Jul 31, 2020 17:00 |
Gnoman posted:A "rod" varied between 3 and 8 meters, and is currently defined as 5. So "threescore" (60) rods would be 180 to 480 meters. With "flight" arrows, lightweight ones used for target practice, this would be fairly impressive - Wikipedia puts 315 meters at the limit of what you'd find on a practice field. If he were using heavier combat arrows, anything beyond 220 would be an extremely impressive feat. So even in this first small story, we are shown Robin's legendary skill with a bow Not to mention through a forest, no less! At a moving target! And of course, we don't really *need* to know any of this -- rods are a long way away, marks are a lot of money, etc., is all we really need to know to enjoy the story, and that's all obvious from context. But what the hell, no harm in breaking it down in case anyone is getting thrown by the weird words. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 01:09 |
Gnoman posted:More to the point, context is fun. It is! If nothing else, this is a good chance to learn more stuff. I've probably read this book twenty-odd times over the years, but I'd never looked up exactly what a "clothyard shaft" was before now. So this is a chance to do some deep diving.
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 02:59 |
quote:
A villain emerges! The good ol' Sheriff of Nottingham. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJk-yQadw_U&t=44s (Aside: they apparently had to cut most of Alan Rickman's scenes in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because test audiences ended up liking him more than Kevin Costner's Robin). Sheriffs at the time weren't paid so much as given 1) the duty to enforce the king's laws in an area and 2) the right to take profits from lands or property confiscated from debtors. This did not make them popular. As an example, one historical candidate for the "Sheriff of Nottingham" of legend is Philip Marc. He was the "High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests" from 1208 onwards to 1217 -- making him head Forester also. One surviving record has Marc ordering "The men of Lexington" to give "the Lord the King 100 pounds to have the King's peace, and to spare their town from being burnt to the ground". (Again, keep in mind the two-pound yearly average salary; at the time, the entire town of Bulwell, nearby, was valued at a total of 100 shillings). In the end, Marc lost his job because he was so universally hated that he and his entire family got *specifically called out as a separate line item in the Magna Carta*: quote:"Item 50. We will remove absolutely from their bailiwicks (in addition to eight persons specified) Philip Marc and his brothers, and Geoffrey, his nephew, and their whole retinue." http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/articles/mellorsarticles/bulwell1.htm There is still, entertainingly, a Sheriff of Nottingham today. The current holder of the office of High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire is Professor Dame Elizabeth Harriet Fradd, DBE of Tollerton. The current Sheriff of Nottingham town is Councillor Patience Uloma Ifediora. So we have our villain, but there's one more character we have to meet here in the Prologue. quote:
Good forest times, bros! I'm a-gonna go look for cool poo poo to do. If I get in trouble I'll blow y'all up on the horn. quote:
This guy is not little at all! quote:
Thus begins a noble tradition and pattern we will see replicated throughout this book: Robin gets in a fight with a dude, the other dude kicks his rear end, Robin says "you kicked my rear end, you're a cool bro, wanna come join my band of bros?" and the other dude thinks that sounds like a great idea. Anybody who's ever been friends with someone they got into a fistfight with gets this. On a deeper level, though, I've always really liked that Robin Hood is not in charge because he's the baddest of the bad asses. He's in charge because he helps people and everyone likes him, not at all because he kicks everybody's rear end. Half the stories are about various Merry Men kicking Robin's butt. Leadership isn't about being some kind of "alpha"; leadership is about being a good dude. This stranger is still a little doubtful though so he challenges Robin to an archery contest, which, yeah, we know how that turns out: quote:
This is the "split an arrow with an arrow" trick, which enters the Robin Hood legendarium with Ivanhoe. It's not part of the original ballads, so Pyle sticks it in here, at the beginning, rather than at the Nottingham archery contest. Mythbusters has "debunked" it a few different times, but it actually can happen, if people are using arrows with wider shafts. Also, take note of the saints everyone swears by; Our Heroes all always swear by saints with good Saxon names, like Withold and Dunstan and Aelfrida. Adam Bell was a an outlaw featured in several period ballads, but his legend hasn't stuck around the same way Robin Hood's has. But getting back to our story. Who is this tall stranger? quote:
If you don't love a dumb joke like a seven foot tall dude getting christened "Little John" by having a beer poured over his head, then this ain't gonna be the book for you, son. And I'm sad for you. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 10:25 |
Khizan posted:I’d always heard that a clothyard was the distance from nose to fingertip with your arm stretched out to the side. For me that happens to be 37 inches, give or take a quarter inch or so. That matches up with at least some of the definitions above, yeah, and is also approximately proper draw distance for an arrow, so would make rough sense.
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 11:14 |
Siivola posted:Is this the first appearance of that iconic quarterstaff bout, or was it present in the early ballads? Oh GOOD question. (Now I'm thinking about Sherlock Holmes' Baritsu). The answer is complicated. In the original Gest all the fights are with either sword or bow, and Robin is basically an undefeated superhero fighting the nobility, rich abbotts, etc., and murderin' fools right and left. In the "later" ballads in the 1600's, you get a trend of shorter ballads where Robin goes up against members of the peasantry (usually losing, then they join up), and those fights are generally with quarterstaff. The specific ballad Pyle is drawing on here is Childe Ballad 125, "Robin Hood and Little John.", which is estimated to date from 1680's to the early 1700's, and Pyle follows it pretty closely. Pyle didn't really *invent* much in this book, but almost all later writers have relied on his synthesis to some extent or other. Most people don't go rooting through Child's Ballads. I should probably talk a bit about Child's Ballads. Francis James Childs, an American and Harvard's first professor of English, had, just the year before, in 1882, published a comprehensive five volume set, "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads", which is still a standard reference for traditional ballads today, to the point that many ballads are referred to by their "Child number" as often as by their title (e.g., Child Ballad 95, which you may be familiar with). If you look at the list of them, thirty-eight of Child's collected ballads concern Robin Hood and his band. SO when Pyle was putting this book together, he had, conveniently, a comprehensive resource for *all* the major Robin Hood ballads. When Pyle says in the preface that all these characters are "all bound by nothing but a few odd strands of certain old ballads (snipped and clipped and tied together again in a score of knots)" he's telling you exactly what he's done -- he's just taking the best of Child's Robin Hood ballads and re-mixing them into a single unified whole. Pyle's in good company -- many scholars think the Gest was essentially the same kind of thing, a bunch of different now-lost originals getting remixed into a new whole. Pyle just happened to come along at the right time (right after Child made the research easy) to do the same job for the modern era, and with the skill set to do it very well. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 11:41 |
I just found out that Alexander Dumas published two Robin Hood novels in 1872 and 1873. I'm trying to read them now and they're so painfully awful it just highlights how good Pyle was in comparison. I'm several chapters in and it's all about Robin's foster parents, the Head family (that's not a typo -- Head, not Hood), Gilbert and Margaret,. Or maybe another dude named Ritzon. We meet Maid Marian before we meet any of the Merry Men at all! Those interested can download a sample here: https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Thieves-Tales-Robin-Alexandre-ebook/dp/B00AYJB33U Comically, it uses Pyle artwork for the ebook cover :P It is kinda interesting though just for the sake of comparison with Pyle. This is Dumas, an acknowledged master, writing ten years before Pyle, but he's just horribly loving up everything about it. I think the difference is that Pyle had the good sense to just let the ballad source material breathe. Dumas is trying to be a novelist, injecting a bunch of his own characters, moving the plot around, as if the important thing in the story was the Robin/Marian love interest or Robin's status as a secret displaced Earl (we'll get to that later; it's a very late addition to the legend). But none of that is the core of the story. The core of the story is Robin and his Merry Bros doing cool bro stuff together, getting into scrapes and playing japes on each other, and putting rich people in their place (newfound poverty). And that's what the ballads are about and Pyle just lets the ballads happen and doesn't get in their way. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 22:15 |
anilEhilated posted:If I remember the Dumas correctly (had that as a kid), the focus of the story was on how Saxons were awesome and Normans were lovely. Yeah, the Saxon/Norman split comes in with Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Pretty much all scholars agree that it's historically nonsensical -- King John was technically king of the "Angevin Empire" which held England and large chunks of France, and by the Henry II / John era the Norman Conquest is a hundred and fifty years in the past. Wales would be independent for another hundred years, and Scotland for another two hundred. On the other hand, y'know, the whole Forest Law thing above was basically a Norman law getting imposed onto English native culture from outside. We do see a little of it in the saints Pyle has everyone swear by, and there's some rhetoric in a few places where it can stand in as a proxy for "rich vs poor,", but since Saxons vs Normans doesn't show up in the ballad sources, and Pyle is sticking really close to the ballads, it doesn't make much substantive difference here. Which, imho, is all to the good -- these days, we're all rightly skeptical of anything that spends too much energy lauding the Saxons.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2020 20:39 |
