The Sunday Poem: Maid Marian
Robin Hood & Maid Marian, poster from 1880
Oh Marian maid, queen of May, born a shepherd girl!
What have they done? Your flock is gone,
Your ballad’s of a different world.
Once you stood alone, you know – you were not just a foil,
But instead you played the central maid
As Yorkshire festivals you toiled.
And then dependency came in, for propriety’s sake,
For maids alone cannot be shown
Lest women proper place mistake.
French, then Saxon, poor and back to Norman blood,
You stood apart and pined your heart
For loves you never needed much.
Your love, your boy, your shepherd boy, now lord made rough outlaw.
Your good French name Leaford became,
And you an archery prize for all?
From play to film and back again, your shape a-shift and formless raw,
And now you’re dead as roles are shed
And actors move through dialogue.
Do you wander alleys now, and shop at big box stores?
Do you worry mortgages, or giving to the poor?
Your ballad flows and we all know that stories grow and change and more;
You may have spent some time with bad boy Robin Hood
But given time we’ll see the shepherdess back home in her own wood.
Marian is always there in thought, be she queen of May or not.
11 Responses to “The Sunday Poem: Maid Marian”
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It’s good. I’m not sure I could really ‘get into’ it, but I understood where you were going and liked the final take away.
They killed Marian.
The bastards!
It’s like making Guenevere a warrior.
I’m not in favor of such wide turns away from traditional stories. It just doesn’t sit well at all.
Nice poem, Raph. Very enjoyable. I was thinking of who might be a modern day Maid Marian. Christian Amanpour? (But I’m not sure the stories of her participating in a rescue of a lover in the Middle East are true, will have to check on that thoroughly.) But there’s probably a maid in the memories of many men. Sadly, some of them don’t make it out of their story alive either. The bastards.
“It’s like making Guenevere a warrior.”
Maid Marian has been kick ass since the 17th century and is one of the earliest examples of literature acnowleging that a woman could be equal to a man.
“With quiver and bow, sword, buckler, and all,
Thus armed was Marian most bold,
Still wandering about to find Robin out,
Whose person was better then gold,
But Robin Hood, hee himself had disguised,
And Marian was strangly attir’d,
That they provd foes, and so fell to blowes,
Whose vallour bold Robin admir’d”
She was independent even earlier than that — she’s an older folkloric figure than Robin himself.
It was the earliest example of Marian picking up a sword I could come up with on short notice. (English folk ballad, collected as Child Ballad 150) There is a much earlier one, still liked to Robin, but I couldn’t find it. As a character in a play about a French May Fair Queen, where I believe she originally came from (and you’ve obviously referenced), she wasn’t quite the feminist hero that she later became.
In between the French tales (which aren’t proven to be linked to the Robin Hood Marian, btw) and her joining the merry men, there’s a robust tradition of Marians and Tucks as part of spring festivals, likely as a descendant of earlier Briton practices. Not necessarily as a warrior type, but definitely as a central and key element in terms of fertility/harvest folklore. Marian didn’t join the Robin Hood legend until around the 16th c., Robin himself dates to around the 13th c., but Marian figures go back several hundred more years.
But she’s not Titania or Queen Mab, is she?
The names could be aliases.
and
http://www.geocities.com/longo44au/index2.htm
So, many aristocracy fallen on hard times might have used the alias of Robin Hood, or Robert Hud, or other similar false identities to protect their families holdings.
The same for Maid Marian. Protecting her family name or own identity to pursue the loyalty of Richard in a hostile political setting.
Or maybe it’s all just a conglomerate of small factual things combined into a larger than life story. We’ll most likely never know with 100% certainty.
Oops. I don’t know what I did to cause the text color and underlining. But I took a while to post that, and did some searches during it, and to top it off, my computer glasses cause some problems on the keyboard sometimes when I get in a hurry. *Shrugs*
A link not closed, I think. Is the above what you intended?
To some degree — that’s the sort of role she played in the May festivals in Yorkshire, anyway — and also the Virgin Mary, and also the maiden sacrifice at Beltane, and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Queen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_crowning