Arthur & Robin
A knowledge portal on the two great English legend-cycles, organised not by chronology or by character but by worldview: the successive, incompatible answers different centuries have given to the question of what these stories are for. It is also the content layer for two games, ARTHURCRAWL and ROBINCRAWL.
The twelve worldviews
| Cycle | Worldview | Period | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matter of Britain | Revival, Screen and Afterlife | 1816 - present | After two centuries of neglect Arthur returns as a Victorian moral problem, then as a film genre, then as a permanent argument about whether he was real. |
| Matter of Britain | Geoffrey's Pseudohistory | c. 1136 - c. 1200 | Geoffrey of Monmouth invents the King Arthur that everyone afterwards argues with: a dynastic conqueror with a continental empire, a prophesying magician, and a nephew who destroys him. |
| Matter of Britain | Chretien's Courtly Romance | c. 1170 - c. 1191 | Chretien de Troyes turns Arthur's court into a departure lounge: the king sits still and the interesting person is the knight who rides out with an unresolved private difficulty. |
| Matter of Britain | The Grail Made Christian | c. 1200 - c. 1240 | Robert de Boron gives Chretien's mysterious graal a genealogy running back to the Crucifixion, and the Cistercian-flavoured Queste then uses it to fail almost every knight at Arthur's court. |
| Matter of Britain | Malory's Fellowship and Its Fall | c. 1469 - 1485 | A knight writing in prison compresses the entire French cycle into English prose and finds in it a single subject: men who love each other destroying each other because their loyalties do not nest. |
| Matter of Britain | Arthur of the Welsh | c. 600 - c. 1100 | Before Arthur was a king he was a marvel-magnet: a leader of a warband who fights witches, giants, cats and the dead, and whose men are named in lists that read like charms. |
| Matter of the Greenwood | Robert, Earl of Huntington | 1569 - 1601 | In 1598 Anthony Munday puts a coronet on Robin Hood's head, and the yeoman becomes a wronged aristocrat who has been in exile from his rightful estates ever since. |
| Matter of the Greenwood | Ritson's Radical | 1795 - 1883 | Joseph Ritson, a vegetarian antiquary with revolutionary sympathies, collects every Robin Hood ballad he can find in 1795 and turns a passing remark of John Major's into a political programme. |
| Matter of the Greenwood | The Technicolor Robin | 1922 - 1973 | Warner Bros spends two million dollars in 1938 on the most confident Robin Hood ever filmed: green tights, three-strip Technicolor, a Korngold score, and a hero who says it is injustice he hates, not the Normans. |
| Matter of the Greenwood | Prince of Thieves and the Heritage Hero | 1991 - present | Costner returns from the Crusades with a Moorish companion and an American accent, Alan Rickman steals the film, and meanwhile Robin Hood completes his transformation into a regional tourism asset. |
| Matter of the Greenwood | The Ballad Outlaw | c. 1377 - c. 1500 | The earliest Robin Hood is a violent, funny, devout yeoman who lives in Barnsdale, hates the Sheriff and the Abbot of St Mary's, and never once says anything about the poor as a class. |
| Matter of the Greenwood | Robin of the May Games | c. 1420 - c. 1590 | For a century and a half, Robin Hood was mainly something you did, not something you read: a costumed parish revel with a summer king, money-gathering, morris dancing, and enough disorder that authorities kept banning it. |
What is in here
| Card type | Count | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Worldviews | 12 | The twelve interpretive lenses, each with its canon, its politics, what it suppresses, and its game hooks |
| Figures | 85 | Legendary characters, authors, patrons, printers, film-makers, historical candidates |
| Documents | 84 | Manuscripts, printed texts, editions and films |
| Scholars | 39 | Positions and disagreements |
| Topics | 23 | The recurring arguments |
| Timeline | 78 | Both cycles on one spine |
| Local sources | 48 | The PDFs, manuscripts and working notes already on this machine |
The two questions this portal is built around
Arthur: Was he real? — and why the answer matters less than the fact that every century has needed a different one.
Robin Hood: When does ‘rob from the rich, give to the poor’ actually appear? — it is not in the medieval ballads, and tracking where it comes from is the fastest route into the whole tradition.
Provenance
Every card records source_method, review_status and confidence.
Cards marked DRAFT are assembled from cited scholarship via web research and the local holdings,
and have not been checked line by line against the primary sources. Promote a card to
VERIFIED only after reading the attestation yourself.