In "Part First," Pyle takes three separate ballads and fits them together into a three part whole -- "And now I will tell how the Sheriff of Nottingham three times sought to take Robin Hood, and how he failed each time." The three ballads are "Robin Hood and the Tinker" , (Child Ballad 127), "Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow," (Child Ballad 152), and "Robin Hood Rescuing Will Stutely" (Child Ballad 141). In each of these, Pyle follows the original ballads pretty closely, but his changes are interesting. I. Robin Hood and the Tinker The first few pages of this one -- the Sheriff issuing a warrant, the messenger getting sent to Lincoln, the messenger and the tinker meeting at the Blue Boar Inn, are all pure Pyle. Even the Tinker's name, "Wat O' the Crabstaff," is a Pyle invention -- in the ballad, he's just The Tinker. The Blue Boar Inn The Blue Boar Inn has become a common feature of most modern adaptations, but it's pure Pyle. There is a Blue Boar Inn dating to the 1400's in Leicester, about thirty miles south of Nottingham, and there's also a Blue Boar Public House in Cambridge, whose website informs me that "The Blue Boar was once a popular pub name throughout the country. It was in the heraldry of the Earl of Oxford [commemorating] the defeat of Richard 3rd with the Yorkists at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 . . . The White Boar referred to Richard 3rd. " So the "Blue Boar" is a bit of anachronism, but not a huge one; a name like that would date the inn to the 1400's, not the 1100's, but that's still prior to the era of the oldest ballads we have. Basically, it's another part of the frame narrative, Pyle taking all the different un-named inns in the various ballads and unifying them into one single Blue Boar with an established cast of characters (the innkeeper, his wife Maven, etc). Outlawry, Arrests, Warrants, etc. What exactly is Robin Hood's legal status here, and why is the Sheriff turning to some random Tinker to execute his warrant? This is all reasonably in accordance with actual medieval british law. Keep in mind, the Sheriff would not have had, like, a police force on hand (apart, perhaps, from the aforementioned Foresters, but we already know how Robin handles them). Regular police forces don't show up till hundreds of years later. If the Sheriff wanted someone captured,, he'd either have to arrest them himself, get the town to do it by raising the "hue and cry," or get the person declared "outlaw": quote:What was an outlaw? https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/outlaws-outlawry-medieval-early-modern-england/ Basically, miss your court dates in medieval England, and you'd get declared "outlaw", the courts would seize all your stuff, and you'd be outside the protection of the law. period, so anybody could capture, kill, or otherwise harm you for whatever reward there might be in doing so. The Sheriff's other normal option would be to get the local populace to grab Robin for him by raising the "hue and cry", upon which all the local everybody were supposed to join together to catch the criminal. None of this is working in Robin's case because everybody likes him so the hue and cry won't work, nobody is dumb enough to try to arrest him when he's surrounded by his Merry Men so outlawry doesn't work, and Robin is absolutely cool with living in the forest, so he doesn't have any chattels to seize. So the Sheriff is turning to outsiders, hence all this setup needed to get our out-of-towner Tinker proceeding down the road, warrant in his pouch, with the bright idea of trying to arrest Robin Hood like he's some random dude. This out of towner Tinker bumps into a friendly jokin' dude on the road, and that's where the traditional ballad itself begins. quote:
This part is also pure interjection by Pyle and not present in the original ballad source. The song Pyle has the Tinker sing here is a different song, "Cupid's Bow," which is *not* a Child Ballad, but can be found here, attributed apparently to the Earl of Oxford and dating to the 1500's or so. You can listen to the instrumental music for it for here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPOg4v4F_cE I love the image of Robin just constantly interrupting a dude trying to sing a song. Right from the start, Robin is just fuckin' around with this dude. Big Bugs Bunny Energy. quote:
(a "Murrain" is a term for either a witches' curse, or fatal diseases of livestock). Note again also that our Tinker is swearing by the Saxon Saint Dunstan; deep down, he's a good egg, even if he's not too bright. quote:
Again, just classic poo poo right here, straight out of the ballad original. I love every bit of this, from the "am I not slyer?" to the "And thou show it not to me I know not to whom thou wilt show it." The only real changes Pyle makes over the ballad here the additions to the Tinker's backstory (he's a quarterstaff champion!), and the naming of the inn as the Blue Boar. quote:
The tinker sings another Child Ballad, then falls over. The original ballad just has the Tinker getting drunk here and Robin just out-drinks him; the bit with the "Flemish strong waters" is pure Pyle addition, and an anachronistic one -- distilled spirits wouldn't be introduced to Europe until the 1300's or so. . But it definitely establishes one thing: quote:
quote:
Fuckin' landlords, man. The tinker wakes up drunk and gets a sharp lesson in trusting landlords: quote:
It doesn't take the Tinker long to track down Robin afterwards, though. quote:
Fosse Way was the old roman road that ran from southwest to northeast England, ending in Lincoln. So the Tinker was on his way home. Looking on this convenient Robin Hood Locations Google Map, we it's about twenty miles from Lincoln Town to Sherwood, or a day's walk or so. And as soon as Robin sees this dude he starts loving with him again! quote:The Tinker said nothing at first but stood looking at Robin with a grim face. "Now," quoth he at last, "I am right glad I have met thee, and if I do not rattle thy bones within thy hide this day, I give thee leave to put thy foot upon my neck." This is basically straight from the traditional ballad, right down to the "metal man / mettled man" pun. The biggest change is that in the ballad, Robin has a sword and is outright defeated; here they both have quarterstaffs (more even and more yoemanlike anyway) and Robin doesn't so much lose as have his staff break, which is good because Robin's gonna be losing a lot of fights in this book -- that's how you join the band, you beat Robin in a fight, apparently -- and if we don't give him excuses each time he's gonna come across like a chump. End of the day though free deer meat for life and three suits of Lincoln green is too good a deal to pass up and the Tinker joins. (I believe I read somewhere, but can't verify right now, that king's foresters in the era were paid two suits of lincoln green, so Robin is paying better than government wages). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2020 21:03 |
Gnoman posted:Green clothes makes sense for forest people, but I've always found it amusing that Lincoln Green is so specifically called out. It doesn't appear to have been a particularly expensive or prestigious color, and some sources have Robin himself eschewing it for the more expensive Lincoln Scarlet. There's an odd focus on fabric in a lot of the Robin Hood ballads. I did find this the other night while googling ballad blogs: quote:Thomas Ohlgren, an authority on the early ballads, has suggested that this transferral of chivalric ideology from the knight to the yeoman represents the rise of the guilds and merchant class in the 14th century(4) Robin and his band follow many rules and traditions of the guilds such as the giving of livery, the lending of money and escorting the king in processions. Ohlgren even goes so far as to say that the Gest may have been written specifically for a draper’s guild to be performed at one of their feasts as there are many references to cloth and livery throughout the ballad. The episode where Little John ham-fistedly measures out cloth with his longbow for the poor knight’s livery and is mocked by Much is picked up on specifically by Ohlgren. He suggests that this represents the opposition of cloth dealers to the strict imposing of a standard measure or ‘Silver Yard’ by the cloth guilds. When Robin meets the king he sells him a quantity of Lincoln green to outfit his retinue, just as various drapers’ guilds did. https://christhorndycroft.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/a-gest-of-robin-hood-an-analysis/
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2020 03:11 |
Cobalt-60 posted:Yes, but is it tights? One theory is that Pyle's Quaker upbringing allowed him to write in a pseudo-Elizabethan dialect without overdoing it; e.g., he would have been raised using "thee" and "thou" at home, natively, in his natural speech. The food though -- his characters always have such fun eating.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2020 12:36 |
Cobalt-60 posted:
Well, Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, so a few years prior to this; Huckleberry Finn is the year after. There *were* lots of different Robin Hood plays and stories floating around, though. Very little in this book is new with Pyle.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2020 21:44 |
Xander77 posted:Let's be fair - Conan Doyle continues the exact same tension well into the days of the Hundred Years war (and he's writing half a century after Scott). Yeah, it's interesting. Pyle is probably the last major version that *doesn't* include Marian as a significant character. She has so little presence in the ballads though that each modern adaptation tends to end up re-writing her completely anew in each incarnation. Sometimes she's a noble's daughter, or the sheriff's daughter, sometimes she's full on part of the Band, etc. The other interesting 20th century update is that a *lot* of modern versions include a Saracen character. Which is perfectly workable given the Crusades context but is handled with a varying degree of, let's say tact.
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# ¿ Aug 4, 2020 15:21 |
Xander77 posted:Was that ever a thing before the Costner version? According to the Bold Outlaw website, the first Muslim member of the Merry Men showed up in a 1980's british TV series..
