King Arthur & Robin Hood

[Josh The Lighthouse Guy]

Much has been said about Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and its influence on antebellum Southern culture.

Does anyone know what kind of standing King Arthur and Arthurian Legend had in the popular conscienceless in antebellum America, either North or South? Besides Ivanhoe, that seems like the main classic tale(s) to deal with knightly virtues and it had been around for centuries before the American Revolution, much less the Civil War.

From a little searching it seems like Arthur's popularity didn't start to really take off until after the Civil War, but I expect there are some folks who know a lot more about that subject than me.

On a related note, am I correct in understanding that Robin Hood literature wasn't really popular in 19th century America? It seems to me like Robin Hood didn't get popular in America until cinema came along. I imagine the core "rob from the rich, give to the poor" theme of Robin Hood didn't really speak to the public at large until after they'd lived through the Gilded Age and robber barons.

 

[R. Porter]

My grandmother said we weren't descended from Robin Hood, but we were descended from the guy who taught him to shoot the bow and arrow! I tend to believe that early movies were made from previously existing books or plays. That would suggest stories and legends took hold before the turn of the 20th century. From what I have found with a brief check of the Web, Ivanhoe takes place during the reign of Richard the Lionheart which makes him contemporary with Robin Hood. One reference indicated that King Arthur was mentioned in Ivanhoe. I have never read the book so I can't confirm that and you can't rely on movies to get things right.

My grandmother was born in 1888 and lived through the birth of motion pictures so she could have come by her family tale in the 1930's but it sounds like the wit of an earlier day. Were King Arthur and Robin Hood known in America before Ivanhoe was published? That requires more research, but it seems they were probably known afterward.

 

[Scott1967]

Both Hood & Arthur exploded onto the scene in the Victorian era when Morals and Character were highly desired traits for a Victorian gentleman and then exported to the US in the mid 19th Century.

Hood is totally fictional who first started to appear in the mid 14th century at the height of chivalry some 200 years after the event & Arthur first appeared in the 12th Century some 600 years after his event , Both stories have been added to over the Centuries however there is no strong evidence to suggest either man existed.

 

[RedRover]

Much has been said about Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and its influence on antebellum Southern culture.

Does anyone know what kind of standing King Arthur and Arthurian Legend had in the popular conscienceless in antebellum America, either North or South? Besides Ivanhoe, that seems like the main classic tale(s) to deal with knightly virtues and it had been around for centuries before the American Revolution, much less the Civil War.

From a little searching it seems like Arthur's popularity didn't start to really take off until after the Civil War, but I expect there are some folks who know a lot more about that subject than me.

Sir Walter Scott, author of the popular Ivanhoe, as I understand, was a fan of Sir Thomas Mallory's "LeMorte D'Arthur" (ca. 1470). But it was not a work the English generally liked, or were encouraged to like, though it was in print in the early 1800s.

In England a principal pedagogical textbook "The schoolmaster" by Ascham (1570), observed of the Arthurian legends of "Le Mort d'Arthur" story that it wasn't suitable for other than wise and honest people...

...

Ascham's two reported great loves were archery and cock-fighting. His work "Toxophilus" was all about archery, and inspired many contemporaries. Thus was found poetry about the likes of the legendary Robin Hood, and his deft skill at it, like Martin Parker's "True Tale of Robin Hood" (1632)...

Ascham's "schoolmaster" was a standard textbook in English for a long time. Washington Irving in 1821's "Bracebridge Hall" rather lampoons their reliance upon it.

But it was popular in America too. From 1836, the English were printing American examinations of Ascham's ideals.

Still pretty standard in America in 1866...

I would presume the continued influence of Ascham in American schoolhouses kept the more salacious Arthurian legends from reaching a greater popularity.

But there were more approved Arthurian tales, particularly in poetry. One was given shortly after the publication of Ascham's schoolmaster by Edmund Spencer, in his 1590's poetic story of "Prince Arthur" from his "Faerie Queene" as of use of the character in embodying Aristotelian principles...

From E.L. Rice's compilation of English writing for Americans, 1846, reproduces the Prince Arthur prose designed to a good purpose...

Also, Bulwer-Lytton's "King Arthur" poem (1849) was for sale in New Orleans by 1851.

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Idylls to the King" (1859) was a Victorian work up of the Arthurian legends.

In August, 1862 Sarah Morgan of Baton Rouge observed that Union troops had pinched all the books in her library, except one, leaving behind her copy of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idylls..."

But methinks many Americans considered Camelot a silly place, or considered it not at all.

See also Twain's "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889).

They liked Scott's Ivanhoe, published in 1820. Scott published anonymously into the 1820s, and his "Waverly" medieval novels, including Ivanhoe were much appreciated. One notice from England in 1820...

By the 1830s Scott's authorship was well known. And Ivanhoe particularly was well regarded in America for many decades. It continued common in American Grammar schools throughout the country into the late 1800s, as in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891...

And into the 20th, as in West Virginia schools in 1914...

And a century after its publication it was still widely read by American boys according to Mr. Phelan's study of rural American sociology, in lieu of works encouraging lawlessness.

