Green In the Greenwood

In his introduction to his 1956 The Adventures of Robin Hood, Roger Lancelyn Green notes that “Robin Hood had no Malory”. He may have being modest there, since I am aware of no other attempt to synthesise as many of the historical source texts for Robin Hood tales into a single overarching narrative which is as complete as Green’s, and what was Le Morte d’Arthur but a synthesis of the Arthurian literature that Malory had to hand?

With King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, which preceded it, Green had the advantage of Malory largely putting the framework in place for him, and having a great mass of other Arthurian material which he could weave into it. With his two 1958 volumes of Greek mythology, he had a pre-existing narrative arc for the whole Trojan War thing, and could fit the preceding material into a narrative with minimal massaging, and again benefitted from from having a mass of sources to choose from.

This attempt to craft the story of Robin Hood as a complete story, with a narrative flowing from beginning to end and incorporating as many incidents from the source material as possible, runs into the same problem that Green had with Myths of the Norsemen: namely, that there just ain’t that much material to begin with. However, Green did have some advantages here which weren’t so available in that later project.

As I discussed in my review, one of my issues with Green’s retelling of the Eddas is that it’s exactly that – a retelling of the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, which both largely overlap each other anyway, and Green was not able to find quite enough additional material to weave in to make Myths of the Norsemen feel like it added much over just reading the narrative parts of Eddas themselves.

With the Robin Hood material, the problem is somewhat different in nature – historical material is sparse (the pieces which survive from the actual medieval period consist of a metrical romance and some ballads), but precisely because it is so diffuse Green has a lot of freedom in how he can fit it together, and this process of weaving it all into one grand whole allows Green to make a contribution above and beyond reciting what already exists.

Approaches To Asgard

Myths of the Norsemen – originally published as The Saga of Asgard, was another in Roger Lancelyn Green’s series of retellings of classic bodies of mythology for young(ish) readers. As with his volumes of Arthurian and Greek mythology, Green endeavours to be as true to the source material as he can, whilst weaving the stories into a strong central narrative.

Unlike those volumes, where the range of source material Green had to draw on was staggering, the actual major sources for Scandinavian mythology are actually fairly sparse – in fact, we can read Green’s two main sources fairly easily, because they are still the two main sources we have on the subject. Perhaps, then, it’s worth taking a look at them before we look at Green’s treatment itself.

One source is the body of poetry known as the Poetic Edda. The exact scope of the Poetic Edda is hard to pin down because whilst our primary source for it is the Codex Regius, a compilation of Norse poetry penned in Iceland some time in the 1270s by an anonymous scribe (and which is the only known source for much of the material within), some compilers and translators also include within the body of work a few other stray pieces of poetry which clearly sit within the same tradition in both style and theme.

Between this and the fact that the Codex Regius has some gaps here and there (and some portions which, quite possibly, the original compiler simply botched the transcription of, since Norse scholars aren’t able to figure out what the hell they mean), any presentation of the Poetic Edda involves not only translating the text itself, but also a certain amount of editorial decision-making in interpreting ambiguous parts, filling in gaps (or leaving them empty), and selecting what to include in the first place.

The edition I own and have read is the version produced by Carolyne Larrington. This includes all of the Codex Regius poems, plus those other poems which are believed by current scholarship to be from the same general time, with useful notes to clarify obscure language (the poems make much use of “kenning”, using colourful punning descriptions of things to refer to them like talking of gold like it’s a “serpent’s bed” because snakes and dragons were supposed to like sleeping on gold), references to stuff not explained elsewhere in the poems themselves but clarified by other sources, and so on.

Green’s Hellenic Shadowlands

Alongside King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, the most substantial of Roger Lancelyn Green’s treatments of major bodies of mythology aimed at young readers was the two volumes of Greek mythology he put out in 1958, Tales of the Greek Heroes and The Tale of Troy, which between them wove a narrative which spanned from the revolt of Cronos’ children against him to the fall of Troy and the demise of the heroes of the Trojan War.