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# ¿ Aug 4, 2020 16:26 |
II. The Shooting Match at Nottingham Town This is the classic archery contest that generally forms the centre-piece of every Robin Hood adaptation ever. It's present in a few different versions in the original ballads; the version Pyle follows most closely is from Child Ballad 152, "Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow." quote:THEN THE SHERIFF was very wroth because of this failure to take jolly Robin, for it came to his ears, as ill news always does, that the people laughed at him and made a jest of his thinking to serve a warrant upon such a one as the bold outlaw. And a man hates nothing so much as being made a jest of; so he said: "Our gracious lord and sovereign King himself shall know of this, and how his laws are perverted and despised by this band of rebel outlaws. As for yon traitor Tinker, him will I hang, if I catch him, upon the very highest gallows tree in all Nottinghamshire." I love how Pyle sets it up, too: First the Sheriff goes whining to the King Then the King goes "You're my sheriff, right? Do your job" Then the Sheriff sits and thinks really hard (modern reprints usually replace Pyle's use of the word "jew" here with "usurer") and he comes up with a cunning plan. The basic format of this -- the complaint to the King, the devising of the Plan -- is present in the original ballad, but Pyle reworks it a bit. He does a really good job of setting up the Sheriff as sympathetic here. This is Merry Old England, there's no serpent in this Garden; the Sheriff isn't evil, he's just a guy, he's got a job, his boss is yelling at him, he's trying to do his job the best he can. quote:So, as soon as he had returned safely to Nottingham, he sent messengers north and south, and east and west, to proclaim through town, hamlet, and countryside, this grand shooting match, and everyone was bidden that could draw a longbow, and the prize was to be an arrow of pure beaten gold. Again, Pyle reworks the original ballad to make everyone slightly more concrete and more sympathetic. Compare with the original ballad: code:
quote:
I think Pyle's rich description of the scene here is one reason it's been so attractive to later adaptations, especially cinematic ones. The original ballad is pretty much just "well, there was a contest, Robin won lols," without much detail. Pyle highlights every detail and every part -- the crowds, the stands, the archers preparing to compete, the Sheriff scanning the crowd, the herald, the rules. I love how the big hole in the Sheriff's plan is that he doesn't yet know what Robin looks like, which is part of why we're getting this near the beginning of the book, not the end. The other archers Robin is competing against are references to other archers featured in historical ballads. Adam Bell and Clym o' the Clough were outlaws featured in Child Ballad 116 (earlier, when Robin and Little John first meet, Pyle had Little John say Robin shot a better shaft than Adam Bell, so this isn't the first reference, which may be why Pyle changed the name from Bell to Dell). So Pyle is making this an All-Star Shooting Match and giving Robin some legendary competition. quote:And now the archers shot, each man in turn, and the good folk never saw such archery as was done that day. Six arrows were within the clout, four within the black, and only two smote the outer ring; so that when the last arrow sped and struck the target, all the people shouted aloud, for it was noble shooting. And *scene*. Again, Pyle's showing his cinematic eye, decades before there was a cinema; just every detail of the scene drawn with camera-like precision, every necessary part of the scene told in the right sequence with the right cuts, the auditory cues, everything. The version of the archery contest in the Gest, Robin is recognized and it turns into a brawl, so that's probably why Pyle follows the Golden Arrow version more closely. That and cool golden arrow. quote:
I always assumed that the final stanza there was a quote from the ballad, but it's Pyle's own writing, as is the image of the arrow clattering among the dishes on the table. Note that Robin has carefully blunted the shaft to make sure nobody gets hurt. Yoemen and Villeins We should probably define these terms a bit and Pyle's use of an actual footnote is probably as good a place as any. Both of them are essentially class terms. "Yoeman" could mean either an attendant in a noble household, or a freeholding small landowner. quote:Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales contains content on the yeoman's social standing in the late 14th century. The yeoman in "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale" is a "servant" to a cleric, once finely dressed but now impoverished.[4] In "The General Prologue", the Knight is accompanied ("served") by a yeoman who "knew the forest just as he knew his home...this was a hunter indeed." This yeoman has a bow and arrows, and a coat and hood of "forest green",[5] as does the yeoman in "The Friar's Tale", who is a bailiff of the forest.[6] The Ellesmere Manuscript contains an illustration of the Canon's Yeoman. William Caxton's printing also contains a wood engraving of a yeoman. So a "yoeman" is someone of a social class below the actual nobility or gentry -- you're still a servant, or if you own land you don't have a title -- but above the peasantry -- you're a fancy servant and/or you actually own land. Basically the fabled "middle class." A man-at-arms or soldier employed in a knight's retinue might also be considered a "yoeman" -- you're a fancy guy with weapons and livery, just not titled. A "villein", by contrast . . that's another word for serf. Technically speaking you weren't a slave, and you could own your own property and had legal rights, but you couldn't leave the lord's land without permission. So the Sheriff is a nobleman, with serfs and servants; Robin and his men, by contrast, are legally independent, all yoemen together, free as the birds, even though they don't own anything and aren't anyone's servants. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 4, 2020 16:35 |
I need to amend an earlier comment -- It turns out there actually was an incident of arrow-splitting before Ivanhoe; in one manuscript version of Robin Hood and Queen Catherine, a version lost and only discovered in 1993, as part of the "Forresters Manuscript", the archetypal arrow-splitting scene occurs. That manuscript dates to the 1670's, and thus predates Ivanhoe but we don't know that Sir Walter Scott had seen it. https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/braves-merida-like-robin-hood-splits-arrows-can-you-really-split-an-arrow-with-an-arrow.html Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2020 02:34 |
Gnoman posted:Would all the other archers of legend have been known in Pyle's day? Having Robin best them all is a lovely dramtic touch, but it would be lost on a modern audience. That's a question beyond my scholarship. Pyle's collecting stories from "Broadside" ballads, which were a relatively popular medium . . . 100 to 200 years before Pyle is doing his work. Other scholars (people who'd read Francis James Childs, professional retro-artists like William Morris, etc.) would have recognized them. The primary child audience wouldn't recognize them but their parents might have? Not really sure, honestly.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2020 17:42 |
Gnoman posted:It almost is reminding me (on a smaller scale) of the role-call of the Achaean fleet in the Iliad, in that it is virtually meaningless to a modern, but somebody versed in the lore of the era (or who had a cultural connection to someone on the list, as the ancient Greeks were said to) they're quite important. My guess also is that Pyle wasn't just writing this for kids; he was also trying to impress his peers. I can't find a direct quote, but apparently William Morris was much impressed by this book: quote:In 1920 Joseph Pennell explained Pyle's success in Robin Hood as one of total design: "Pyle believed that the way the artists of today should work was to take advantage of modern methods. And he designed his edition of Robin Hood from end to end himself . . . he used good type, he spaced his type well, and he arranged his illustrations on the page well; he drew not only the decorative head-and-tail-pieces, but the full pages and the cover, and he also wrote the story. And that book made an enormous impression when it came out here, and even impressed greatly the conservative William Morris, who thought up to that time, 1883, nothing could artistically come out of America." (quoted from a google books search result it would be too lengthy to repost here). So yeah, I think Pyle's including nods to other ballads and the like in order to impress other professionals and scholars. This might be a good time to post in a bit more detail about Pyle's Theories of Art, because he definitely had them. quote:"Throw your heart into a picture then jump in after it." -- Howard Pyle https://muse.jhu.edu/article/248211 quote:
quote:Several times Pyle criticized figures looking away from the viewer. He said: “It is an axiom in Dramatic Art that the face should always be turned towards the audience and Dramatic Art is nearest akin to our art—As soon as the face is turned away the interest begins to flag. You should see the face with its varied expressions.” Quoted in Brown and Rush, “Notes from Howard Pyle’s Monday Night Lectures,” August 29, 1904, 48. https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/pyle-as-a-picture-maker It's really interesting to me that Pyle was in effect teaching his own variation on the Stanislavski Method, but for illustration, not actors, and two generations before Stanislavski published it. I think this is one reason his work is still so effective even a hundred years later. He's not just drawing a scene, he's staging and acting it. Other versions end up seeming wooden or forced, but with Pyle, quote:"And where art thou now, my good lad?" shouted the stranger, roaring with laughter. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Aug 6, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2020 15:04 |
III. Will Stutely Rescued by his Companions The sheriff hasn't given up yet! quote:NOW WHEN THE SHERIFF found that neither law nor guile could overcome Robin Hood, he was much perplexed, and said to himself, "Fool that I am! Had I not told our King of Robin Hood, I would not have gotten myself into such a coil; but now I must either take him captive or have wrath visited upon my head from his most gracious Majesty. I have tried law, and I have tried guile, and I have failed in both; so I will try what may be done with might." This front section is introduced by Pyle so that he can fit Child Ballad 141, Robin Hood Rescuing Will Stutly, into his "life of Robin Hood" framework. I think the interesting thing about this front section is that Pyle emphasizes again that 1) the Sheriff is resorting to force because he's run out of other ideas, and 2) Robin is going out of his way to avoid violence, even to the point that the Merry Men are grumbling about it for fear of looking like cowards. But you can't hide in the forest forever. Someone has to go peek their head out and find out what's happening. quote:Thus they hid in the depths of Sherwood Forest for seven days and seven nights and never showed their faces abroad in all that time; but early in the morning of the eighth day Robin Hood called the band together and said, "Now who will go and find what the Sheriff's men are at by this time? For I know right well they will not bide forever within Sherwood shades." Poor Will Stutely, betrayed by a kitten! This whole section is Pyle's invention and it's really striking how well it blends into the story as a whole. It's tense and sharp and well-drawn and every part of it feels concrete and real. From this point on, Pyle is following Child Ballad 141 very closely, often just rendering verse into prose. quote:He shall not be hanged tomorrow day," cried Robin; "or, if he be, full many a one shall gnaw the sod, and many shall have cause to cry Alack-a- day!" Violence is horrible and sad, but when it's time to help a bro, all good bros gotta throw down. quote:
A "Palmer" was a pilgrim who had travelled to the Holy Land and brought back a bit of palm leaf folded into a cross as a sign. Like the medieval english equivalent of a wandering monk. This conversation with the Palmer is in the ballad, but Pyle develops it more, giving it to David of Doncaster specifically rather than to an unnamed memmber of the band, adding norman v. saxon dialogue, and especially adding the " yet he taketh only from the rich and the strong and the dishonest man, while there is not a poor widow nor a peasant with many children, nigh to Sherwood, but has barley flour enough all the year long through him" language -- the "give to the poor" part of the Robin Hood legend is much more strongly present in later adaptations like Pyle's than in the original ballad sources (more on that in a separate post later). quote:
This three-part exchange with Stutely asking to be allowed to die fighting is fairly close to the ballad, except the "sorry jest withal" part at the end, where the Sheriff makes a particularly dire threat; he's going to cut Stutely's corpse into four quarters and hang each of them separately from a tree. This was an actual medieval punishment and a real thing (though often it would be done to people while they were still alive -- see, e.g., "drawing and quartering." But this is a kid's book so Pyle doesn't go into detail on this, probably just as well. quote:
Little John is a BRO, and the Sheriff is a coward. Note how at the beginning of the story, the Merry Men were worried that Robin was a coward, because he was ordering them not to fight; now in the test, the truth is revealed. quote:
I love the raw emotion in this closing section. Real buds and real bros cry because they love each other.
