On Robin Hood, and Literacy

A while back, there was an article by Tom Shipper at Christianity Today, reviewing Stephen Lawhead's Hood, first book in a trilogy about Robin Hood. (I read it myself and liked it, but I like Lawhead's stuff generally.) It is a review notable not so much for its opinions of Lawhead's efforts (it mostly spends time whaling on him for historical inaccuracy) as for its description of the original Robin Hood of the mediaeval ballads:

...the Robin Hood cycle, though so often reproduced by moviemakers, producers of tv series, and children's authors, has long presented the most serious problems of adaptation. To start with, there is no clear story of Robin Hood... Instead, what we have is a powerful scenario: outlaws, greenwood, merry men, longbows, inept officers of justice like the Sheriff of Nottingham. Merry Men are captured and rescued, the rich are robbed to feed the poor, traps are set and escaped from, in the end the king turns up and forgives everyone. But there's not much story in it, and there's no canonical version like Malory's Arthur.

Another problem (now significantly so unwelcome as to be all but forgotten) is that while the earliest literary versions we have may be weak on narrative, they are remarkably clear about their social positioning. The figure of the man in the greenwood, Robin Hood, or Robin 'Ood, or (T.H. White's idea) Robin Wood, may go back centuries into the time of myth, but Robin as we have him in the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages is a representative of the yeomanry. His weapons are the cheap ones of the rural peasantry, bow and quarterstaff. Sometimes he has a sword, but he never wears armor and does not ride to battle. His social prejudices are those of the rural peasantry as well—and this is where the embarrassment starts for the modern rewriter. Medieval Robin has nothing against the aristocracy at all, indeed he likes them, and is ready to assist them, as long as they are real aristocrats (i.e., men who have inherited their rank from old time), and as long as they are prepared to be "good fellows." His enemies and victims are tax-collectors, officers of the central government, the upper ranks of the clergy, especially abbots of well-endowed monasteries, and in particular lawyers: the literate classes, in other words. Modern writers, perhaps uneasily aware that they themselves would get very short shrift from a modern Robin, find this hard to sympathize with, while Marxist and sub-Marxist academics feel that Robin is much too like the surly, independent, white male Republican or Conservative citizens who voted in Presidents Bush, Bush, and Reagan, and Mrs. Thatcher too.

The medieval ballads indeed seem very clearly to spring from a particular time, the time of Edward, "our comely king," as they loyally call him. Which Edward? Surely Robin's archery gives the answer. It is Edward III (d. 1376), whose smashing, unexpected, and successive victories over Scots, French, and Spanish relied as heavily on the unique skills of the English bow-using yeomanry as they did on the more familiar ones of the English armored aristocracy—with whom the yeomen (as in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales portraits) formed both a social unit and a weapon-system. That cohesion did not last long, dissolved by cannon and handguns, and the yeomanry's moment in the sun soon passed, to be remembered only in the titles of some British military units, recruited for generations from the upper ranks of the rural peasantry, officered by the rural gentry, and, like their redneck successors, always ready for an excuse to break the heads of the urban proletariat whom they despised.

All clear enough, but a deep embarrassment to even 19th-century liberals, and with little appeal to modern urban consumers of fiction. And then there is the basic contradiction: Robin hates all officers of the crown, but is totally loyal to the king. Again, this is perfectly familiar in certain circles even now, where the "support our troops" bumper sticker may well co-exist with utter hostility to all agents of the government, and especially the IRS. But it's not a nice scenario.

These days, you could add something about tea parties and Going John Galt to that last.

Shipper's critique, to which all of this is germane, is that Lawhead's basically the latest in a long time of people to rewrite Robin Hood into the kind of myth you could make a Hollywood movie out of, or a Disney one if you toned down the content: the Merry Men are fighters for freedom and justice, and their enemies are cruel oppressors and unjust usurpers. Peasant outlaws robbing the urbane educated classes needs to be parsed as poor vs. rich and hence as oppressed vs. oppressor, rather than country yeoman vs. edumacated townie (or, in Mencius Moldbug's terminology, Vaisya vs. Brahmin): Shipper doesn't pursue this point much, but Western audiences - and particularly Western creative classes - are bizarrely willing to embrace "eat the rich" sentiments while being well-off, or even horrendously rich, themselves (cf. Neil Young: "poor people gonna rise up and take what's theirs", or the ne plus ultra, John Lennon, millionaire, singing "imagine there's no money"); parsing the story as country yokels vs. literate classes would be a trickier proposition, let alone as rednecks vs. city liberals (unless you wanted Hollywood to make Robin Hood the villain...)

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On reflection, though, I realise I'm writing and thinking as if it were in some way contemptible, or wrong, to rewrite the Robin Hood myth as Shipper describes. This is not the case: every age reinvents myth and, to a degree, history in accordance with its priorities - the Middle Ages did this shamelessly with the Miracle Plays (one Harrowing of Hell play ends with a comedy epilogue in which the demons, having been thoroughly Harrowed, are consoled by the arrival of a Muslim barmaid damned for watering down beer). And if the theories Shipper refers to are true, the Middle Ages did this with Robin Hood, as well, adapting the Man in the Greenwood to the situation of the wealthy literate classes increasing in number, and having an increasing impact on society. Now our entire society is literate, so when scavenging the older myths we emphasise the "wealthy" part of Robin Hood's adversaries. All perfectly right and proper.

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Apropos of literate vs. illiterate, there's a highly interesting article on the subject here (scroll about halfway down):

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality... doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled... Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:

Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.

Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

...Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

The point of the article (which should be read in its entirety) is that if the written word changes how people think, the tendency of modern technology to shift from the word to the image will do the same, and this will be a bad thing. Television, and now the internet, are encouraging a kind of "secondary orality", to use the article's phrase: losing some of the advantages of the literate mind, while gaining none of the advantages of pre-literate culture: oral culture is a tradition within a community, whereas the internet and television are solitary vices and do not encourage human interaction.

I think, though, that the internet has advantages that are not being given full credit by the article: it facilitates the spread of knowledge, and the ability to check one's facts (wikipedia is invaluable for this, if one remembers to be skeptical on controversial issues, and that the citations are there for a reason). I am also informed that giving children access to laptops changes the way they think: text on paper is necessarily linear, and moves in a given order; on the internet, hypertext is non-linear, and children brought up on it think in a more non-linear fashion. What the results of this are, I don't know; they may be good or bad.

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I don't suppose it was just the isolated issue of graphic-functional vs. abstract thought patterns that caused the dislike shown in having Robin Hood prey on the literate classes - although if the literates treated culture differently, disliking the low-brow entertainment, cliches and stereotypes that illiterates valued, that would contribute. Possibly it was also the way some literate types tend to look down on others, whether contemptuously or benevolently, wandering round with their nose in the air thinking they're better than everyone else (I used to be like this when I was younger and exceedingly arrogant) or patronisingly wondering how to fix the world (something I'm still guilty of, I confess; though I don't suppose the literates back then were as prone to Moldbug's "nostrism" as we are now).