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The Robins of Spring
I've seen the Snipe, I've seen the Kestrel. I've seen hawks, and herons and swooping swallows. I'm up to twenty six warblers, as well as Orioles, Tanagers, Grosbeaks, Flycatchers, and, not least of all (well, actually it is the least, or at least the smallest), the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. For years I visited the Park, and never saw these birds. The variety is astounding, but most of the birds in the Park at any given time are members of a few common species. One cannot quite afford to ignore them. In order to see something unusual, one must be well versed in the usual. The better you know the locals, the more the migrants stand out. If you instantly recognize the silhouette of a White-throated Sparrow, you won't follow it, instead of the Cape May Warbler that's one branch over. This makes for a lot of learning. You need to know them in light or darkness, perched or flying, wet from bathing, or fluffed and drying. The same bird can look many different ways. So, for all that there are two hundred species out there, mostly you see the same ones over and over. And when you're sure you know them, you should probably check once more, just to be certain.I've seen a lot of Pigeons, or Rock Doves, to be proper. I've seen a lot of Starlings, Grackles, Crows, and Sparrows. And Robins. Lots and lots of Robins. Now, the Robin has a reputation as a harbinger of Spring, and they do migrate, but many nest here, and some stay all Winter. You can see a Robin in the Park any day of the year. It is perhaps the best loved of the regulars. For one thing, it's more colorful than most of the birds living in association with humans, and they're not so dependent on our waste as are the Pigeons and the House Sparrows. (Actually, it seems to be a general rule that those birds which share our habitat are drabber than members of the same species living in natural environments, which may also say something about those of us who share their circumstances.) Anyway, people like Robins, and, in fact, the bird embodies a nostalgia for our European heritage. The name was bestowed by colonists who were reminded of the smaller European Robin. The two birds are only distantly related, but they share a color scheme, and their behavior is similar. Both are approachable, and do not shy from humans. They frequent parks and gardens, as well as forest floors. They forage on the ground, making them more visible than canopy oriented species. "Robin" was once as common a name as "Bob": both are informal types of "Robert", thus the name embodies a friendly familiarity.
There is another Robin associated with Spring, also a familiar of the Wood. Take a look at this bit of poetry, anthologized in the first edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. The last two stanzas make it clear that the text is from a Robin Hood ballad. Editor Quiller-Couch makes no mention of the fact, instead appending his own title, "May in the Green-Wood". For him, this conventionalized introductory passage could stand on its own as representative of a whole genre of English poetry that celebrates the Spring. The cutting is a bit highhanded by today's editorial standards, but the point is well made. The so-called Greenwood Tradition provides the context not only for the Robin Hood material, but for a range of other ballads and legends as well. It has an identity of its own, beyond the specifics of any plot.
Robin Hood's origins are obscure. Scholars have sought to identify him with some historical figure, or have seen in him a reconfigured pagan spirit: Rob o' the Wood. Interest has tended to focus on the dramatic aspects of the legend, rather than on the sylvan dimension in which they occur, but it's exactly that zone which I'm concerned with. In the Greenwood, many paths meet beneath the Trysting Tree, and Robin Hood's identity results from this conjunction. The theme of social justice: robbing from the rich to give to the poor, is today thought of as the central motif of the legend, the stuff of action movies. It was certainly important in the Middle Ages, but Robin was also adapted to another, less proactive function, as a leading figure of the May Games.
The first recorded reference to Robin is from the 1370's, when "rhymes of Robin Hood" are mentioned in passing, in Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman. The legends may date from as early as the 12th century, but characters and plot lines continued to be added, in accordance with contemporary mores, for several hundred years. The poetic fragment cited above is, in fact, the beginning of "Robin Hood and the Monk", which may be the oldest written work about Robin to be preserved, dated to around 1450. Looking at the full text (from Rochester University's excellent site) we can see that the Greenwood introduction is but a small part of this lengthy ballad. For purposes of narrative, there is only so much to say of the Greenwood, but for purposes of ecstatic orientation, there is everything to experience, if not to speak.
What we cannot speak of, we must approach in other ways. A large body of ritual accrued around the season of rebirth. The Maypole we remember, along with Morris dancing, but the season was honored throughout the month, with a variety of activities, some rising to the level of ceremony, others more along the lines of what we would call a party. The first footnote to the ballad reiterates my point about the timing of the festivities. The aptly named Professor Knight is perhaps a bit pedantic, going so far as to suggest that Chaucer is confused, but I think that we agree on the main premise. April or May, Spring or Somer, however phrased, what is being celebrated is Rebirth, in all its flowering lushness. The fullness of Spring, not its incipient signals, nor the darkening greens of lazy Summer. As a custodian of the woodlands, Robin was incorporated into these celebrations: the Games of May. He guides us on the uncertain journey between the order of the town and the pathless chaos that obscures the heart of the forest. As a friendly guide, he inhabits the sun-dappled margins of the woods, much like his avian namesake. Those not well adjusted to the landscape may be led deeper, into darkness, there to be despoiled. Robin's method of robbery is more in the nature of a test, and not unrelated to procedures of Shamanic initiation. The traveler is invited to a hearty feast, and afterwards is asked to pay. An honest soul who offers what he has, though it be but a penny, is sent safely on his way. Those that would hide their riches are summarily relieved of them, and sent back from whence they came, unable to make progress.