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# ¿ Aug 7, 2020 20:26 |
Siivola posted:That's fascinating, thanks! I might have to take a peek at Child's work since I'd love to get into early music like that. Thank you so much for this post! The costuming was the biggest detail that I had absolutely no idea how to explicate, because I don't know enough of the terminology to know the appropriate search terms to even educate myself; I recognized Pyle was giving everybody pointy shoes and that's about it. Please chip in with comments on other costumes as we move forward, and anyone else too. I hadn't realized Pyle was mixing eras like that, but i did notice that he has David and the Palmer standing in a classic stage pose, each of them "cheating" about one-third open towards the audience, so it looks like they're facing each other but you get a clearer view of each of them. Pyle is really *explicitly* staging this book like a Robin Hood play. If want to do a deep dive on Pyle's costuming, there are a ton of articles about how much Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates ended up influencing Hollywood notions of pirates: The funny thing is, most of the articles I'm finding are saying "these outfits are totally unrealistic and impractical" but what I've read from actual period accounts indicates that Pyle was actually surprisingly accurate, because pirate captains tended to dress really extravagantly from captured goods: quote:Above all they were distinguished by their clothes. In the early years of the eighteenth century most landsmen wore long coats and long waistcoats over knee breeches and stockings. Seamen on the other hand wore short blue jackets, over a checked shirt, and either long canvas trousers or baggy “petticoat breeches,” which somewhat resembled culottes. In addition, they frequently wore red waistcoats, and tied a scarf or handkerchief loosely around the neck.20 (quoted from David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag) Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 8, 2020 00:36 |
Siivola posted:Have you by any chance been playing Kingdom Come lately? Soupy beer that you need to drink with a straw is an ancient Egyptian thing, and that game is the only instance I know of that getting associated with the Middle Ages. Technically, Pyle is setting this in the 1100's though! (even if all his references and set details are from the era of the ballads, that is, 1400 to 1700 or so). So there might be room for both of you to be correct. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 8, 2020 15:27 |
anilEhilated posted:I find it kind of interesting how most of the encounters between the Merry Men and anyone else go: "Ho there, stout fellow! I like the cut of your jib, let's try to bash each other's skulls with quarterstaffs!" This is a perfect segue into the next section! My guess is that one part of your question answers the other. Relative to this version, the ballads are a lot more violent -- the best example being Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham where Robin straight up murders fifteen cops just because they tried to cheat him on a bet. Literally everyone fights everyone else all the time, etc. Most of these ballads are known primarily from "broadside" cheaply printed versions, and yeah, "if it bleeds it leads" was a thing even then is my guess. So I think Pyle is adding some moralizing here by constantly emphasizing Robin's relative nonviolence. Robin only shoots the forester in self-defense; he avoids sending his men into violent conflict unless forced into it; his preferred melee weapon is a quarterstaff instead of a sword. (Part of me wonders if this emphasis derives in part from Pyle's Quaker upbringing). I think Pyle's trying to balance credible scholarship -- presenting a version that tracks reasonably closely with the actual ballad sources -- while also presenting a relatively moral work he'd see as suitable for children. That said -- Up till now, the story has in a sense been mostly exposition -- setting up Robin's background, the establishment of the Merry Men, and the primary driving conflict between Robin and the Sheriff. The next story, "Robin Hood and the Butcher," is our first just "here's a Robin Hood story" set piece, and we'll see that Pyle makes some more significant changes than he has to prior stories. This one is based on Child Ballad 122, "Robin Hood and the Butcher," which exists in two versions, "A" and "B." As far as I can tell (could be wrong) both versions are dated to somewhere between 1600 and 1700, though "A" is thought to be the older of the twain; both can be considered newer versions of "Robin Hood and the Potter", Child 121, one of the five oldest known Robin Hood ballads, which dates back to the 1490's (and which Pyle does not adapt). quote:NOW AFTER all these things had happened, and it became known to Robin Hood how the Sheriff had tried three times to make him captive, he said to himself, "If I have the chance, I will make our worshipful Sheriff pay right well for that which he hath done to me. Maybe I may bring him some time into Sherwood Forest and have him to a right merry feast with us." For when Robin Hood caught a baron or a squire, or a fat abbot or bishop, he brought them to the greenwood tree and feasted them before he lightened their purses. Pyle follows the text of "Butcher B" here, which is important because in Potter and in "Butcher A" Robin 1) fights the merchant 2) loses (as is traditional when Robin fights someone who isn't rich), 3) makes a deal after the fight. So Pyle is still sticking pretty closely to the ballad sources here, but all three versions were in Child's, so Pyle has chosen the one that was least violent and friendliest. As elsewhere, he's also added some pro-Saxon verbiage, and a sharp little in-character jest about "few call me honest." One bit of interesting analysis in J.C. Holt's Robin Hood is looking at the various "merchant meets Robin Hood" stories is thinking about who was the audience for these ballads? Holt's answer is that the audience was probably the rising merchant "yoeman" class -- not the very wealthy, but the butchers, tradesmen, etc. Which would help explain why the purported hero always gets his butt kicked by A_Random_Merchant_01, but also why they always become buds afterwards and then go after the real enemy -- greedy landlords, rich people, and tax collectors (that is, the sheriff). quote:When he came to Nottingham, he entered that part of the market where butchers stood, and took up his inn[Stand for selling] in the best place he could find. Next, he opened his stall and spread his meat upon the bench, then, taking his cleaver and steel and clattering them together, he trolled aloud in merry tones: Pyle really develops this a lot from the original ballad. In "Butcher B," Robin is just a bad merchant who doesn't understand meat prices, so he sells everything for a third of what it's worth; here, instead, Robin is just loving around because he wants to flirt with the girls in town; he's making merry, as is his wont. It wouldn't be in character for Pyle's Robin to be stupid, but it would be in character for him to be pranking people, so Pyle re-casts the episode (and in the process writes a bunch of brand-new ballad verse for Robin to sing). Come to think of it, in the original ballads, Robin and the other Merry Men rarely if ever sing ballads themselves (maybe that will change when we get to Robin Hood and Allan-a-Dale, we'll see I guess). I'd always assumed that was something Pyle was drawing from the ballad sources, but I guess it isn't. Having all the characters constantly stop the action to sing ballads is a weird narrative choice; the only other author I can think of who does it with Pyle's frequency is Tolkien, and Tolkien is the right age to have read a lot of Pyle as a child. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Aug 9, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2020 20:14 |
quote:
"Beshrew" apparently means "make wicked; deprave; invoke evil upon; curse; blame for a misfortune." Robin gets his angle! It's worth noting that at this point the Sheriff has never gotten a clear look at an undisguised Robin (which is probably why Pyle has placed this story as early as it is in the book). quote:There the Sheriff had already come in state, and with him many butchers. When Robin and those that were with him came in, all laughing at some merry jest he had been telling them, those that were near the Sheriff whispered to him, "Yon is a right mad blade, for he hath sold more meat for one penny this day than we could sell for three, and to whatsoever merry lass gave him a kiss he gave meat for nought." And others said, "He is some prodigal that hath sold his land for silver and gold, and meaneth to spend all right merrily." The joke here, of course, being that Robin is being completely honest with the Sheriff, stating his name outright; and he does have horned beasts, though what kind of beast the Sheriff wotteth not! The "horned beasts" joke is in both "Butcher A" and "Butcher B" but in neither is Robin ballsy enough to just state his own name outright brazenly to the Sheriff's face. In "Potter", the "horned beasts" are of course absent, and Robin competes in an archery contest, wins, and convinces the Sheriff that he knows exactly where Robin Hood is and can help the Sheriff trap him. So by following the "Butcher" version rather than the "Potter" version, Pyle avoids a repetitive archery contest, while also allowing space for a bit of a moral, as in "Butcher" the Sheriff is greedy and trying to scam a victim, rather than just trying to capture Robin and do his job. quote:The afternoon had come when the Sheriff mounted his horse and joined Robin Hood, who stood outside the gateway of the paved court waiting for him, for he had sold his horse and cart to a trader for two marks. Then they set forth upon their way, the Sheriff riding upon his horse and Robin running beside him. Thus they left Nottingham Town and traveled forward along the dusty highway, laughing and jesting together as though they had been old friends. But all the time the Sheriff said within himself, "Thy jest to me of Robin Hood shall cost thee dear, good fellow, even four hundred pounds, thou fool." For he thought he would make at least that much by his bargain. I will laugh at this joke every single time it appears in this book. quote:
Apparently, from J.C. Holt, this "highwayman asks traveller to dine with him" was a fairly common trope across various outlaw ballads, and may even have actually been common outlaw practice, under the theory that,hey, if you *sold* someone a *meal*, then it wasn't *robbery*, right? No crime! quote:
I really like that they actually do show the Sheriff a good time. Like, it's not fake; the Sheriff *does* get invited to the cool kids party for a night. quote:
And here we get the explicit moral that we didn't have in the earlier tales. It fits better here with the narrative structure of the original ballads, and Pyle doesn't waste a lot of time on it, but it's there. The other major change Pyle makes in these latter sections of Butcher is that both Potter and Butcher A include some sections of Robin flirting with the Sheriff's wife -- in Potter Robin gives her a ring, and in Butcher A she speaks some lines and it appears (though some relevant pages are missing) that Robin only spares the Sheriff as a favor to the Sheriff's wife (again implying a relationship between the wife and Robin). On the one hand, this means that Pyle just cut out one of the very few speaking roles for a female character in all the early ballad sources. On the other, though, this way he avoids any hint that Robin was carrying on with a married woman, again fitting in with Pyle's quaker morality (Pyle also was known for only teaching his students to draw from clothed models).
