156 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
‘ The legends will not tell us what happened some year or other accord- 
ing to chronology ; in our craving for a kernel of historical truth in the 
myths, we naively insinuate that the myth makers ought to think in a 
system unknown to them, for the benefit of our annalistic studies. . . . 
‘Time is, in our experience, a stream of events descending from the 
‘ unknown mists of beginning and running in a continuous flow down the 
‘ future into the unknown ; to the men of the classical ages the actual life 
‘is the result of a recurrent beginning and has its source in the religious 
‘feast. The festival consists of a creation or new birth outside time, 
‘ eternal it might be called if the word were not as misleading as all others 
‘ and as inadequate to describe an experience of a totally alien character. 
‘ When the priest or chieftain ploughs the ritual furrow, when the first 
‘seed is sown while the story of the origin of corn is recited, when the 
‘ warriors act the war game, they make history, do the real work, fight 
‘ the real battle, and when the men sally forth with the plough or the seed 
‘ or the weapons, they are only realising what was created in the ritual act.’ 1° 
According to Gronbech, then, the myths and legends of the North have 
their origin in the world of ritual drama, a world in which the terms of 
history are quite meaningless. Other writers are moving in the same 
direction. Mr. C, B. Lewis, in his Classical Mythology and Arthurian 
Romance, seeks to show the ritual origin of the Arthurian legends, while 
M. P. Saintyves, in his Les Contes de Perrault et les Récits Paralléles, 
performs the same service for such tales as Cinderella and Bluebeard. 
Prof. S. H. Hooke and his colleagues have recently traced the connection 
between Myth and Ritual in Semitic lands. 
It will be seen, then, what a variety of fortunes has befallen the ancient 
ritual dramas. Some have been converted to Christianity ; some have 
been rationalised into pseudo-history ; others have degenerated into fairy 
tales. There are, however, some which survive, or survived till recently, 
in something like their original form. Let us take, for example, the cycle 
of Robin Hood, which forms the most important body of English and 
Scottish traditional narrative. Attempts have of course been made to 
turn him into an historical character, but he remains the god of the tree, 
a figure of world-wide importance. Hd6d’s Oak is the name given in an 
Anglo-Saxon charter to a place in Worcestershire, and he owns hills, 
rocks, caves and wells in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, 
Derbyshire, Shropshire and Somerset. His story has been localised in 
Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Cumberland, as well as in Scotland, and 
he has been supposed to have lived in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries, and sometimes to have been earl and sometimes churl. But 
wherever and whenever he lives, he always has his Maid Marian, his 
Little John and his Will Scarlet, since it is the incidents of the ritual drama, 
and not its setting, which matter. ‘That he was the hero of such a drama 
there can be no doubt. We are told 1° that in the fifteenth century the 
May celebration was called ‘ Robin Hood’s festival,’ and that he was ‘ one 
* of the mythical characters whom the populace was fond of personating in 
‘the semi-dramatic devices and morris-dances performed at that season.’ 
In Scotland he was as popular as in England, and in 1577 the Scottish Par- 
15 Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 226, 261. 16 D.N.B., s.v. Hood, Robin. 
‘ 
‘ 
¢ 
