Figures
People in the legends and people who made them: legendary characters, authors, patrons, printers, actors, and the handful of historical candidates.
The Matter of Britain (Arthur) — 41
'Nennius'
The name traditionally attached to the Historia Brittonum, on the authority of a prologue now generally judged a later addition. Whoever compiled it gave Arthur his twelve battles and called him dux bellorum. Modern scholarship usually refers to the text rather than the man.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809-1892
Idylls of the King (1859-1885) is the work that makes Arthur a Victorian public property. Camelot becomes an allegory of a moral order dissolving through private sexual failure - a reading that dominates popular understanding to this day.
Arthur
The central figure of the Matter of Britain. In the earliest Welsh material a leader of a warband surrounded by marvels; in Geoffrey a crowned conqueror; in the romances a static court-centre; in Malory a tragic king. No contemporary source names him.
Bedwyr / Bedivere
Arthur's one-handed companion in the Welsh material, paired always with Cai; in Malory the last survivor, who throws Excalibur into the water and must be asked three times.
Bors de Ganis
The third Grail knight, and the only one who returns to Camelot to report. Not a virgin and not the best knight, but the one who survives - the Queste's model of achievable, compromised virtue.
C. Scott Littleton
Co-author with Linda Malcor of From Scythia to Camelot, arguing Arthurian legend derives from Sarmatian cavalry stationed in Britain and from Nart sagas of the Caucasus.
Cai / Kay
In Culhwch he is a superhuman marvel - nine days underwater, heat radiating from his hands, able to be as tall as a tree. The romances demote him to a sarcastic seneschal who gets unhorsed. A clean index of what the courtly tradition did to the Welsh one.
Chretien de Troyes
Champenois poet, the most influential single author in the tradition. Wrote for Marie de Champagne (the Charrette) and Philip of Flanders (the Conte du Graal). Died leaving Perceval unfinished, which generated four continuations.
Erec
Hero of Chretien's first romance. Wins Enide, marries her, and then stops seeking adventure - the charge of recreantise that follows is the first properly interior problem in Arthurian literature.
Galahad
Invented by the Vulgate cycle as Lancelot's son and the Grail's designated achiever. His virginity is the point: he exists to make Lancelot's excellence insufficient.
Gawain / Gwalchmai
The English favourite. Geoffrey's Walwanus is Arthur's nephew and champion; the French tradition demotes him as Lancelot rises; the alliterative English tradition (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the alliterative Morte) restores him. In Malory his vendetta against Lancelot drives the…
Geoffrey of Monmouth
c. 1095-1155
Probably Welsh or Breton, working at Oxford, later bishop-elect of St Asaph (a see he seems never to have visited). Author of the Historia Regum Britanniae, the Prophetiae Merlini and the Vita Merlini. His contemporaries suspected him: William of Newburgh wrote that Geoffrey had made up…
Gildas
c. 500-570
British cleric whose De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae is the only near-contemporary narrative of the period Arthur is supposed to belong to. He describes the victory at Mons Badonicus and names Ambrosius Aurelianus as the British leader. He does not mention Arthur. This silence is the single…
Guinevere / Gwenhwyfar
In Welsh tradition an abducted queen and the subject of triads; in Chretien the object of Lancelot's devotion in the Charrette; in the Vulgate and Malory the co-cause of the fellowship's destruction. Her abduction is one of the oldest attested Arthurian episodes.
Igerna / Igraine
Wife of Gorlois of Cornwall, mother of Arthur by Uther under Merlin's disguise. In the later cycles also mother of Morgause and Morgan, which is what makes the incest plot possible.
John Boorman
Director of Excalibur (1981), the most Malory-faithful major film and the one that fixed the visual language of Arthurian cinema - green light, wet armour, Carmina Burana.
Joseph of Arimathea
The Gospel figure who buries Christ, redeployed by Robert de Boron as the Grail's first keeper and the founder of a British Christian lineage. The Glastonbury connection is a later monastic elaboration.
Lancelot du Lac
Absent from all Welsh material and from Geoffrey. He enters with Chretien's Chevalier de la Charrette (c. 1177), is expanded into the vast prose Lancelot of the Vulgate, and by Malory is the axis of the whole tragedy. A French addition that becomes indispensable to the English story.
Layamon
A parish priest at Areley Kings, Worcestershire, who turned Wace into the first Arthurian narrative in English, in alliterative long lines. His Arthur is harsher than Wace's and his poem is noticeably interested in the English as a people.
Linda A. Malcor
Co-author of From Scythia to Camelot; the thesis is a minority position in Arthurian studies but has strong popular reach.
