The Original Robin Hood: Traditional Ballads and Plays Including All Medieval Sources by Thor Ewing

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Original Robin Hood: Traditional Ballads and Plays Including All Medieval Sources by Thor Ewing Alexander L. Kaufman thor ewing, trans., The Original Robin Hood: Traditional Ballads and Plays Including All Medieval Sources. Edinburgh: Welkin Books Ltd., 2020. Pp. 263. isbn: 978–1–910075–13–5. $14.99. There are very few contemporary English translations of the Middle English and Early Modern English Robin Hood poems, plays/games, and chronicle entries. For a character and a tradition that is seemingly reborn and reimagined with each new era or after a major event, and one that continues to be recreated in various forms of media, the dearth of translations is surprising. Excellent translations do exist by Thomas H. Ohlgren (2005) and Lesley Coote (2020), though they are limited in the number of Robin Hood texts that they include. Thor Ewing's audience for his anthology is the general reader, and he is explicit when it comes to the aim of the book, which is 'to put the old poems, ballads and plays of Robin Hood back into a language that anyone can enjoy' (p. 10). Indeed, [End Page 86] these are very enjoyable translations, but Ewing takes a number of creative liberties with the source material in order to craft them. Moreover, there is another aim to his volume, and that is to explore, in a lengthy introduction, the historical origins of Robin Hood and other characters that dwell within the literary tradition. Thus, the translated works are meant to augment his evidence that he has located the origins of the original Robin Hood and of some of his associates. The works that Ewing translates are organized into four sections. The Gest of Robin Hood is first and resides alone. We then have 'Ballads of Robin Hood,' which contains twelve poems that are arrange according to the life cycle of the outlaw. 'Plays of Robin Hood' has the Paston-associated Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Notyngham, as well as Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter that were first included in William Copland's 1560 edition of the Gest. Lastly, there is an appendix, which comprises translations from chronicle entries (Wynton, Bower, the Polychronicon, and Mair), thirteenth-century legal records, a few early allusions to the legend, and music scores for ballads and songs (which is a welcome inclusion). For the medieval texts, Ewing bases his translations mostly on Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren's TEAMS edition Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales; for the later works, he relies heavily on Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. For a book that calls itself The Original Robin Hood, there is an inherent problem: with a translation, we are moving further away from the original sources of the Robin Hood literary tradition. Ewing's poems place the reader within his present artistic moment. Additionally, Ewing has taken certain liberties with a number of Robin Hood texts that are incomplete: 'I've tried to keep my own additions to a minimum, but I have felt the need to "restore" more than usual of the ballad of "Robin Hood's Death"' (p. 55). To this poem, he has added twelve verses; to Robin Hood and the Monk, where a single leaf of the manuscript is missing (and thus some 48 lines are absent), Ewing has added 'two blocks of one-and-a-half verses' (p. 56); and to Monk and the poem Robin Hood and the Potter, he has 'added occasional half verses to keep the regular pattern of four-line verses' (p. 56). Ewing unconvincingly argues that the opening of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne was part of a now-lost version of Robin Hood and the Monk and that the dream narrative in the former has no bearing in the plot of that poem; as such, some eighteen verses are excised from Gisborne, but two verses from the opening of Robin Hood and the Butcher from the Percy folio (where the only extant version of Gisborne is found) are added to the opening of Gisborne. Ewing in his introduction attempts to suggest that the original Robin Hood was not a yeoman (as...