Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow

"Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow" is Child ballad 152.[1][2]

Synopsis

The sheriff of Nottingham complains to King Richard of Robin Hood. The king declares that the sheriff is his sheriff and must catch him. The sheriff decides to trap him with an archery contest, where the prizes would be arrows with golden and silver heads. Robin decides to compete, despite a warning from David of Doncaster that it's a trap. Robin goes in disguise and wins. At Little John's advice, a letter is written to the sheriff and shot into his hall, telling the truth.[1][3]

Portrayals

The story is portrayed in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn in which Prince John, Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff of Nottingham plan to trap Robin as the most likely winner of the contest, knowing of his attraction to the Lady Marian, and Robin splits the arrow of another contestant to thus win the prize of the golden arrow given by her hand. An altered version of the tale appears in the first episode of the Robin of Sherwood television series, in which the prize offered is a silver arrow belonging to Herne the Hunter as a means of luring Robin to the castle. This episode is parodied in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights in which the contest itself seduces Robin. The event also appears in the animated Robin Hood (1973 film), with the prizes instead being a golden arrow and a kiss from Maid Marian. The event also appears in the computer game Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, where the player, as Robin Hood, can win a golden arrow in an archery contest, thereby adding its value (15000 marks) to a ransom to free Richard the Lionheart from prison abroad. The event also appears in the Doctor Who episode Robot of Sherwood, with Robin splitting another contestant’s arrow, before the Doctor splits Robin’s arrow.

Archery contests in Robin Hood tales

There are many archery contests in the legends of Robin Hood, but many of them are clearly derived from this source, as in Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.[4] Other variants are more closely related to the older contest included in A Gest of Robyn Hode, where they are recognized and must fight free.

gollark: When have I explained nothing? I want an annotated 500-word essay with examples.
gollark: Yes, I am in fact Olivia too.
gollark: Perhaps they're semirandom. Perhaps I devise bespoke bluffs by myself and then share them. Perhaps my bluffs are optimized automatically via testing against high-fidelity computer simulations of all other participants. Perhaps I don't make bluffs but merely disseminate cognitohazards causing perception of bluffs. Perhaps my every word and bluff is meticulously generated to produce minimum guessing of me. Perhaps I never bluff and every word I say is accurate.
gollark: I generate my bluffs via RNG now to avoid the terribleness of human random number generation (heavpoot has data on this), unless I don't and am trying to trick you into not making inferences from them.
gollark: Unless I didn't but am *not* trying to fool you all.

See also

Notes
  1. Child, Francis James, ed. (1890). Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. III Part 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company. pp. 223–225. Retrieved 2017-11-24.
  2. "Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow". The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Internet Sacred Text Archive. 2011. Retrieved 2017-11-24.
  3. Waltz, Robert B.; Engle, David G. (2012). "Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow". Folklore The Traditional Ballad Index: An Annotated Bibliography of the Folk Songs of the English-Speaking World. California State University, Fresno. Retrieved 2017-11-24.
  4. Pyle, Howard (2003). "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 2017-11-23.


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