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2020 21:26 |
I found a neat article on how Robin moved from the ballads, through pulp serials, and into Pyle; it also gives us some more background on that Dumas version I mentioned on the last page:quote:
https://www.boldoutlaw.com/robages/robages8.html
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2020 23:46 |
Dareon posted:Unironically loving those villain names. That is some Phoenix Wright level poo poo. Just from skimming the first chapter of the Dumas version, even teen Robin was already shooting down arrows in flight with other arrows.
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# ¿ Aug 10, 2020 12:55 |
The next section is kindof a weird interlude, but it's right out of A Gest of Robyn Hode, the oldest Robin Hood ballad we have. More specifically, it's a chunk out of the middle; we'll get to the main storyline of the Gest later. In the Gest, Robin lends Little John to the service of a knight (we'll get to that story later); while in the service of the knight, Little John wins an archery contest in Nottingham; the Sheriff asks him to join up and, what the hell, Little John agrees and becomes the Sheriff's right-hand man as a prank, after which some hijinks ensue. Since Pyle is re-arranging the narrative order, he has to restructure the framing a bit. quote:SPRING HAD GONE since the Sheriff's feast in Sherwood, and summer also, and the mellow month of October had come. All the air was cool and fresh; the harvests were gathered home, the young birds were full fledged, the hops were plucked, and apples were ripe. But though time had so smoothed things over that men no longer talked of the horned beasts that the Sheriff wished to buy, he was still sore about the matter and could not bear to hear Robin Hood's name spoken in his presence. It's another fair at Nottingham and another archery contest; but this one's lame, so Robin and most of the other Merry Men decide not to bother. Still, Little John is feeling kinda bored just being merry all the time, he wants some hijinks, so he decides to go anyway. quote:Right merry were these Fair days at Nottingham, when the green before the great town gate was dotted with booths standing in rows, with tents of many-colored canvas, hung about with streamers and garlands of flowers, and the folk came from all the countryside, both gentle and common. In some booths there was dancing to merry music, in others flowed ale and beer, and in others yet again sweet cakes and barley sugar were sold; and sport was going outside the booths also, where some minstrel sang ballads of the olden time, playing a second upon the harp, or where the wrestlers struggled with one another within the sawdust ring, but the people gathered most of all around a raised platform where stout fellows played at quarterstaff. Just a great description here, and yeah, who wouldn't like to have someone stroll up to the beer booth and shout out "drinks are on me, everybody!" quote:
As far as I can tell, the entirety of this quarterstaff bout is Pyle's invention." I can't find any other sources in google or google books referencing our good friend Eric, though, excepting only Louis Rhead's 1912 Robin Hood which seems heavily based on Pyle's, so this sequence seems like a Pyle invention. It really would not surprise me to find out I'm wrong though, especially since Pyle specifically calls out "Eric O'Lincoln" as having had his "name sung in ballads throughout the countryside. When I read this as a kid, I always thought of this as one of the iconic fights in the book, and assumed it must be coming from a ballad original (especially since Pyle says Eric O'Lincoln featured in ballads). That said, the format of the sequence is classic and one I've seen in everything from folk stories to kung fu movies (specifically, i'm thinking of Five Fingers of Death which has almost this exact sequence just with kung fu instead of quarterstaves -- skip to 9:45 mark to about 12:30): Some travelling badass is beating up local challengers, and our local guy with real talent and skill steps up and you get a bout for the ages. quote:"Ay," quoth Little John, "had I but mine own good staff here, it would pleasure me hugely to crack thy knave's pate, thou saucy braggart! I wot it would be well for thee an thy cock's comb were cut!" Thus he spoke, slowly at first, for he was slow to move; but his wrath gathered headway like a great stone rolling down a hill, so that at the end he was full of anger. classic little hero's journey here, Little John initially refusing the call, being granted outside aid, then accepting. quote:Then each man stood in his place and measured the other with fell looks until he that directed the sport cried, "Play!" At this they stepped forth, each grasping his staff tightly in the middle. Then those that stood around saw the stoutest game of quarterstaff that e'er Nottingham Town beheld. At first Eric o' Lincoln thought that he would gain an easy advantage, so he came forth as if he would say, "Watch, good people, how that I carve you this cockerel right speedily"; but he presently found it to be no such speedy matter. Right deftly he struck, and with great skill of fence, but he had found his match in Little John. Once, twice, thrice, he struck, and three times Little John turned the blows to the left hand and to the right. Then quickly and with a dainty backhanded blow, he rapped Eric beneath his guard so shrewdly that it made his head ring again. Then Eric stepped back to gather his wits, while a great shout went up and all were glad that Nottingham had cracked Lincoln's crown; and thus ended the first bout of the game. Again, classic three-part structure, three rounds, ending in knockout -- and I like the specificity with which Pyle describes the winning blow, that's an actual quarterstaff move and a very powerful strike, like a baseball bat. And this also decisively establishes Little John as the champion Quarterstaff Man in the same way that Robin is Champion Archery Man, for a nice parallelism. They've both won tournaments. quote:And now each man stepped forward and shot in turn; but though each shot well, Little John was the best of all, for three times he struck the clout, and once only the length of a barleycorn from the center. "Hey for the tall archer!" shouted the crowd, and some among them shouted, "Hey for Reynold Greenleaf!" for this was the name that Little John had called himself that day. And he has Little John win an archery competition also, just for kicks, he's still a Merry Man so of course he can outshoot any mere Sheriff's man. Next chapter: hijinks ensue! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Aug 11, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 11, 2020 00:26 |
Cobalt-60 posted:
Well, they don't call him "Sly Sheriff of Nottingham", right? Cobalt-60 posted:What exactly does Little John do in the Sheriff's service? Since the historical Sheriff was an extortionate jerk, I'd think any principled man would avoid working for him; let alone one who's supposed to be on the other side. And what was Robin's response? Did Little John run into some of his old colleagues at the blue Boar and they go "Man, WTF?" anilEhilated posted:The descriptions of places are really great; they just make me want to sit down under yon greenwood tree and watch merry folk pass by. And these bring us to the next section! If you've ever had a job where one day you just wake up and go "You know what, I'm out!" . . . . quote:I. How Little John Lived at the Sheriff's What does Little John do at the Sheriff's? He gets faaaaat Most of the above paragraph, again, is pure Pyle; the original Gest is just quote:
So Pyle is adding significantly to Little John's character to make this all more believable and answer the obvious questions. LJ signs up as a prank, bro, but as pranks often do, it turns real, in part because it's winter and living the sweet life as the Sheriff's right hand man is a pretty good gig. Unfortunately, though, holding down a job means you have to get up on time in the morning, and sometimes that suuucks. quote:When he came downstairs he saw the Steward standing near the pantry door—a great, fat man, with a huge bundle of keys hanging to his girdle. Then Little John said, "Ho, Master Steward, a hungry man am I, for nought have I had for all this blessed morn. Therefore, give me to eat." The Steward is a wimpy little bureaucrat who keeps good men from their breakfast -- the worst sin. Keep in mind, though, that meals in medieval households were communal. Everyone's supposed to show up when the Master of the House eats -- that is, in this case, the Sheriff. Since Little John slept through breakfast entirely, and the Sheriff has now gone for the day, by rights and custom the Steward is correct here and Little John has missed his chance at breakfast. (see, e.g., https://oakden.co.uk/a-medieval-feast-menus-etiquette/2/ ) But Little John is Chaotic Good: not for him, the rules that bar a lusty yoeman from his feeding. quote:So saying, he crept into the pantry and looked about him to see if he could find something to appease his hunger. He saw a great venison pasty and two roasted capons, beside which was a platter of plover's eggs; moreover, there was a flask of sack and one of canary—a sweet sight to a hungry man. These he took down from the shelves and placed upon a sideboard, and prepared to make himself merry. Sack, Malmsey, and Canary were wines from the Canary Islands; they don't start being imported to Europe until the 1500's or so from what I can tell. "Sack" specifically is fortified wine, like modern sherry -- think Amontillado, or Courvoisier. "Capons" are castrated male chickens specifically fattened for eating: quote:Humankind has been eating chicken for a long time—at least since 4000 BC in Asia—but the capon’s history is a bit murkier. It seems the Romans were the first to castrate a young male chicken and then fatten it, when a law was passed during a period of drought forbidding the fattening of hens, as it was deemed a waste of precious grain. Wily breeders skirted the letter of the law by instead castrating roosters, and fattening them for sale. The name “capon” comes from the Latin “capo,” meaning “cut.” Through the Middle Ages, capons were especially popular with the clergy and kings, and thus popularized throughout Europe, where capon was stuffed, roasted, stewed and baked into pies. In present-day France and Italy, capons are traditionally served at Christmas. https://www.dartagnan.com/what-is-a-capon-how-to-cook.html The venison "pasty" is a meat pie. Americans don't really eat meat pies any more, except for the Chicken Pot Pie, but here's a recipe for a venison pasty (that's "paaah-sty" with a long a). After the eatin', of course, comes the singin': quote:"Now," quoth Little John, "thy voice is right round and sweet, jolly lad. I doubt not thou canst sing a ballad most blithely; canst thou not?" I can't find originals in google for either of these songs beyond Pyle, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there. Still, a stout yoeman's gotta do what a stout yoeman's gotta do, and they said they were gonna fight, so, I mean, wouldn't want to be unmanly quote:Then they both stepped forth into the broad passage that led to the Steward's pantry, where each man drew his sword again and without more ado fell upon the other as though he would hew his fellow limb from limb. Then their swords clashed upon one another with great din, and sparks flew from each blow in showers. So they fought up and down the hall for