Marie de Champagne
1145-1198
Daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Chretien names her as the source of the matiere and san of the Charrette, making her one of the few documented patrons whose brief we can partly reconstruct.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
1930-1999
The Mists of Avalon (1983) retells the cycle from Morgaine's viewpoint as a conflict between goddess religion and Christianity - hugely influential on popular neo-pagan readings of Arthur, and historically unfounded in ways Hutton documents.
Merlin / Myrddin
Geoffrey fuses the Welsh wild-man prophet Myrddin with the fatherless boy Ambrosius from the Historia Brittonum, then gives him the Prophetiae Merlini. Robert de Boron makes him the devil's son redirected to God's purpose, which is where the birth-narrative and the tutelage of Arthur…
Mordred / Medraut
In the Annales Cambriae's Camlann entry, Medraut simply falls alongside Arthur - the text does not say they fought each other. Geoffrey makes him the usurping nephew; the Vulgate and Malory make him Arthur's incestuous son. The villainy is an accretion.
Morgan le Fay
In the Vita Merlini she is a benign healer, chief of nine sisters on the Isle of Apples, who receives the wounded Arthur. The prose cycles turn her into Arthur's malevolent half-sister and Guinevere's enemy. Her demotion from healer to villain over roughly a century is one of the…
Morgause
Arthur's half-sister, wife of King Lot, mother of Gawain, Gaheris, Agravain, Gareth - and, by Arthur, of Mordred. The incest is unknowing on both sides in Malory, which is precisely what makes the consequence unavoidable. Her murder by her own son Gaheris is one of the Morte's ugliest…
Nimue / Viviane / the Lady of the Lake
An unstable composite: the enchantress who learns Merlin's craft and then entombs him with it, the foster-mother of Lancelot, and the hand that gives and receives Excalibur. Different texts split the roles differently, and Malory keeps several Ladies of the Lake without reconciling them.
Perceval / Parzival / Peredur
Chretien's naive hero who fails to ask the question at the Grail castle. Wolfram rebuilds him as a man who must earn a second chance; the Welsh Peredur is a parallel version whose relationship to Chretien is disputed.
Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders
1143-1191
Patron of the Conte du Graal; Chretien says Philip gave him the book from which he drew it. Died on the Third Crusade at Acre, which is roughly when the poem breaks off.
Robert de Boron
Burgundian author of Joseph d'Arimathie and Merlin, the works that Christianise the Grail and give Merlin his biography. His Perceval survives only in prose redaction. Everything after him inherits his framework.
Sir Thomas Malory
d. 1471
Almost certainly Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire: knight, MP, and repeat criminal defendant (charges included ambush, extortion, rape and cattle-raiding), who wrote Le Morte Darthur in prison and finished it in the ninth year of Edward IV, i.e. 1469-70.
T. H. White
1906-1964
The Once and Future King (collected 1958, from The Sword in the Stone 1938 onward) reframes Malory as an anti-war book and an education novel. Source of the Disney film and of Camelot the musical.
Taliesin
A historical sixth-century poet to whom a large body of later visionary verse was attached, including Preiddeu Annwn. The Book of Taliesin (c. 1350) preserves both strata. He is the voice through which the archaic Arthur mostly reaches us.
The Gawain-poet
The anonymous North-West Midlands poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness, all preserved in a single manuscript (BL Cotton Nero A.x). Technically the most accomplished Arthurian writer in English, and completely unidentified.
Tristan and Iseult
Originally an independent Celtic story of a love-potion, a king's nephew and a queen, absorbed into the Arthurian orbit by the thirteenth-century Prose Tristan and thence into Malory, where Tristram gets a book of his own. The affair is the structural rhyme for Lancelot and Guinevere, and…
Twrch Trwyth
The enchanted boar hunted across Ireland, Wales and Cornwall in Culhwch ac Olwen, carrying comb and shears between its ears. The single best example of what Arthurian narrative looked like before the twelfth century.
Uther Pendragon
Geoffrey's invention as Arthur's father; the Tintagel shape-change on Igerna is Geoffrey's most consequential single scene, since it makes Arthur's legitimacy structurally doubtful from birth.
Wace
Jersey-born clerk who turned Geoffrey into Anglo-Norman verse as the Roman de Brut (1155) and, in doing so, introduced the Round Table and reported the Breton hope that Arthur will return.
William Caxton
c. 1422-1491
England's first printer. His 1485 edition of Le Morte Darthur divided the text into 21 books and 507 chapters, supplied a preface justifying Arthur's historicity, and was the only known text until 1934.
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Author of Parzival (c. 1205), the German reworking in which the Grail is a stone (lapsit exillis) guarded by templeisen, and in which Parzival's half-brother Feirefiz is piebald black and white. Claims a source, 'Kyot the Provencal', that no one has found.
Yvain, the Knight of the Lion
Wins a lady by killing her husband, is granted a year's leave for tournaments, overstays it, goes mad in the forest, and rebuilds himself in the company of a lion he rescues from a serpent. Chretien's most balanced hero.
