In This House, Robin Hood Is a Hero

On robbing from the great to give to the mediocre.

There are many silly movies about Robin Hood, but we may be in for the silliest yet. Neither Errol Flynn in tights nor Russell Crowe in leather can match the ponderous melodrama of Hugh Jackman in furs and high dudgeon as he growls his way through the trailer for A24’s The Death of Robin Hood. I thought this guy was supposed to be merry? Not in this version, which features the tag line: “he was no hero.”

What a funny thing to say. The word “hero” describes a certain kind of character in a certain kind of story. Originally it was a Greek word—hērōs—for the champions who lived in the days before wickedness made humanity shrunken and feeble. The poet Hesiod described these shining fighters as a “holy breed of hero-men, the ones called demi-gods.” Homer pictured them hurling boulders that would take two men to throw, “such as men are now.” By definition, a hero is the stuff of legend.

So gradually the word came to mean the protagonist, the good guy, the main character. When it entered English, “hero” phased out the Anglo-Saxon word haeleth, meaning “warrior.” It was the natural title for valiant adventurers like Beowulf and King Arthur. Heroes have always been flawed—Homer’s certainly were—and they have always been extraordinary. Above all they have always been at the center of a tale. You can’t be a hero without being the hero of a story, even if the story is a true one.

We don’t know if there is a real man behind the many legends of Robin Hood. All we have are the stories. And from the very first stories, Robin is the hero. One of the earliest versions, the 15th-century Gest of Robyn Hode, introduces him as “a good yeoman” and “a proud outlaw”: a man of substance, not high born, living on the run. “So courteous an outlaw as he was one,” goes the poem, “Was never none found.”

That’s the premise of the story, the architecture of its world. Robin Hood’s peculiar status, as both hero and outlaw, is what the story is about. There is no such thing as who he “really” is outside the story, and no such thing as the story without him as its hero. His particular moral character and position is one of the legend’s load-bearing pillars.

There are many different Robin Hood yarns, but each one is preoccupied with the quintessentially English contrast between nobility of title and nobility of spirit. In the most familiar version, Robin is a prince among men in rebellion against the rotten King John. The point is that, in a corrupt society, the just become outlaws and the dishonorable are honored. That’s what it means to tell the story of Robin Hood.

It looks like the Jackman movie will be based on an episode at the end of the Gest, in which a wicked nun colludes with her lover to kill Robin. The elements of this new retelling are so familiar that I could probably have rattled them off sight unseen: the disgraced non-hero, the bold young girl, the misunderstood non-villainess. Hey ChatGPT, write me an “edgy” “modern” Robin Hood....

Maybe A24 will surprise me and deliver something more original than I’m envisioning here. I sort of doubt it, though. The runaway success of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked has helped bring morally inverted retcons back into major vogue. I’ve written before about this trope, in which the Wicked Witch of the West or the Evil Stepsister or literal Satan gets recast as a quirky freedom fighter with big dreams. In essence it’s a retread of the Gnostic fantasy that the God of the Bible is secretly a lying oppressor, and the world as you think you know it is upside-down.

That kind of thing can actually be of interest if done well. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved to toy with their heroes and rewrite their myths. The most prominent example is that of Odysseus, who starts out in Homer as a resourceful voyager and becomes a terrifying nihilist in Virgil’s Aeneid, before finally ending up in the hell of Dante’s Inferno. It’s not unheard of to ask how a classic story might look different from a different perspective.

But it does represent a total upheaval in moral outlook, like the one that took place as pagan antiquity gave way to Christendom, or the one on offer in the Gnostic gospels. If you’re going to attempt a transformation of worldviews on that level, it matters which worldview you’re replacing, and what you’re proposing to replace it with.

From what I can tell, the proposal currently on the table is to dispatch with traditional canons of heroism and replace them with...nothing. No one is really wicked, just misunderstood (except for the heroes, who are wicked). This pointless and self-contradictory idea at least has the benefit of reflecting what a lot of very self-important and middlingly intelligent people—for example, the people who run movie studios—actually think.

It’s particularly stupid in the case of Robin Hood. If your point of view is that sometimes good people are unfairly outcast by society, well, I’ve got great news. There is already an excellent classic story about exactly that. It’s called the story of Robin Hood! He is literally, in his very essence, the hero cast wrongly as the villain by a cruel world. Remaking him into a villain cast wrongly as a hero does nothing except attach the brand name “Robin Hood” to a completely separate and much less interesting narrative.

“In this house, Robin Hood is a hero!”

It would be a wonderful surprise if The Death of Robin Hood turned out to be something other than what it looks like, because at this point the moral bait-and-switch routine has been done to death. It gets very old, very quickly, and for good reason: there is a real universe of good and evil. Stories exist to trace the contours of that universe, in which flawed people perform acts of genuine heroism and villainy. If you don’t believe in any of that, you will very quickly run out of new stories to tell and find yourself dismembering old ones to cannibalize their remains.

People sometimes call this sort of thing “realism.” But true realism isn’t the mopey grayscale that fake sophisticates prefer. It’s the depiction of life as it’s actually lived, in the vivid world of good and evil—the world full of stories, the world with an author. In other words, the real world. If you can’t or won’t see that world for what it is, you don’t have much of a tale to tell.