Why We Still Love Robin Hood (After All These Years)
Clad in his signature Lincoln green doublet, Robin Hood has captured hearts for nearly seven centuries, and 2017–18 might prove to be his biggest years yet. In the coming months, the famed hero of English folklore is slated to appear in seven reboot films of the classic story, including a Maid Marian spinoff, a vibrant punk-pop retelling, and a futuristic rendition in which Robin Hood figures as a rogue MI5 agent in a dystopian London.
Hollywood loves a remake, but not even The Fast and the Furious can boast the cultural longevity of the sly Robin of Sherwood Forest. What makes Robin Hood so enduring? I recently picked up a tattered, clothbound copy of Howard Pyle’s seminal 1883 telling, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and soon found my answer.
We continue to love this tale across the centuries and across the world for one reason: When we look at Robin Hood, we’re looking at ourselves. His story is ours.
Think about it.
His story follows the classic structure of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, where forces beyond his control compel him to fight. In the very first chapter of Pyle’s book (“How Robin Hood Came to be an Outlaw”), we learn that a gang of drunken foresters taunt and then threaten Robin’s life. The young man’s anger gets the better of him, and his retaliation is quick and sure: Robin Hood ends his attacker’s life in self-defense. “Gone was all the joy and brightness from everything, for his heart was sick within him,” writes Pyle, “and it was borne in upon his soul that he had slain a man.”
Robin flees into Sherwood Forest. His journey has begun.
Like Robin, all of us feel compelled on our own journeys by a combination of personal responsibility and forces beyond our control. Illness, romantic travail, domestic troubles, injustice, to different degrees, they happen to us all. Like us, Robin is an underdog, seeking victory when the odds are stacked against him. We love to root for underdogs because in our own stories, that’s the role we play.
From Chapter One, Pyle’s got us hooked. In some ways, the stories that follow are a reckoning for Robin. By besting the Sheriff of Nottingham and his henchmen, time and again, while also pursuing justice at every turn — aiding the poor, helping mend a marriage, and so on — he’s both atoning for his earlier crimes and helping make his little bit of the world a safer, fairer place for all. Yet again, we see in Robin Hood our best selves, for is this not what we, too, want? More and more, today’s young people want careers that advance social responsibility.
The Robin Hood story endures for one more reason, too: Robin Hood is no solitary savior. He’s got friends. Much of the story involves Robin meeting and befriending his Merry Men, the “fivescore or more good stout yeomen [who] gathered about Robin Hood, and chose him to be their leader and chief.” There’s colossal and compassionate Little John, spry, savvy Will Scarlet, and many, many others. Whether in the anthropomorphic characters of Disney’s endearing animation (1973) or rabble-rousers of Mel Brooks’ sidesplitting Men in Tights (1993), we immediately recognize our old friends, that familiar ragtag gang of wily do-gooders.
Robin and his Merry Men remain relevant across every century and generation not because of fantastical feats, but because of their strength of character. Time and time again, we fall in love with this community of altruistic outliers who champion loyalty and camaraderie above all else. In every interpretation, their core attributes persist, showing us how the most human characters prevail in doing heroic deeds. The joy of Robin Hood and his Merry Men is that we admire them, we desire to be among their number. As much as social media has brought us all digitally closer, we still long, desperately, for real friends, in the flesh. Who doesn’t want loyal pals like the playfully irascible Friar Tuck or the sonorous Alan-a-Dale? And let’s not forget Maid Marian, the hero of her own adventure tale.
Robin’s got a clique. Everybody wants a clique.
We can find a dozen more reasons why we continue to love this story. The setting of ye olde medieval England is particularly romantic for Gen Z and Millennials, longing to escape off the grid to more sylvan environs sans Wi-Fi, where “hedgerows are green and flowers bedeck the meadows; daisies pied and yellow cuckoo buds and fair primroses all along the briery hedges.” From page one of Pyle’s text, readers visualize themselves traipsing alongside Robin Hood with the scent of sweet grass and sound of rustling leaves. There’s an air of American self-reliance to it that charms.
Place is important. In a story as in life, place should exist multi-dimensionally, and Sherwood Forest surely does. How many story settings do you know that have provided the foundation for an entire pedagogical approach, like Germany’s “forest kindergartens” where children learn through nature? Sherwood Forest teaches us how to awaken the senses in our own storytelling.
Recently, walking the halls of SCAD with Pixar’s John Lasseter, I asked him what he looks for in new employees; after all, Pixar and Disney hire many of our graduates. “Easy,” he said. “They’ve got to be able to tell a great story.”
It’s that simple: Show us a hero with a calling and a purpose, in whom we can see ourselves, and we’re all yours. Pyle himself summons Robin Hood’s adventurous spirit when, in the preface to his book, he writes, “And now I lift the curtain that hangs between here and No-man’s-land. Will you come with me, sweet Reader? I thank you. Give me your hand.”
Time and again, we give our hand to the story — and we are never disappointed.
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Paula Wallace is the president and founder of SCAD, a private, nonprofit university providing preeminent education and career preparation across four locations on three continents and which has garnered acclaim from respected organizations and publications, including 3D World, American Institute of Architects, Businessweek, DesignIntelligence, U.S. News & World Report, and the Los Angeles Times. In Fall 2017, the university will publish SCAD: Architecture of a University, the story of SCAD’s award-winning built environment.