The Matter of the Greenwood (Robin Hood) — 44
Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley
Northern outlaw archers of an independent tradition, printed alongside Robin Hood material from the sixteenth century. Cloudesley shoots an apple from his son's head - the William Tell motif in English - and the three are eventually pardoned by the king.
Alan Rickman
1946-2016
The Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991, playing against the film's earnestness so successfully that he is the main thing anyone remembers about it.
Allin a Dale
The minstrel whose bride is being married to a rich old knight until Robin's band interrupt the wedding. A late addition, and the sentimental strand of the tradition in its purest form. The Forresters text is radically variant.
Andrew of Wyntoun
c. 1350-c. 1423
Scottish canon whose Original Chronicle (completed c. 1420) contains the earliest surviving chronicle notice of Robin Hood, placing him and Little John as forest outlaws under the years 1283-85, in the reign of Edward I.
Anthony Munday
1560-1633
Playwright, pamphleteer, City pageant-writer and, earlier, government pursuivant against Catholics. Author of The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (1598), the plays that ennoble Robin Hood.
Basil Rathbone
1892-1967
Guy of Gisbourne in 1938, and a genuinely expert fencer, which is why the final duel still works.
Douglas Fairbanks
1883-1939
Robin Hood (1922), the enormous silent version whose castle set was the largest built in Hollywood to that date. Established Robin Hood as a vehicle for athletic spectacle.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
1897-1957
Won the Academy Award for the 1938 score. A Viennese Jewish composer whose work on the film kept him in America as Austria was annexed - the score is why he survived.
Errol Flynn
1909-1959
His Robin in 1938 is the performance every later Robin is measured against - and the reason the role is associated with laughter as much as archery.
Eustace the Monk
A real Flemish monk turned pirate and mercenary (d. 1217), whose romance makes him a master of disguise and trickery in the forest. With Hereward and Fouke, one of the outlaw narratives that predates Robin Hood and shares its grammar.
Fouke le Fitz Waryn
A real Marcher lord (d. 1258) whose Anglo-Norman prose romance has him dispossessed by King John and living as a forest outlaw. Three episodes are close analogues of the Gest: an ambush on merchants with a truth-or-consequences test, the king lured into the forest and captured, and a brother…
Francis James Child
1825-1896
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) numbers thirty-eight Robin Hood ballads (Child 117-154), giving the tradition its standard citation system. Child numbers remain the way scholars refer to these texts.
Friar Tuck
Also a latecomer, entering through the play tradition (Robin Hood and the Friar). A real chaplain, Robert Stafford of Lindfield, used 'Frere Tuk' as an outlaw alias in Sussex in the 1410s-20s, which may be cause or effect.
Henry Chettle
c. 1564-c. 1606
Collaborator on the Huntington plays; better known for printing Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and apologising for it.
Hereward the Wake
Leader of English resistance in the Fens against the Normans c. 1070, whose Gesta Herewardi turns him into a trickster-outlaw. Later fused with the Saxon-versus-Norman frame that Scott would attach to Robin Hood.
Herne the Hunter
An antlered spirit named in The Merry Wives of Windsor and attached to a single oak at Windsor - and, since 1984, to Robin Hood. Richard Carpenter made Herne the god who chooses Robin, inventing a pagan Robin that had no prior existence in the tradition and that a great many people now assume is…
Howard Pyle
1853-1911
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) is the version most English-speaking children have actually read, and its illustrations fixed the visual costume - the pointed cap, the belted tunic, the greenwood. Pyle sanitised the violence thoroughly.
John Major (Mair)
c. 1467-1550
Scottish historian whose Historia Majoris Britanniae (1521) relocates Robin to the 1190s, the reign of Richard I - the first time the legend is attached to Richard and John, and the origin of the framing that Scott and Hollywood inherited. Major also supplies the earliest statement that Robin…
John, later King John
1166-1216
Villain of the modern legend, absent from the medieval one. His usefulness is that he supplies an illegitimate authority, which lets Robin be a rebel and a loyalist at the same time.
Joseph Ritson
1752-1803
Lawyer, vegetarian, ferocious textual critic and radical democrat with Jacobin sympathies. His Robin Hood (1795) was the first systematic collection of the ballads and its preface supplied the modern legend's politics and its biography. Died insane, reputedly after attempting to burn his…
Kevin Costner
Robin in Prince of Thieves (1991), notoriously without an English accent; the film grossed around 390 million dollars worldwide regardless.
Kevin Reynolds
Director of Prince of Thieves; fell out with Costner over the edit.
Little John
Robin's chief companion from the earliest texts and, in the Monk, effectively the hero - he rescues Robin, kills the monk and the page, and openly tells Robin he is no longer his master. Reputed grave at Hathersage, Derbyshire.
