September 14, 2009
Sherwood Forest meets Hollywood in international conference
The International Association for Robin Hood Studies conference meets here next month
kathleen.mcgarvey@rochester.edu
The world premiere of the newly restored Robin Hood (1922) starring Douglas Fairbanks is set for 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House. Musicologist Gillian Anderson will conduct her reconstructed original score for the silent film. Ticket information is available at http://dryden.eastmanhouse.org/films/robin-hood. (Images courtesy of George Eastman House Motion Picture Department Collections
First mentioned in medieval ballads, Robin Hood has been an iconic figure in English—and now world—culture for more than seven hundred years.
A wily outlaw, a force for good in a corrupt society, and in many—though not all—versions, a displaced nobleman who robs the rich to give to the poor. This is the Robin Hood that has come down through the centuries and who remains a vivid part of popular culture today, as a new movie now in the works—with Russell Crowe this time inhabiting the part of the folk hero—attests. He’s already been portrayed by actors from Errol Flynn to Daffy Duck.
“Robin Hood is a fixture in our mental baggage,” so ubiquitous that “most people can’t identify when they first heard of him,” says Thomas Hahn, a professor of English, a specialist in medieval literature and a lifelong devotee of the Robin Hood legend.
From October 22 to 25, Hahn and other scholars of the Robin Hood story will put that “mental baggage” under scrutiny at the seventh biannual conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies. The conference, which will be held at the University—its inaugural site—this year takes on the theme “Robin Hood: Media Creature.” It will bring together literary critics, historians, folklorists, anthropologists, musicologists, and experts in film, children’s literature, graphic novels, and comic books.
In addition to academic panels, the conference will also feature a range of performances. Among the events are the screening of the earliest surviving Robin Hood film, a newly restored nitrate print of the 1912 version of Robin Hood, filmed in Fort Lee, N.J., then the center of movie-making in the United States; a concert of early lute music with Paul O’Dette, an Eastman professor and Grammy Award–winning lutenist; a performance of Robin Hood operettas by Steven Daigle, an associate professor of opera and dramatic director of Eastman Opera Theatre, and singers and musicians from the Eastman School and the College; and the world premiere of a tinted nitrate print of Douglas Fairbanks’s 1922 Robin Hood, newly restored by Rochester’s George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art.
Whatever the form, Robin Hood’s appeal is a constant.
“People usually first ask, ‘Was he real?’,” Hahn says. “It’s a desire to ground our affection for Robin Hood in the fact that he was a real person.”
Scholars have pointed to people named Robin, or Robert, Hood in historical records, but there is no single figure who seems to have inspired the Robin Hood stories.
Thomas Hahn, professor of English, a specialist in medieval literature and a lifelong devotee of the Robin Hood legend, says: “Robin Hood is a fixture in our mental baggage,” so ubiquitous that “most people can’t identify when they first heard of him.”
“Historians have been too successful, in that they’ve produced too many candidates” for being the original Robin Hood, “none more compelling than the other,” says Hahn.
But while there may be no evidence of a single real man behind the heroic story of Robin Hood, there were plenty of outlaws in 14th-century England who could have provided the inspiration, says Richard Kaeuper, a professor of history. A medievalist, Kaeuper has written books on justice and public order and on chivalry.
“A lot of medieval outlaw stories turn on justice proclaimed—and not provided,” he says.
“Robin Hood legends are subversive,” says Russell Peck, the John Hall Deane Professor of English. “They always involve him subverting those with authority and wealth—sheriffs, mayors, churchmen, dukes.
“His honor lies in his belief in a moral structure common to the culture, but abused by those in power,” Peck says.
The story “always becomes more prominent in times of stress,” he adds, and finds its own relevance today. “I suppose the Robin Hoods in our day become those people who dare to oppose large corporations or big government to expose wrongs and gain a fair hearing.”
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