rewriting legends
Oct. 20th, 2021 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliWas pondering Robin Hood and legends in general after re-reading Howard Pyle's Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.
It did not hold up to childhood memories, quite, but I have never found a better re-telling. Pyle artfully fit together a number of ballads and gave them new connections to make it more novelistic. Most other writers invent new adventures and don't have the art of it.
This is nothing new, to be sure. "Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon," anyone? Where a woman in black, mounted on a horse, tells Robin that London is besieged by the prince who will force the princess to marry him unless three champions fight him and two giants? And Robin, Little John, and Will Scadlock are the champions, and then the princess marries Will? It's not influenced much of the later legend, for some reason. . .
But then, I was comparing it to interlacing fairy tales, which I know a lot better -- and legends are a lot harder. If I don't like one Sleeping Beauty variant, I can pick another; there are hundreds, and once you get a feel for how they are put together, there is much that can be done. It helps that they are "once upon a time" cut free from real history or geography -- because when they are not cut free, they are legends instead.
The bold outlaw is less easy to mix and match exactly because he's a legend; that is, he has connections to a particular time and place. It takes real art to rip off a tale of a highwayman and convert it to a Robin Hood tale. Even the technology changed. Ripping off Robin Hood and William Tell both for an outlaw hero of Greenwood Land might work, but it would not be so simple as fitting together fairy tales.
Legends are just harder to rewrite.
It did not hold up to childhood memories, quite, but I have never found a better re-telling. Pyle artfully fit together a number of ballads and gave them new connections to make it more novelistic. Most other writers invent new adventures and don't have the art of it.
This is nothing new, to be sure. "Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon," anyone? Where a woman in black, mounted on a horse, tells Robin that London is besieged by the prince who will force the princess to marry him unless three champions fight him and two giants? And Robin, Little John, and Will Scadlock are the champions, and then the princess marries Will? It's not influenced much of the later legend, for some reason. . .
But then, I was comparing it to interlacing fairy tales, which I know a lot better -- and legends are a lot harder. If I don't like one Sleeping Beauty variant, I can pick another; there are hundreds, and once you get a feel for how they are put together, there is much that can be done. It helps that they are "once upon a time" cut free from real history or geography -- because when they are not cut free, they are legends instead.
The bold outlaw is less easy to mix and match exactly because he's a legend; that is, he has connections to a particular time and place. It takes real art to rip off a tale of a highwayman and convert it to a Robin Hood tale. Even the technology changed. Ripping off Robin Hood and William Tell both for an outlaw hero of Greenwood Land might work, but it would not be so simple as fitting together fairy tales.
Legends are just harder to rewrite.