an hour and more, neither striking the other a blow, though they strove their best to do so; for both were skillful at the fence; so nothing came of all their labor. Ever and anon they rested, panting; then, after getting their wind, at it they would go again more fiercely than ever. At last Little John cried aloud, "Hold, good Cook!" whereupon each rested upon his sword, panting. Of course, the Cook and Little John being bros, they swing their swords for a full hour but then realize, hey, we're bros! Let's go be forest bros instead! Pyle is reversing the order of everything here; in the Gest, the Cook and LJ fight first, then chow down, and nobody sings. Pyle's order is a little more comical and definitely more bro-tastic. And Little John brings the Sheriff's plate back, and the band thinks it's funny . . . but Robin doesn't. This sequence -- with Robin saying "hey, we already burned the Sheriff once, the Sheriff isn't that bad a guy, this is overdoing it", is entirely absent from the ballad and Pyle's addition; in the Gest, LJ just gets the plate and then brings in the Sheriff also because, hell, it's funny. Either way, though, the Sheriff gets another visit to Robin's Forest Inn -- Robin's not going to stand in the way of a good joke! quote:Little John ran for full five miles till he came to where the Sheriff of Nottingham and a gay company were hunting near the forest. When Little John came to the Sheriff he doffed his cap and bent his knee. "God save thee, good master," quoth he. The sequence with the Sheriff getting served by his own cook with his own goblet is in the ballad, but of course in the original, Robin's men keep the silver instead of giving it back; they do let the Sheriff go, but they make him promise to always help out Robin's men from now on and never prosecute them. And the moral about hiring servants is new with Pyle also. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Aug 11, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 11, 2020 23:18 |
I also really love "thou great purse of fat"
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2020 01:52 |
Dareon posted:This sort of thing bothers me if I let it. On the one hand, historical accuracy should be portrayed as closely as possible, it's absurd for Arthurian knights to be going around on horseback in full plate with longswords and lances when Camelot, if it even existed, was sometime around the fall of Rome (When both horses and swords were tiny due to lack of husbandry and metalworking knowledge respectively). On the other hand, it's hard to get any information whatsoever about fighting styles back then, all the European martial arts manuals I'm finding with a quick scan of Wikipedia date from the 1400s or later, with only a few as early as the 1300s. And to be fair to Pyle, this kind of fencing would have been the most accurate source he had available to him at the time; I don't believe things like Hans Talhoffer's Fight Book were known or available until fairly recently, especially in America. And, after all, we're in the land of Fancy; where every ballad from 1200 to 1700 is happening at once. There's being accurate to the nominal setting (1180 or so) and there's being accurate to the contemporary setting of the ballad sources (that is, 1400 to 1600 ish). Arthur wears full plate and rides horseback because most modern authors are following Mallory, who wrote in the 1400's and gave everyone high medieval equipage; similarly here, I think Pyle has a decent defense in that he's keeping everything roughly appropriate for the dating of his source material if not appropriate for the actual dates in his text. After we've gone through the whole book I'll make a detailed post on "Historical Robin" to help close out the thread, it's a more complex topic than I'd expected. Dareon posted:
Check out Brotherhood of the Wolf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-So-yYHxMY&t=62s Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Aug 12, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2020 13:15 |
Comically, I hadn't realized that there were performances of a lot of these ballads up on Youtube. (These first two are kinda low-quality versions, just a guy in his living room): A Gest of Robyn Hode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_FiUMJZvak Robin's Progress to Nottingham:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqGVge_I4mQ Robin Hood and Little John: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD4ICsY__cw Robin Hood and Little John [remix]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLhYSw67pdg Robin Hood and the Tinker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6UJE6zjGwY Robin Hood and the Butcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYGuo4MPpzA Robin Rescuing Will Stutely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jtxm9NN9KE and (foreshadowing!) : Robin Hood and the Tanner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpG4bzdmyjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmgFIvbdY0 Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Aug 12, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2020 18:34 |
The next few episodes are basically a "getting the band back together" montage -- episode after episode that explain how the various famous members of the Merry Men join up. The next of these in sequence is Arthur a Bland, the Tanner, famed subject of "Robin Hood and the Tanner," Child Ballad 126 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmgFIvbdY0 Pyle transposes the fight and sets it between Arthur a Bland and Little John instead. quote:ONE FINE DAY, not long after Little John had left abiding with the Sheriff and had come back, with his worship's cook, to the merry greenwood, as has just been told, Robin Hood and a few chosen fellows of his band lay upon the soft sward beneath the greenwood tree where they dwelled. The day was warm and sultry, so that while most of the band were scattered through the forest upon this mission and upon that, these few stout fellows lay lazily beneath the shade of the tree, in the soft afternoon, passing jests among themselves and telling merry stories, with laughter and mirth. Someone has to go get all that cloth of Lincoln Green! And Little John has been lazing it at the Sheriff's so it's his job. quote:So he strode whistling along the leafy forest path that led to Fosse Way, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, until at last he came to where the path branched, leading on the one hand onward to Fosse Way, and on the other, as well Little John knew, to the merry Blue Boar Inn. Here Little John suddenly ceased whistling and stopped in the middle of the path. First he looked up and then he looked down, and then, tilting his cap over one eye, he slowly scratched the back part of his head. For thus it was: at the sight of these two roads, two voices began to alarum within him, the one crying, "There lies the road to the Blue Boar Inn, a can of brown October, and a merry night with sweet companions such as thou mayst find there"; the other, "There lies the way to Ancaster and the duty thou art sent upon." Now the first of these two voices was far the louder, for Little John had grown passing fond of good living through abiding at the Sheriff's house; so, presently, looking up into the blue sky, across which bright clouds were sailing like silver boats, and swallows skimming in circling flight, quoth he, "I fear me it will rain this evening, so I'll e'en stop at the Blue Boar till it passes by, for I know my good master would not have me wet to the skin." So, without more ado, off he strode down the path that lay the way of his likings. Now there was no sign of any foul weather, but when one wishes to do a thing, as Little John did, one finds no lack of reasons for the doing. This whole sequence is of course an addition by Pyle, but it's perfectly well in character for Little John as he's been established so far (his defining character traits being that he is a) very large and b) not fond of doing his job). Despite everyone living outdoors, this is the only mention of rain or clouds we'll get in the entire book, apart from the Preface announcing that in the land of Fancy, "no rain falls but what rolls off our backs like April showers off the backs of sleek drakes." quote:Up he rose at the dawn of the next day, and, taking his stout pikestaff in his hand, he set forth upon his journey once more, as though he would make up for lost time. Apart from substituting Little John for Robin, this exchange -- our hero calling himself a "forester," and offering to let Arthur pass due to having a slightly shorter staff -- are straight from the ballad text. quote:So, without more ado, each gripped his staff in the middle, and, with fell and angry looks, they came slowly together. The actual description of the fight here is mostly from Pyle also; in the ballad they just hit each other a few times, Robin eventually cries "hold" , therre a few jokes about tanning each other's hide, and that's it. Instead, here we get Little John's one and only loss at quarterstaff -- and he's got two excuses, one that he got fat at the Sheriff and another that the other guy was wearing leather armor on his head. Still, he lost, and Robin saw, so you know he's gonna catch some grief over that one. Hence our implicit moral: do your assigned work, and don't get fat and lazy! quote:"What may be thy name, good fellow?" said Robin, next, turning to the Tanner. Tanning was a fairly dirty and unpleasant job even by medieval standards, so maybe it's no surprise good Arthur wants out. It's interesting that Robin mentions Will Scathelock here, because we'll be meeting a slightly different version of Will in the next adventure. Onward! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Aug 13, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2020 21:28 |
