With some help a couple of days ago, I got a few boxes of books out of storage. What fun going through them and getting them out on shelves! I came across two books that I am very pleased to have out of the darkness of storage and back into the daylight of a home library.
Robin Hood was one of my childhood heroes and I picked up almost every book about him I could find. One of my favorites to read, however, I could only find at my local library. I knew precisely where it was shelved in the rows and rows of books, and would make a beeline to that shelf when my family and I would make an outing to the library.
This particular Robin Hood book was unique in that it was not a retelling of the tales of the storied outlaw, but an academic inquiry into the historical person of Robin Hood, the location of his activities, and the development of the myth surrounding him.
The author, J. C. Holt, investigates various evidence of real, historical persons who could be the original outlaw from whom the stories developed. I found the meticulous parsing of obscure historical records and documents absolutely fascinating, and found the arguments for a historical Robin Hood very credible. Excerpts from the oldest surviving ballads of Robin’s exploits were included in the book, and I loved the mystery they evoked.
Eventually, I moved away from my childhood town and no longer had access to the book I found had so captured my imagination. Robin Hood still lived on in my mind and many of the details of Holt’s book remained vivid. Several years later, I visited a used bookstore in Wyoming and, to my immense surprise, sandwiched between volumes my eyes scanned over without recognition, I spotted the distinctive forest green spine with white lettering…it was Holt’s book on Robin Hood!
Of course I bought it and, with great joy, brought it home to live on my own bookshelf. The book was just as I had remembered. I don’t tire of picking it up, leafing through it’s pages of text and illustration, and revisiting all that had saturated my childhood daydreams.
Later, I came across another used Robin Hood book I had never seen before, although the names of the authors were familiar to me from Holt’s book. It is a collection of several of the old ballads of Robin Hood, put together and commented on by R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, and a wonderful resource. It seems to me to be a perfect complimentary volume to Holt’s inquiry. The two make a wonderfully bounteous pair, rich in the stuff of childhood dreams.
