Bandit Territories: British Outlaws and Their Traditions ed. by Helen Phillips (review)

Contemporaneous with a number of other essays written about the legend of Robin Hood by children’s literature scholars, Helen Phillips’s 2008 Bandit Territories: British Outlaws and Their Traditions nonetheless has gathered together a number of highly respected critics from medieval as well as children’s literature studies to offer readers a series of fascinating insights into the history and culture of British outlaws. The collection examines fugitives like Scotland’s William Wallace and Wales’s Fouke Fitz Waryn. Most of the essays, however, focus on the most famous of all British bandits, Robin Hood. Of the many excellent chapters in the collection that examine Robin Hood and those with whom he is forever associated such as Maid Marian and Little John, the two or three that have a direct bearing on children’s literature are the focus of this review.

David Blamires, in his “Maid Marian in Twentieth Century Children’s Books” begins by noting that contrary to what we might think, “Maid Marian is a late arrival in the development of the Robin Hood stories” (44). Blamires argues that in fact Maid Marian does not appear as Robin’s love interest until the early 1600s even though the Robin Hood legend had existed since the early medieval period. And, Blamires continues, not until the early nineteenth century does Maid Marian become the “central figure of a romantic novel” (45). In short, there is no one single image of Maid Marian there at the beginning and still with us today. Twentieth-century retellings of the Robin Hood legend that focus on Maid Marian and her relationship to Robin Hood have a long, fascinating, and diverse history that modern readers tend to forget.

In the remainder of his chapter, Blamires examines those twentieth-century retellings in the context of two, related points: first, that the image of Maid Marian changes over the twentieth century; second, that despite the changes, what’s constant is her relationship with Robin. Blamires explains that over the course of the twentieth century, Maid Marian goes from being idealized to being portrayed more realistically. Given the emergence of the modern Women’s Movement in the post-World War II era, this is not surprising. Thus, in H.E. Marshall’s 1905 Stories of Robin Hood, Maid Marian is described in romantic fairy tale terms as befits the post- Howard Pyle image of Robin Hood as a wronged nobleman who robs the rich and gives to the poor. This idealized image of Maid Marian remains more or less the same until the late 1990s when Michael Morpurgo, rather shockingly, describes her as an “albino” (47) who rejects Robin’s advances and keeps company with outcasts such as “hunchbacks, cripples, and lepers” (47). Blamires also reports that not only does Maid Marian’s appearance change over the course of the twentieth century, so do other aspects of her. Gradually over time, writers tried to make her more active. Of the many versions that attempt to make her more physically lively, not so much just an idealized love interest for Robin, Robin McKinley’s 1988 The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest is well known among Robin Hood scholars. In this version, Marian is a much better archer than Robin. She is brave, independent, and intellectually capable, according to Blamires, a shining example of female heroism demanded by feminist theorists looking for positive role models to counteract the cultural stereotype of women as passive and dependent on their male counterparts. More recent versions of the Robin Hood legend that place Maid Marian in the middle of the action, Blamires argues, are really just spin-offs from McKinley’s prototypical vision of Maid Marian as a modern woman, an equal to Robin Hood.

Jeffrey Richards’s “Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Cold War Chivalry” examines a number of canonical Robin Hood stories and their television/film adaptations, specifically those released during the 1950s in England and America. Thus Richards notes “Sword of Sherwood Forest...