Robin Hood and Will Scarlet Will Scarlet is one of the oldest members of Robin's band, present in the earliest ballads, and in a sense we've already met him, or a version of him -- Robin just mentioned Will Scathelock in the last story. "Scathelock", "Scarlock" and "Scarlet" were originally just different versions of the same character. He's probably the most frequently-named member of the band after Robin and Little John, showing up under one or another name in seven different Child ballads: Gest (Child 117), Robin Hood his Death (Child 120), Robin Hood and the Newly Revived (Child 128), "Robin Hood's Delight" (Child 136), "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (Child 123), "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne" (Child 118), and "Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon" (Child 129). In some ballads, yet another version of the character shows up under the name Gandelyn or Gamble Gold (you may have heard one of these, actually, as Child ballad 132, "Robin Hood and the Pedlar", was featured as a tavern song in Assasin's Creed: Black Flag). Traditionally, Will Scarlet is the most skilled swordsman of the Merry Men, just as Little John is the quarterstaff champ and Robin is the bowman. Over time, though, the different names developed into different traditions, and as early as the 1500's, "Scathelock" and "Scarlet" are being treated as two different people, where "Scathelock" or "Scarlock" was a more grubby and violent character known for his strength ("Scathelock" apparently means "lock-smasher") and "Scarlet" was the more dandified, fancy man character wearing fancy clothes. "Will Scarlet" may in a sense be a backroynm-as-character -- "Scathelock" changing into "Scarlet" over time, "Scarlet" being associated with fancy expensive clothes, and a new fancy-man character thus emerging and splitting off into his own side tradition. Pyle follows that split, with both a Scathelock and a Scarlet in the band, but he's going to spend a lot more time on fancy Will Scarlet; he's drawing a bit on all the above here but the most direct source is Child Ballad 128, "Robin Hood Newly Revived", basically written as a Will Scarlet origin story. (You can listen to a version of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK-sm6xNM8Y ) quote:THUS THEY traveled along the sunny road, three stout fellows such as you could hardly match anywhere else in all merry England. Many stopped to gaze after them as they strode along, so broad were their shoulders and so sturdy their gait. I can't stay mad at you! quote:After they had traveled some distance, the day being warm and the road dusty, Robin Hood waxed thirsty; so, there being a fountain of water as cold as ice, just behind the hedgerow, they crossed the stile and came to where the water bubbled up from beneath a mossy stone. Here, kneeling and making cups of the palms of their hands, they drank their fill, and then, the spot being cool and shady, they stretched their limbs and rested them for a space. We could talk about a possible gay reading of this passage, but I'm not sure it holds up if we care about authorial intent, because I doubt such was even on Pyle's radar. Still, it's there and maybe someone with better analytic chops than I could make some hay there, but I'll leave that angle aside for now. There's the Norman / Saxon split of course and some class divisions, of course. Main thing, though, is that Robin has decided to start a fight in advance, without thinking things through or talking first, and we know by now exactly how that's going to work out for him. quote:Meantime the stranger, who had been walking so slowly that all this talk was held before he came opposite the place where they were, neither quickened his pace nor seemed to see that such a man as Robin Hood was in the world. So Robin stood in the middle of the road, waiting while the other walked slowly forward, smelling his rose, and looking this way and that, and everywhere except at Robin. Methinks good Robin may have bitten off more than he can digest! (But note how this twist incorporates both the fancy Scarlet and the brutal Scathelock traditions: dude is fancy and also a beast). I love how polite and friendly they both are to each other. The bit with discarding the sword for quarterstaves parallels the original ballad, where initially they are going to shoot arrows at each other, then decide to "step it down" and fight with swords instead. quote:Well did Robin Hood hold his own that day as a mid-country yeoman. This way and that they fought, and back and forth, Robin's skill against the stranger's strength. The dust of the highway rose up around them like a cloud, so that at times Little John and the Tanner could see nothing, but only hear the rattle of the staves against one another. Thrice Robin Hood struck the stranger; once upon the arm and twice upon the ribs, and yet had he warded all the other's blows, only one of which, had it met its mark, would have laid stout Robin lower in the dust than he had ever gone before. At last the stranger struck Robin's cudgel so fairly in the middle that he could hardly hold his staff in his hand; again he struck, and Robin bent beneath the blow; a third time he struck, and now not only fairly beat down Robin's guard, but gave him such a rap, also, that down he tumbled into the dusty road. Yeah, we knew that was going to happen. I like how Little John gets his digs in, to make up for Robin giving him poo poo over the fight with the Tanner. But maybe they should've asked each other's name first? quote:"My name is Gamwell," answered the other. So it's ok Robin lost! Scarlett's his own nephew (think back to Robin's comments about the guy's likely family a few paragraphs ago) and Robin taught him how to use the quarterstaff in the first place. He's just younger, stronger Robin! Note this also implies a fair bit about Robin's social class; he may not be gentry himself, but he clearly has near relatives who are. It's also worth remembering that so far this makes two members of the band who've actually done anything specific to get themselves outlawed. Little John and the Tinker and the Tanner and the rest just join up for the hell of it and because they want to shoot deer in future; Robin and Will though, they've both killed people. quote:"Well, by the faith of my heart," quoth Robin Hood, "for anyone escaping the law, thou wast taking it the most easily that ever I beheld in all my life. Whenever did anyone in all the world see one who had slain a man, and was escaping because of it, tripping along the highway like a dainty court damsel, sniffing at a rose the while?" You know what, it did look like rain! It still does! Let's all go back home and do our work some other day! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Aug 13, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 13, 2020 15:10 |
I just realized the reason I've had "little bunny foo foo hoppin through the forest" running through my head for the past two weeks is because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLhYSw67pdg
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# ¿ Aug 13, 2020 20:18 |
The Adventure with Midge the Miller's Son Midge (or Much, or Moche) the Miller's Son is one of the oldest members of the Merry Men, featured in the earliest ballads ("A Gest of Robyn Hode", "Robin Hood and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne") right alongside Little John. He's always a relatively minor character, though, to the extent that it's not even really clear if he's Midge, the son of the Miller, or the son of Midge the Miller. He doesn't (as far as I've been able to find) have a separate origin or "joining the band" story in the ballads, so Pyle gives him one here. First though, we're gonna pad this out with some hearty fare and some manly songs: quote:WHEN THE four yeomen had traveled for a long time toward Sherwood again, high noontide being past, they began to wax hungry. Quoth Robin Hood, "I would that I had somewhat to eat. Methinks a good loaf of white bread, with a piece of snow-white cheese, washed down with a draught of humming ale, were a feast for a king." I searched local british cheeses for Lincoln, Sherwood, and Nottingham, and found this: quote:Traditional Lincolnshire Poacher is available in a cylindrical shape, coated by a rind appearing similar to granite. It is a slow-maturing cheese that takes between 12-24 months to develop a golden, straw-coloured yellow pate and spotted brown and grey colour rind. One gets daily and seasonal variation in terms of both flavour and texture but all-in-all the cheese has both cheddar and gruyere-like qualities. It has a smooth texture and a strong taste. In summer, notes of pineapple, toasted nuts and grassy dominate the flavour profile while in winter the taste becomes savoury and almost meaty. Lincolnshire Poacher pairs well with full-bodied reds and whites and beer. quote:At last Will Scarlet looked at a small piece of bread he still held in his hand, and quoth he, "Methinks I will give this to the sparrows." So, throwing it from him, he brushed the crumbs from his jerkin. It's hard to search this song, because most of the google hits are for versions of this book. I did find that "Merry Blossom Time" with these lyrics was published as sheet music by Arthur Bird, but as far as I can tell that sheet music was published in 1896, well after Pyle; . And I can't seem to find an actual copy of the sheet music in question, just references to it. Another copyright entry under the same title is credited to Anna Risher in the 1920's. So this may be a traditional song, or it may be Pyle's; it seems a little sophisticated for a traditional song, but as a slightly fancy song it's well-suited to our Will. quote:"I know not," quoth Arthur, smiling, with his head on one side, like a budding lass that is asked to dance, "I know not that I can match our sweet friend's song; moreover, I do verily think that I have caught a cold and have a certain tickling and huskiness in the windpipe." I actually found a Jstor article that mentions this one, and appears to confirm that it's Pyle's own writing (though I can't access the full article); it seems like Pyle may have written a lot of the songs in this book originally as independent poetry submissions for Harper's. This song is, of course, a version of the "loathly dame" story featured in Child Ballad 32, "King Henry", and that Chaucer drew on for The Wife of Bath's Tale. quote:"Nay," said Little John, "I have none as fair as that merry Arthur has trolled. They are all poor things that I know. Moreover, my voice is not in tune today, and I would not spoil even a tolerable song by ill singing." The phrase "Hey nonny nonny" is of course from Shakespeare and many other places, essentially the elizabethan equivalent of "doo wah diddy". Little John's song is simpler than the other two, and filled with a lot of trite and conventional images ("cock doth crow" etc) ; maybe it was a fragment Pyle didn't feel like finishing? Maybe Robin didn't want to listen to the rest of the song? quote:Little John looked whither Robin Hood pointed. "Truly," quoth he, after a time, "I think yon fellow is a certain young miller I have seen now and then around the edge of Sherwood; a poor wight, methinks, to spoil a good song about." Here he goes again! But I like how Robin is emerging as a consistent character: sly, jesting, kind, averse to shedding blood yet no coward, but always getting himself in over his head through overconfidence. quote:"Hold, friend!" cried Robin to the Miller; whereupon he turned slowly, with the weight of the bag upon his shoulder, and looked at each in turn all bewildered, for though a good stout man his wits did not skip like roasting chestnuts. As far as I can tell this bit with the flour is Pyle's invention -- it doesn't seem to be in a ballad, but could have been in a play or other source. [ EDIT: it's from "Robin Hood and the Beggar," Child Ballad 134, which we'll talk about in more depth later]. Up till now, nobody believing he was actually Robin has always been helpful; now it turns around and bites him. quote:Now it chanced that Will Stutely and a party of Robin's men were in the glade not far from where this merry sport was going forward. Hearing the hubbub of voices, and blows that sounded like the noise of a flail in the barn in wintertime, they stopped, listening and wondering what was toward. Quoth Will Stutely, "Now if I mistake not there is some stout battle with cudgels going forward not far hence. I would fain see this pretty sight." So saying, he and the whole party turned their steps whence the noise came. When they had come near where all the tumult sounded they heard the three blasts of Robin's bugle horn. Robin enjoys a good jest as much when he's the butt of it as any other time. So Midge joins up -- another honest tradesman corrupted, and another "big dude gets called Tiny" joke name -- and we've almost gotten the whole band back together. And Little John's character is emerging consistently too -- Big, loyal, not exactly careful. Next up: we're still missing two essential members of the band. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 14, 2020 15:40 |
When I think bread and cheese, I always think a soft brie.