As well as solid introductions to the relevant bodies of myth in their own right, Green’s two Greek volumes offer an interesting insight into his view of mythology, and in particular an interesting contrast to the handling of similar subject matter by C.S. Lewis. If the Inklings were the Jedi Council of mid-20th Century English fantasy writing, Green was Lewis’ padawan, and Greek myth was a subject both of them were keen on after a fashion; Green and his wife June would accompany Lewis and Joy Davidman, on a 1960 holiday to Greece shortly before Joy’s health failed completely, and it seems all but certain that a certain healthy appreciation of the mythic landscape was part of the draw. However, in my view Green’s approach to mythology was much more fulfilling than Lewis’, and this is particular apparent in the first book of the duology.

Tales of the Greek Heroes

In both volumes, Green takes the same approach he had with Arthurian myth by pulling together all of the disparate stories selected for incorporation and fitting them into structure that has a narrative arc running from beginning to end providing strong interconections between all of them, so they’re all episodes in the same grand saga rather than a bunch of disconnected stories that happen to share a setting and a cast of stock characters. For the second volume, The Tale of Troy, that was simple enough: the Trojan War itself and its immediate aftermath provided that central plot, as it has for retellings for thousands of years, job done.

For the purposes of first volume, however, Green has a bit more of a challenge on his hands, but has an elegant solution. Tales of the Greek Heroes is bookended by the Titanomachy at the beginning and the Gigantomachy at the end. In the immediate wake of the Titanomachy, when Zeus gets angry at Prometheus for giving the power of fire to humanity, Prometheus taunts Zeus with the knowledge that sooner or later the Gigantomachy is going to come, and the Immortals will need a mortal hero to hand who can actually slay giants if they are to avoid the vengeance of Rhea. By the end of the book, Heracles has proved to be the hero in question, Zeus has mellowed out and permitted the release of Prometheus, and the giants are soundly defeated.

Arthur, Condensed

Roger Lancelyn Green, the scion of ancient nobility (his family line could be traced back to the 11th Century and he was the lord of two manors), was a member of the Inklings who was a padawan of C.S. Lewis and a close friend of Lewis’s in his later life. As well as following a career in academia, he was also a respected biographer. But for followers of fantasy and mythology, perhaps his name stands out the most as the writer of a series of books in the 1950s and 1960s which came out via Puffin, each of which offered an accessible (but never patronising) look at a different body of European or classical mythology.

The first of Green’s books in this vein was his King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, published in 1953. In this treatment of the Arthurian body of legend, Green’s declared approach is to start with Le Morte d’Arthur, dip merrily into other sources as he sees fit, and try to massage the Arthurian body of stories so that they all form part of one major overarching tale.

To be fair to Malory, I’d point out that this is kind of what he was trying to do with Le Morte d’Arthur, at least to the extent of providing it as a big fat tome with the origins of Arthur in beginning and the titular death of Arthur at the end and having all the Round Table adventures in between. As a result, Le Morte d’Arthur is perhaps the most cohesive and comprehensive of the original sources of Arthurian legend – coming as it did right at the end of the medieval period, it ended up being more or less the culmination of that whole literary tradition, and you can divide Arthurian texts into pre-Malory and post-Malory pieces.

Many of the post-Malory items – especially once you hit the 19th Century – look back to Malory, simply because there was no better compilation of material available – whilst many pre-Malory sources don’t try to tell the entire saga, but present individual stories within it. (The major exception would be Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, but this gives a fairly terse account of Arthur’s reign as part of a wider farrago of absolute nonsense.) Even so, in trying to go as comprehensive as he can with Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory ended up including a whole bunch of stories and incidents which seem to have no connection to anything else beyond being stories involving a Knight of the Round Table or Arthur himself, and also ended up producing a massively cumbersome work which is hardly a light read.

As a result, from the Victorian revival of interest in King Arthur onwards people have regularly attempted to try and use Malory as the framework for their own retellings and attempting to present a more cohesive central theme or overarching plot. Green’s efforts here fit into the tradition, as does T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, John Boorman’s Excalibur, and Greg Stafford’s Pendragon tabletop RPG (and particularly The Great Pendragon Campaign).