The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

The pleasures here are the encounters. Robin meets a seven-foot giant on a narrow bridge and loses to him blow for blow, tumbling into the stream to gales of laughter, then invites the man to join and christens him Little John in a mock baptism of ale. There is the Sheriff of Nottingham, forever grudging and forever outfoxed. There is Robin himself, ragged and one-eyed in scarlet, splitting a rival's arrow before a hushed crowd under the Sheriff's very nose. And there is Allan a Dale, a grieving minstrel whose ballad falls upon the feast and silences it, and Friar Tuck beneath his osier, a meat pasty between his knees, swigging Malmsey and spoiling for a swordfight.

Howard Pyle tells it in old, rolling speech, full of jest and disguise and horn blasts summoning hidden men from the greenwood. The tone is roguish and open-hearted, adventure stitched from firelit feasts under a great oak, daring rescues, and the loyalty of friends who best each other and love each other for it.

Beneath the merriment runs a quieter thread: a code, a fellowship, a life lived on one's own terms in the free woodland. "I will be mine own," Robin says, "and no man in all merry England shall be my master." What that costs, and what it comes to, is Sherwood's to keep until a reader walks in under its branches.