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# ¿ Aug 14, 2020 17:26 |
Wilbur Swain posted:
Google tells me that's only a concern for people with "weakened immune systems", so it's all good, right? A note on pacing: I'm trying to do a dive post per day but I may fall behind. If people are ahead or behind please don't feel limited to only comment on the current section -- I'd rather have people talking than feeling they need to catch up or wait on others.
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# ¿ Aug 15, 2020 04:50 |
The next few sections are going to combine two major ballads, "Robin Hood and Alan a Dale" (Child Ballad 138), and "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" (Child Ballad 123). Of the two, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar" is far older, while "Robin Hood and Alan a Dale" is relatively modern, dating to the 17th century. Despite the obvious synergy (you'll see why when we get to it), Pyle was the first to link these two ballads into one unified story. Robin Hood and Allan-a-Dale This is one of the latest additions to the Robin Hood corpus. The 17th century saw a profusion of Robin Hood stories but most of them (Robin marrying Clothinda Queen of the Shepherdesses; Robin going to sea with the navy; Robin defending London from Turkish giants; etc) haven't "stuck" and become part of the recurring legendarium; this one has. quote:IT HAS just been told how three unlucky adventures fell upon Robin Hood and Little John all in one day bringing them sore ribs and aching bones. So next we will tell how they made up for those ill happenings by a good action that came about not without some small pain to Robin. They haven't really robbed anyone lately, have they? Not since the Sheriff! One parallel here that gets discussed in a lot of the scholarship is that in the various King Arthur tales and ballads, there's a recurring convention that Arthur will not sit down to eat without a guest or an adventure of some kind happening first. Similarly, a lot of the Robin Hood stories open with Robin sending his men out to find a "guest" for dinner -- that is, a potential victim -- so there's a kind of parallelism here and a kind of inversion, Robin's seat under the Greenwood Tree mirroring and inverting Arthur's seat at Camelot. In this particular case, though, that's a parallel being added by Pyle, not present in the specific source ballad (Child 138). quote:So, having chosen four more stout fellows, Will Stutely and his band set forth to Fosse Way, to find whether they might not come across some rich guest to feast that day in Sherwood with Robin and his band. Man, some days you go fishing and you waste all day just sitting in the grass eating and drinking and taking naps, and you don't even catch anything. What's that about a bad day robbing being better than a good day peasanting quote:
Everything up to this point has been Pyle's addition to the ballad, which just opens with Robin seeing Alan happy one day, then sad the next, then Robin sends out Little John and Midge (under the name "Nick the Miller's Son") to bring Alan around. I like how Pyle develops the personalities of the minor characters from tale to tale. Stutely is a little more cautious than he used to be, not hard to figure out why. It's a good thing Scarlett is here -- as a fancy man himself, he understands these sensitive types. (In one early version,found in one of the Sloane manuscripts, the main character in this story was not Alan, but Will Scarlock). quote:The youth did as he was bidden and, with bowed head and sorrowful step, accompanied the others, walking beside Will Scarlet. So they wended their way through the forest. The bright light faded from the sky and a glimmering gray fell over all things. From the deeper recesses of the forest the strange whispering sounds of night-time came to the ear; all else was silent, saving only for the rattling of their footsteps amid the crisp, dry leaves of the last winter. At last a ruddy glow shone before them here and there through the trees; a little farther and they came to the open glade, now bathed in the pale moonlight. In the center of the open crackled a great fire, throwing a red glow on all around. At the fire were roasting juicy steaks of venison, pheasants, capons, and fresh fish from the river. All the air was filled with the sweet smell of good things cooking. I like the interplay here between the rough Merry Men all teasing and laughing at the kid, but kind Robin, like Scarlet, he understands these sensitive types too. For all his slyness, Robin's leadership isn't first in his head, it's in his heart. That said, how old is Robin now? He can't be that much older than Alan! quote:"Methinks thou art overyoung to be perplexed with trouble," quoth Robin kindly; then, turning to the others, he cried, "Come, lads, busk ye and get our feast ready; only thou, Will Scarlet, and thou, Little John, stay here with me." And that's why Disney made Little John a Bear! He's adorable when he's angry. Saint Francis was canonized in 1228, so he's actually not that anachronistic at all. The important think in this passage though is social class. Ellen's father is a "Franklin", which isn't a title or rank, it just means that he is not a serf -- as low as you can get in the social order without being property. Robin and his band, as "Yoemen," are all of higher social class than a mere "franklin". "Sir Stephen of Trent," by contrast, is at least a landed knight, and may even be higher nobility, because Trent is a village and parish, so holding Trent in fief would make him a fairly major landholder. quote:Then up spoke Will Scarlet. "Methinks it seemeth but ill done of the lass that she should so quickly change at others' bidding, more especially when it cometh to the marrying of a man as old as this same Sir Stephen. I like it not in her, Allan." Thanks for saying it, Will, we were all thinking it quote:
Way to show some fire, Allan. Good for you. quote:
Sly Robin has a plan! In the ballad, this is a flat exchange rather than Robin doing a favor -- quote:
Pyle's Robin just helps because helping is his nature. The "Banns" are the Banns of Marriage, the ancestor of the "speak now or forever hold your peace" bit you've seen in romcoms. The idea was, you announce the marriage in advance, then at the wedding, people have a chance to show up and say things like "he's already married to me!" or "they don't know it, but they're half-siblings!" or whatever else. Remember this is a society where divorce is almost impossible, so it's really important that you get it right in advance -- no takebacks! "Pope Joan" is a pseudo-historical and legendary female pope who supposedly disguised herself as a man, rose through the church hierarchy, and became Pope due to her skills and merits, only to be discovered as female when she gave birth and subsequently expunged from the historical record. . Importantly, for much of the middle ages, the legend was thought to be historical and true, even by Catholics, and was widely believed for centuries. quote:"But," quoth Robin, "Fountain Abbey is a good hundred miles from here. An we would help this lad, we have no time to go thither and back before his true love will be married. Nought is to be gained there, coz." This is where Pyle starts to interweave our second ballad, "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar." The traditional ballad refers to Fountain Abbey, which is eighty miles to the north of Sherwood -- almost a two hour drive today. And it's in the title, so Pyle can't just elide it. So he invents a smaller, more local fountain to be the Friar's hermitage. What the gently caress does "curtal" mean? "curtal" means "brief", "cut short", or "docked"; "docked" can also mean "punished" or "censured" in an ecclesiastical context, so there may be a pun there indicating he's been punished for something. Checking the scholarship, though, quote:The term curtal has raised discussion. Most feel it refers to a shorter gown, worn for mobility: friars were associated with travel among the ordinary people, which was both a source of corruption and also, as in the Robin Hood tradition, popular acceptability. A "tucked friar" is another way of expressing this https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/robin-hood-and-the-curtal-friar Before we leave good Allan for the moment, though -- now we have a professional minstrel, you didn't think we were getting out of here without a song, did you? quote:
This song appears to be Pyle's riff on the Swan maiden legend; Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake had premiered at the Bolshoi Ballet just a few years previously, in 1877, although from what I can tell it did not tour in America prior to Pyle's publication of this book. And it's a perfect choice for Alan to sing to the band, too; up till now, we've heard lots of jolly songs, but Alan is a professional: he picks a song that's on topic (weddings) and a song of deep lore and magic. And of course Alan joins the band. And now Robin is even more like a Lord of the Forest than he was before; he's forming a court, complete with a professional minstrel. Next time: Robin gets religion! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 15, 2020 16:41 |
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# ¿ May 8, 2024 15:14 |
Cobalt-60 posted:This I must know more about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_and_the_Prince_of_Aragon It's a child ballad! I'm pretty sure there are early King Arthur tales with virtually the same plot, though I can't remember the title. Come to think of it, Gawaine and Will Scarlett are even somewhat parallel characters (the Lord's nephew, known for fantastic strength) although that's a bit of a stretch since Gawaine and Scarlett are generally presented as fairly different personalities. edit: here's the text https://d.lib.rochester.edu/robin-hood/text/child-ballad-129-robin-hood-and-the-prince-of-aragon Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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# ¿ Aug 16, 2020 02:37 |