Worldviews
Twelve interpretive lenses - six Arthurian, six for Robin Hood. Each is a period's answer to the question of what the legend is for, and each becomes a playable ruleset in ARTHURCRAWL and ROBINCRAWL.
The Matter of Britain (Arthur) — 6
Revival, Screen and Afterlife
Tennyson to Monty Python to the origins industry
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.
Geoffrey's Pseudohistory
Arthur as British imperial conqueror
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.
Chretien's Courtly Romance
Adventure, love, and the knight as a problem
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.
The Grail Made Christian
From a serving-dish to the vessel of the Passion
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.
Malory's Fellowship and Its Fall
The whole cycle told once, as a tragedy of loyalty
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.
Arthur of the Welsh
Folkloric giant-killer and raider of the Otherworld
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.
The Matter of the Greenwood (Robin Hood) — 6
Robert, Earl of Huntington
The outlaw promoted for a courtly audience
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.
Ritson's Radical
The Jacobin antiquary who wrote the slogan
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.
The Technicolor Robin
Errol Flynn, Korngold, and the Depression
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.
Prince of Thieves and the Heritage Hero
1991 and the visitor centre
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.
The Ballad Outlaw
A yeoman, a bow, and a great deal of blood
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.
Robin of the May Games
A parish fundraiser with a lord of misrule
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.