Roger Lancelyn Green: The Adventures of Robin Hood

My kids are 7 and just shy of 10 years old and The Adventures of Robin Hood is a great bedtime book. The characters and the dialogue are natural and Green isn’t trying to impress with esoteric words (like “esoteric”) The prose is plain but poetic and a pleasure to read aloud.

Lady Marian came suddenly into the room, clad in Lincoln green, with a quiver of arrows at her side and a bow in her hand.

“How now?” roared her father. “Where are you off to now, wench?”

“To the greenwood,” said Marian calmly.

“That you shall not!” bellowed Lord Fitzwalter.

“But I am going,” said Marian.

“But I will have up the drawbridge.”

“But I will swim the moat.”

“But I will secure the gates.”

“But I will leap from the battlement.”

“But I will lock you in an upper chamber.”

“But I will shred the tapestry and let myself down.”

“But I will lock you in a turret where you shall only see light through a loophole.”

“But I will find some way of escape. And, father, while I go freely, I shall return willingly. But once shut me up, and if I slop out then, I shall not return at all… Robing waits for me in the greenwood, and the knot half-tied yesterday can so easily be tied completely.”

“Well spoken, lady,” cried the Friar.

“Ill spoken Friar!” thundered Lord Fitzwalter.

– Roger Lancelyn Green, The Adventures of Robin Hood

Looking at Green’s list of fiction novels on his Wikipedia page, I’m sure this will not be the last book of his that I read, maybe for myself and not as a bedtime story. I will give it a Google and see which of his books have the best reviews but “Tales of the the Greek Heroes: Retold From the Ancient Authors” caught my eye (I enjoyed the Plutarch’s Alexander and Caesar biographies but there is no way I’m going to make it through that tomb, even if Plutarch is fairly readable, it’s definitely not grade school prose)

“The Book of Nonsense” also caught my eye because I just bought “A Book of Nonsense” by Edward Lear (a picture book of nonsensical limericks) a couple weeks ago. Ok, I’ve convinced myself, I just bought “THE Book of Nonsense” by Roger Lancelyn Green. I am rather fond of nonsense. It looks like it edited by Green… and maybe written by many authors? I’m not quite sure from the descriptions. But like I said, if it’s nonsense I’m sure I won’t be disappointed!

I added The Tale of Troy to just reach the $15 required for free shipping. The Book of Nonsense, I got the same edition that they are selling as a collectible for $30 for $8. It was printed in 1957. Tale of Troy, January 1958. I like to get old books if they aren’t more expensive. I’ve got some good ones from Thriftbooks. If they come with someone’s “Property of…” inscription inside the cover, that’s better. I like to imagine who they were and what happened to them.

A random tangential conclusion: “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” by Norbert Weiner comes to mind. Inside the front and back cover were old articles from the early 1950s, one from Time magazine. Oh boy, that was a great ThriftBooks surprise delivery for a dork like myself! I sent pictures to my coworkers. They were overwhelmed with happiness for me, I’m sure.