Not Just a Tournament/Analysis

One of the earliest examples of Not Just a Tournament is at the end of The Odyssey. Odysseus wants to kill all of the men who've tried to marry his wife while he was away, so he has his wife organize an archery contest with herself as the prize... then he kills everybody who shows up. Contrast with what is probably the best known use of this trope, the archery tournament at the end of Robin Hood. The Big Bad only knows two things about The Hero: he's in love with The Chick and he's the best archer in the country. What better way to flush out our protagonist than to organize an archery tournament with her as the prize? Since The Odyssey was a well-known part of the contemporary literary canon the author would have expected his readers to already be familiar with that work's archery tournament. This may mean that Robin Hood's ending was meant as a deliberate subversion of what readers would have, in their day, seen as a well-established trope.