The Greenwood domain embodies the feminine presence of the Goddess. Robin's role as Her minion is displaced onto his conventionalized devotion to the Virgin Mary, which is expressed throughout the various texts. The earliest Robin Hood tales are otherwise remarkable for their lack of significant female characters. His consort, Marian, arrived later, from across the channel. What links them is ostensibly a chance of naming, though I suspect the connection runs deeper. Robin and Marian are the title characters of a popular French pastourelle, which is assumed to have been confounded with the May Games on the one hand, and the Robin Hood stories on the other. The pastourelle, or pastoral, is a romance form, unlike the outlaw ballads, but it is similar in that the characters gain identity from their surrounding landscape. As the name implies, this pastoral zone is not so wild as the Greenwood, rather the protagonists are shepherd and shepherdess, but they are removed from the town, and their country context serves to legitimize a level of sexuality not properly embodied by the more "civilized" townspeople.
However it may have been, the pastoral Marian seems to have made her way into the Springtime rituals as Queen of the May, and in England her paramour Robin became coincident with Robin Hood. Their pairing would lend his legend the romantic dimension it was lacking. Without that quality, I doubt the tale could have lived on in popular consciousness, as it has to this day. But here I want to return to Robin the bird.
I suspect that the old-world Robin, being a smaller bird, flits more than its American counterpart. Not that our Robins can't flit a bit, if need be. Flitting is emblematic songbird behavior. Maddening and mesmerizing for the bird watcher. They take wing faster than one can see, alighting at a distance for another moment, only. They are like quantum particles, inexplicably appearing out of nowhere, then gone without a trace. They flit along the forest eaves, intersecting broken sun, filtered beams of golden-green. Eyes that once could follow these saw more than we today can see. And saw it all with naked eye, unaided by binocular. As the bird moves in mystery, so too the sunlight moves. Or rather, doesn't. But guided by our eye's mind, we see the light play over leaf and trunk, and spill upon the ground like fluid. The Light is steady; a trembling world but intervenes.
This confluence of man and bird, sunbeam and eyesight, does indeed, in my estimation, hearken back to a Tradition deeper than the Christian Middle Ages. Traces of Shamanism are evident, Celtic and older. Spirit-identification with a bird is a common Shamanic phenomenon, and continues to be documented by anthropologists today. I want to speculate about something less demonstrable, other than through a dappled argument that works from the inside out.
Thus we come to the quintessential attribute of Robin Hood: his bow and arrow. The Paleolithic origins of this device predate Robin by millennia, but his deployment may help us to understand its genesis. What I want to argue is that the bow and arrow does not represent weaponry, as such. Its utility is of another order, though marred by that which mars all of Creation. In the Robin Hood tales, the bow is rarely used as a weapon. The real fighting is done with swords, while archery seems a higher, almost spiritual, calling. The bow is used for idealized contests of skill, which epitomize the natural virtue of the forest-dwellers, who always outshoot their cultured rivals. Its other main usage is in poaching the king's deer. Obtaining illicit venison is not depicted as a violent crime, but rather represents a just use of resources, in harmonious accord with the natural economy of the Greenwood.
The magic of archery lies in its literalization of the act of seeing. The technology is just a means to that end. It was not devised under the impetus of some mechanistic vector, but through the inspiration granted to those students of vision, the Shamans of the foretime. What we call inventions, they understood as gifts of the gods, or teachings of the native spirits. They projected their own vision into the birds, and learned of them the art of flight, by way of a device that mimics the swift path of an eye that finds with certainty its intended target. They borrowed a few feathers, lashing them to the tail of their fledgling. This "bird"; the arrow, became a vehicle of ownership, pointedly imparting the lesson that what is seen is thus possessed.
An artificial bird teaches the mystery of vision, and lays claim to what it "sees". The archer and the bird watcher differ by degree, but not in essence. Today, we can be initiated through binoculars, looking without killing. The messy business is handed off, unseen, to others. But every Robin serves reminder that our gaze is a responsibility. Nothing we see is thereby unaffected. All that we see deserves our best regard.