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Politics : The View From the Centre -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (353)	2/9/2009 7:26:30 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1134

Robin's origins and the Green Man The famous English outlaw who robbed from the rich to give to the poor was first heard of in a Latin clerical chronicle in 1354 in which Robin was a trespasser in a royal forest. As early as 1438 a ship was registered at Aberdeen with the name Robin Hood, and in 1486 King Henry VII watched Robin Hood pageants at York. The English outlaw was in sixteenth-century Scotland a cult figure, probably because of his resistance to English authority. Tennyson saw the fabled figure as an alternative to the values of modernism. We may see Robin Hood's death, coming as it does on the day before Christmas, the ancient festival wherein the forces of the new were born again, as an allegory of the annual 'death' of the vegetative process. The next day, following the Winter Solstice, the process begins anew and the days grow ever longer, bringing life back to the soil. Such are the myths and legends associated with death-rebirth deities, especially at Yuletide. In his colour of Lincoln Green and his presence in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, Robin is a cognate of the archetype, the Green Man, a symbol of uncertain origin common in Britain and Ireland. Classic examples of the Green Man are most frequently found among the stonework in and on churches, in the borders and decorations of bibles and other religious works – he is even carved, under the instruction of Michelangelo, on the tomb of Pope Julius II in Rome – though it is more likely pagan in nature. The French called him tete de feuilles (head of leaves) and the Germans called him blattmaske (leaf mask) or blattqesicht. In the English tradition, this sprite is also called Robin Goodfellow or Puck, and may be depicted with a goat's cloven hooves like Satan and the wood-dwelling satyr, Pan (pictured at left), Greek god of shepherds and flocks. In Roman mythology, he is the god Faunus. Other possible references to him are Green George, Jack-in-the-Green, and the Green Knight . wilsonsalmanac.com