Maid Marian
Absent from every early ballad. Marion arrives from the French pastourelle tradition - Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et de Marion (c. 1283) - by way of the May games, where Robin and Marian are paired as summer king and queen. Munday makes her the noblewoman Matilda Fitzwater. She is a…
Mel Brooks
Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), parodying Prince of Thieves within two years - and, in doing so, restoring the comic register the ballads actually had.
Michael Curtiz
1886-1962
Replaced William Keighley partway through The Adventures of Robin Hood when the studio judged the action insufficiently vigorous. Later directed Casablanca.
Morgan Freeman
Azeem, the Moorish companion invented for the 1991 film - a gesture toward the medieval world's actual breadth that also draws steady criticism as an orientalist device.
Much the Miller's Son
One of the original three companions (with Little John and Will Scarlet). In Robin Hood and the Monk he murders the monk's young page to prevent him talking - a detail that later versions cannot use.
Olivia de Havilland
1916-2020
Marian in the 1938 film; the performance that makes Marian a political actor rather than a prize.
Richard Carpenter
1929-2012
Creator of Robin of Sherwood (1984-86). His decision to make Robin the chosen champion of an antlered forest god is the single most influential addition to the legend since Ritson, and it is entirely his.
Richard I
1157-1199
The Gest's king is 'Edward', not Richard. The Richard-and-John framing is Tudor and later, systematised by Scott's Ivanhoe. Attaching Robin to the Third Crusade is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century move.
Robert Hod of York
fl. 1225-1226
A fugitive recorded in the Yorkshire assize rolls for 1225-26, called Hobbehod in later accounts, in debt to the Liberty of St Peter's, York - which would make him a tenant of the Archbishop of York, one of Robin's enemies in the Gest. Identified by L. V. D. Owen in the 1930s. David…
Robin Hood
The outlaw of the greenwood. A yeoman in the earliest surviving texts, a summer-game role in the parish revels, an earl from 1598, a redistributor from 1795, a film star from 1922. No securely identified historical original.
Sir Guy of Gisborne
The bounty hunter in a horse-hide who hunts Robin and is beheaded for it. Robin mutilates the face with an Irish knife so it cannot be identified, sets the head on his bow-end, and wears Guy's hide as a disguise. The single most useful scene for demonstrating how unlike the modern legend…
Sir Richard at the Lee
The impoverished knight of the Gest whose debt to the abbey Robin pays, and who shelters Robin later. The plot's economic engine: Robin functions as an alternative credit system, not as a charity.
Sir Walter Scott
1771-1832
Ivanhoe (1819) introduces Robin as Locksley and welds the legend permanently to the Saxon-versus-Norman conflict and to Richard's return - neither of which is medieval. The 1938 film and most since inherit the frame from Scott, not from the ballads.
The Abbot of St Mary's, York
The Gest's real villain: a monastic creditor foreclosing on Sir Richard at the Lee. The early legend's antagonism is against ecclesiastical finance far more than against wealth in general.
The Prioress of Kirklees
Robin's kinswoman, who bleeds him to death under pretence of medical treatment, in some versions in collusion with her lover Red Roger. The legend ends with a woman of the Church killing him by a therapeutic procedure - not in battle, and not by the Sheriff.
The Sheriff of Nottingham
The constant antagonist, and a structural oddity: Robin is based in Barnsdale in Yorkshire in the Gest, which is not in the Sheriff of Nottingham's jurisdiction. David Crook's argument that the historical Robert Hod of York was pursued as Robert of Wetherby is one attempt to explain…
The Virgin Mary
Robin's patron. He hears three masses daily, will not dine until he has done so, refuses to harm any company that includes a woman for her sake, and in the Gest treats her explicitly as the guarantor of the knight's loan. Medieval Robin is devout in a way no film Robin is.
Thomas Love Peacock
1785-1866
Maid Marian (1822), a satirical novel that makes Marian an athletic equal rather than a prize, and mocks the Huntingdon pedigree while using it.
Walter Bower
1385-1449
Abbot of Inchcolm, continuator of Fordun's Scotichronicon (c. 1440). He places Robin in 1266, among the disinherited followers of Simon de Montfort after the baronial rebellion, and calls him a famous murderer whom 'the foolish populace' celebrate in song - while also telling the…
Will Scarlet / Scathelocke
Present from the earliest ballads under variable names (Scarlok, Scathelocke, Scarlett). Munday splits the name into two separate characters, which is a nice index of how confidently Elizabethan dramatists handled the tradition.
William Robehod
1261-1262
A Berkshire fugitive recorded in 1261 as William son of Robert le Fevre, and in the 1262 memoranda roll as 'William Robehod'. Someone deliberately changed the name. This is the earliest firm evidence that 'Robin Hood' already meant something to a clerk - i.e. evidence for the…