Those adversaries come after them in far larger numbers as knights on horseback, carrying sword and spear. And, like in the legend, the outlaw band members are adept at guerilla tactics, shooting the longbow, repeatedly besting their adversaries. The evil sheriff of Nottingham becomes the ruthless Norman Sheriff de Glanville. There are other familiar characters from the legend too: maid Marian becomes Merian, Bran’s headstrong beloved. And the third, Tuck, contains much from the point of view of Father Aethelfrith, whom the legend calls Friar Tuck. (Rhi Bran y Hud is what he is eventually called by his countrymen.) The second book, Scarlet, revolves around the point of view of Will Scarlet, who joins the outlaw band living in the ancient woods of the March, the eastern borderland of Wales. The first book, Hood, stands mostly in the point of view of Bran, the Robin Hood character. What if Robin Hood and his longbowmen were really Welsh resistance fighters, seeking to counter the heavy hand of William the Conqueror’s son William Rufus? Lawhead bases his three-volume tale on this supposition. Now Lawhead, who has spent much of his career exploring Celtic culture and myth, is entertaining us by bringing his broad knowledge of the Cymry (Welsh) to the Robin Hood legend. Tuck is the final book of the King Raven trilogy, which is a long, wild yarn spun to answer the question, who might Robin Hood have been? Apparently the traditional location, Sherwood Forest, isn’t very conducive to a good semi-historical tale, at least as far as Lawhead is concerned. She appears to be several hundred years old, a Celtic seer in the tradition of Merlin, but of course her age isn’t pinned down, so who knows?Īre Arthurian legends fantasy? This book falls in the Arthurian vein, in that it is speculating about the possible history behind a legend.
There is only one character who has attributes that are truly larger than life: the Banfaith seer, Angharad. Genre: Historic legend, Christian, young adult (high action, no sexy stuff) Published by Thomas Nelson, 2009, 443 pages
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