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Could it be that Robin Hood never came from Nottingham? American author Stephen Lawhead is claiming just that. In his latest novel Hood he’s taken English folklore’s most famous outlaw from the treetops of Sherwood Forest to the primeval woodlands of the Welsh March.

 

Lawhead’s telling us to forget everything we know about Maid Marian and the Merry Men and to prepare ourselves for the legend of Robin Hood as we’ve never heard it before. 

 

Lawhead – a confirmed Anglophile who’s lived in Oxford on–and-off for the last 20 years – claims that, “Although in Nottingham, the Robin Hood legends found good soil in which to grow – they must have originated elsewhere.” He firstly points to the landscape to back up his theory.  Hood, he believes, could never have hidden in the ever-dwindling forests of medieval Sherwood, but could have survived undetected in the Welsh March for years. Then there is the fact that the Welsh developed the long bow as a ferocious weapon of war, becoming the most fearsome mercenaries operating in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. These and a host of other details led Lawhead to conclude unswervingly that Robin Hood had more than a hint of the Red Dragon in him.

 

Lawhead has written 22 novels since giving up his job as a rock band manager and the owner of his own music label in 1981.  His most-acclaimed and bestselling work is the Pendragon cycle, a reinterpretation of the legend of King Arthur.