The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle

⭐ 7/10

This is a collection of classic Robin Hood stories, compiled and synthesized by Howard Pyle for kids. It came out in 1883, so the language is very different, but still comprehensible because of that target audience. So it worked pretty well for me. 

At first I was totally on board, because these stories are charming and use this beautiful language. However, I will say that an entire novel of stories in this style is rather wearisome and I kinda just wanted to be done midway through. The biggest issue for me is that these are super episodic and don't have all that much consequence from one story to the next, so there isn't actually that much to keep you reading. It's mostly hijinks by the merry men, mostly at the expense of the Sheriff of Nottingham (who, for the record, was just trying to do his job). 

The other big issue is that SO many of these stories are nearly identical. So many stories start with a confrontation, and then Robin Hood fights someone with a cudgel, and after an hour of the greatest duel of all time, Robin says he's impressed with the other man's skill and invites him to join his band of merry men. This -- and the arc in which Robin is challenged to a competition with bow and arrow, in which he splits his own arrow in the end --  happen a combination of like 12 times. Too many cudgel fights!! 

Still, the thing that made me want to finish was just the beauty of these old prose. It's a very old style, with lots of "quoths" and "thous," as well as "lusty" being the adjective of choice (the word is used probably no less than 500 times). I actually read that this was kinda an invented middle-English, used for this book that got reproduced a lot thereafter, so that's cool. I read the audio version, read by Christopher Cazenove, and it was music to my ears.  It reminded me a bit of Tolkien, though there is far less variety in the vocabulary.

But yeah, if you're not really into cool middle-English sounding prose, I don't think this book has enough to keep you interested for a whole novel. I guess it's very true to the legend, but what I actually think this book needed was Maid Marian!! I know she existed prior, and this book badly needed some romance or something besides Robin fighting with friends. 

Anyways, whatever. It's hard to put a score on something that's a century and a half old, but I tired from this pretty quickly. Good, not great.