There are so many versions of Robin Hood that it is impossible to say quite when I first encountered him, but amongst those books that mysteriously appeared in the household in those dim years was one that became a treasured object. It still is.
    An odd thing really. It was obviously produced as some sort of early marketing tie-in with the 1938 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood—the one that starred Errol Flynn, which is of course the best ever. The book has a minimal text by an unnamed author but every page is illustrated with a scene from the movie in glorious sepia—at least 100 of them—as well as 16 colour plates garishly colourised. What I remember is clamouring to get a look at these pictures while Rosely battled to read the text and if that was not the first reading of the story, it’s best to pretend that it was.
But what is odd is that, somehow, the possibility of there being a motion picture having something to do with this never occurred to me, and it was many years before I first saw the film, in black and white on television, and I don’t remember making the connection. Which is rather a pity, given the way things turned out as you will see.
    Robin Hood arises as a myth that goes almost all the way back to the time when it was set. He might or might not have been a real person, but it was Walter Scott who created the nuts and bolts of the legend when he deployed the myth and his Merrie Men to try and help out the brain-dead and useless Ivanhoe gather King Richard’s ransom. Whole societies exist to this day trying to unscramble which bits Scott added and which predate him. Scott would have loved it.