Robin Hood Ballads Essay Week 12

Movie Robin Hood

This week I read the Robin Hood Ballads unit. I think of all the units I have read so far that this was probably one of the most unique units. The entire unit was in song form, so reading it was like reading some old time poetry. I had a very Chaucer feel to it. One of the great things about this unit is that a lot of them had an embedded Youtube video of someone singing the ballads, so that added an extra dimension to this unit. I have always loved movies and tales that involved Robin Hood, so it was a no brainer for me to pick this unit. In the unit the stories that were presented were all pretty familiar to me so there were no real surprises for me as far a new knowledge. However, because they were in the forms of ballads I was able to enjoy these stories on a whole new level. Though they were in ballads they were not hard to understand or follow. The pictures in the unit were another part of the unit I enjoyed. Some of the artwork I had never seen before, actually most of it was new for me. I was always familiar with the Robin Hood I have seen in the movies so to come across other art work that was influenced by the legend, if that is accurate because there is some argument that he was an actual person, was interesting to me. I had never thought of the cultural effect that Robin Hood had on that region, but now after reading the stories in the unit, seeing the artwork, and hearing the songs it is clear that Robin Hood is as big a part of the culture as the Arthurian legends.

Picture Attribution

By United Artists, cinematographers Arthur Edeson & Charles Richardson (http://douglasfairbanks.org/robin1.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons