Has the new Robin Hood gone "woke"? A Robin Hood expert weighs in on the debate

The new Robin Hood series from MGM+ has produced an arrow storm of criticism from viewers who dislike its historical inaccuracy, with accusations of "wokery" unsurprisingly making their way into the discourse.

Others, at the same time, are enjoying its modern updating and creative invention.

Both sides have a point.

Viewers who do not approve of the dramatic licence taken by the series’ makers draw attention to a number of issues that are modern-day interventions rather than being true to medieval England.

One insertion is that Robin Hood’s closest ally, Little John, is a black man with dreadlocks. The chances of this bearing any resemblance to reality in late 12th-century England are almost zero.

If Little John was of African descent, then something extraordinary would be happening today – instead of the Robin Hood legend we would be talking of the Little John one, so exceptional would be the scenario. We would not be watching films and TV series on Robin Hood, but on Little John. It is inconceivable to have such a character not being one of the most famous people of the Middle Ages, comparable to that of Joan of Arc in France.

In the early stories of Robin Hood, Little John is a figure of almost equal importance and heroism to Robin, featuring in all the ballads and tellings of the legend. He also appears as a named companion of Robin in Scottish chronicles from the early 15th century.

As one would expect, at no point is any reference ever made to his racial ethnicity. The extreme rarity of people of colour in 12th-century England would have immediately drawn the overwhelming attention of writers had Little John been black.

The makers of the new Robin Hood also distort historical reality by making the “Saxons” (i.e., the English) as worshippers of a female goddess, Godda. By the time in which the series is set, England had been Christianised for 500 years.

Pockets of paganism and folk religion would have survived, but any found by the church or monarch would have been destroyed by English kings long before the Normans (very much the bad guys in the programme) arrived.

The Merry Men also include a woman disguised, for a while, as a man. This is Much the Miller’s Son of the original tales now being the Miller’s Daughter. While such a character has never appeared in any of the Robin Hood stories, there certainly were plenty of women criminals, so this is not such a stretch.

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Such additions to the tale have been criticised by some as being an historically inaccurate attempt to make the story fashionable and relevant to our 21st-century multicultural society in which less than 5 per cent of the population regularly attends Christian services.

How, then, in purely historical terms, can it be that viewers who have no problem with these modern embellishments are equally right in their opinions?

The key here is that while there are the real facts discussed above about the historical setting and medieval writers supporting the critics, the earliest tales of Robin Hood are highly unlikely to be factual ones.

This is because the story of Robin Hood was, from the start, designed as entertainment.

Just as modern audiences like to be transported away from daily life into exciting stories of heroes and derring-do, so, too, did medieval ones – and all those in the centuries since. In the numerous medieval outlaw tales, of which Robin Hood was just one, audiences relished the often-gratuitous violence, revenge, coarse humour and mostly happy endings where the hero succeeds and where justice is restored.

By the time of the earliest surviving Robin Hood tales in the late-15th century, the legend was already at least two centuries old. It is anyone’s guess how much the tale had already changed over that time. Notably, neither Maid Marian nor Friar Tuck were in the first stories, being added only later.

The legend has lasted the test of time due to its almost limitless potential for adaptation. It has been made to appeal to all classes and audiences in different times. Thus, towards the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in the 1590s, Robin was no longer a yeoman but elevated to the ranks of the nobility as Earl of Huntingdon so he could now be a hero of the upper classes.

By the 20th century, Robin was re-imagined in many forms, two notably being as an anti-communist freedom fighter of the Cold War and the DC Comics superhero Green Arrow from the 1940s.

The 21st century sees the changes continuing. The Green Arrow was adapted to the Arrow series, in which the hero fights corporate corruption and terrorism in the post-9/11, post-2008 financial crisis world. In the 2018 film Robin Hood he is something of an environmentalist. In the new series, Robin Hood and his Merry Men (and Women) offer yet another variation.

While there are many fascinating historical clues about Robin Hood, he has always been an infinitely adaptable character from literature and culture. And so he remains today.

Robin Hood is streaming now on MGM+.

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