On a related note, am I correct in understanding that Robin Hood literature wasn't really popular in 19th century America? It seems to me like Robin Hood didn't get popular in America until cinema came along. I imagine the core "rob from the rich, give to the poor" theme of Robin Hood didn't really speak to the public at large until after they'd lived through the Gilded Age and robber barons.

On the contrary. One of the principal characters in Scott's very popular "Ivanhoe" is none other than "Locksley" or Robin Hood of Sherwood forest himself!

In 1842 President Tyler named his Virginia estate "Sherwood Forest."

Robin Hood tales abounded in Britain in the early 1800s. From 1805:

While Ivanhoe was universally popular here, in the South, there were particular works taking off the theme of Robin Hood. For example Beverly Tucker's "Partisan Leader" (1836) that described a future (in 1856) in which a band of merry Virginians are forced into the countryside by a political takeover of the country by Martin Van Buren, etc. Or the work of William Gilmore Simms, "The Partisan: or Romance of the Revolution," (1835) employing a romanticized history of Francis Marion to enthuse particularly a southern audience of his chivalrous band driven into the swamps of Carolina, etc. Both were reprinted, Simms' partisan in the 1850s, and Tucker's Partisan Leader in 1861-64.


But the story with Robin Hood as the principal perhaps wasn't so popular in America until worked up by Howard Pyle in his "Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" in 1884:

 

[7thWisconsin]

I've always thought Howard Pyle wrote the best fake Shakespearean English of any writer! I had a full color, massively illustrated copy of his Robin Hood when I was little.. I think I spent more time with the pictures than the prose! A few years ago, I spent quite a while looking for what I remembered as a Renaissance painting of fully armored knights in combat. Couldn't find it. Opened up my Robin Hood... oops there it was!
Seriously, Twain was a satirist and humorist; ate we giving his Ivanhoe quote just a little too much gravitas?

 

[RedRover]

Seriously, Twain was a satirist and humorist; ate we giving his Ivanhoe quote just a little too much gravitas?

Yes. Twain was writing about literary modes, romanticism, and the like, and the apish manner in which Americans hung their hat on Scott's styles, particularly Southern authors. His claim that it caused the war is a gesture of mockery which he himself calls a "wild proposition" but throws out for fun...

That was in 1883 in "Life on the Mississippi" Twain, in his biting way, awards Sir Walter Scott's novels a place in the confusion which he says converted the South into a hot bed of old world phantasms and to which he mockingly ascribes the cause of the war of 1861.

"Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter`s influence than to that of any other thing or person.

One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery `eloquence,` romanticism, sentimentality-- all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too-- innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could.

But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it--clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany-- as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walters' time is out."

Mark Twain quotations - Sir Walter Scott

So his beef was with the stagnation of popular literature, that kept "Ivanhoe" copycats in the van of popularity. And in the immediate post-war in the South it did provide a template for public amusements and sport in the wake of the wreck of public fortunes and dispersal of the Confederate armies, etc.


From Hendricks' "the Training of an American" notice of Walter H. Page in the immediate post-war years in North Carolina. The boys had access to Le Morte d'Arthur by Mallory, but the Confederate veterans enjoyed tilting at the ring, inspiring the lads to read Ivanhoe again!

Tournaments of the kind had been somewhat popular in the South in the pre-war years, but perhaps even more so after 1865 after the wartime massacre of the best horse-flesh, and much the capitol, put horse racing in the lurch. The tournaments could employ for their serio-comic purpose any horses and chaps who could cut a pole. It was not a purely military sport either. Since the purpose of such practice was for the champions to choose their favorite lady, the champion choosing "the queen of love and beauty" (as per Ivanhoe) and the proceedings generally ended with a dance.

A northern visitor to Fredericksburg, Virginia observed a tournament held at Kenmore...

.....

In ante-bellum North Carolina there had been failed attempts to ban horse-racing, and encourage tournaments instead of horse racing and its customary betting. In some parts of the post-war south, besides the dearth of racing stock and money, where horse-racing was illegal, the "tilting at the ring" tournaments games were bet on instead! Horace Greeley claimed by 1870 "the tournament is a natural institution of the South as much as base-ball is of the North or cricket of England." The sport was also indulged among the freedmen. In 1865 at West Grove in Fairfax County, Virginia ten knights tilted at the ring before a large and enthusiastic crowd.

But as was not uncommon at large-scale events, public men got a crack at the crowd before the fun commenced, and not without the customary allusions akin the popular literature, in the mode of Scott's "Ivanhoe." At the large scale tournament at the Memphis race-track in May, 1866, Landon C. Haynes encouraged the sport and its chivalrous spirit...

....

Twain wasn't the only critic of the medieval romantic sentimentality. From England in an 1876 short story in "Beeton's Every Lady's' Christmas Annual" the apparition of an English medieval knight converses with an American tourist lady in England, she observes the late sir knight, chivalrous as he may have been, was no republican in social sentiment...

And compares him to the carpet knights in America...

But by the time Twain wrote his literary criticism in 1882, the tournament craze in the South had largely abated. Replaced by horse-racing, baseball, etc. Some were glad to see it go, since the riders were almost universally single men...(perhaps too determined to ride in the circuit than settle down).