Robin Hood

Week 9: Medieval Heroes - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images


Resources

Robin Hood

Robin Hood: Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood is a good overall site with a number of ballad texts. You will also find a wide variety of materials at Ben Turner's Robin Hood website.

The University of Rochester's ROBIN HOOD PROJECT is "designed to make available in electronic format a database of texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information about the Robin Hood stories and other outlaw tales." Also at Rochester, you can find the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages, which has published a wide selection of Middle English texts online, including many materials about Robin Hood.

There is a modern English rendering of the Geste of Robin Hood by Robert Landis Frank, and the original Geste is also available online.

Many of you may be familiar with the Robin Hood legends in the version by Howard Pyle, which you can read online at many websites, including Classic Reader.

Ballads

Francis J. Child's five volumes of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898) are one of the most important folk music collections in the European tradition. Unfortunately, it is no longer in print, but you can find the ballads online:

The Contemplator's Child Ballads site is where many of this week's texts (and MIDI files) originated. It does not contain all the ballads, but the MIDI files are helpful, and there are also very interesting notes about the ballads.

Sir Walter Scott. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.  A digital edition at electricscotland.com.

The Oxford Book of Ballads by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1910). A complete online edition of the book at Bartleby.

A Collection of Ballads by Andrew Lang (1910).

Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasntry of England edited by Robert Bell (1846). A collection of ballads that predates Child's.

A Handful of Pleasant Delights by Clement Robinson and Divers Others (1584) - selections from a 16th century collection of ballads.

Thomas Deloney's The Garland of Good Will (1631) and his Strange Histories (1602) are 17th century ballad collections.


Modern Languages / Anthropology 3043: Folklore & Mythology. Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
Page last updated: October 9, 2004 12:52 PM