Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Cover has a little wear. Note this is a hardcover copy. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> With a series of brilliant historical novels -The Story Teller Pastimes of a Red Summer Quintet and Lancelot – Peter Vansittart has established a reputation as a writer of rare inventiveness and imagination one of the few living novelists able to recreate the historical past with unswerving conviction (Sunday Tele- graph). In The Death of Robin Hood Peter Van- sittart traces the growth and decline of an idea ‘Robin Hood’ symbol of nature versus man-made order forest versus town magic and superstition versus reason and established government. The novel begins in the primeval forest where Hodekin one-eyed Wood King unchanging but continually renewed brings warmth and fertility and ends in the Britain of the 1930s where woods (and men) are tamed and powerless and the force of the old idea is weak and faltering a glimmer of a lost age. It is only in Germany where it has been appropriated and perverted by the Nazis that the myth retains its potency. The two central sections of the novel focus on moments in British history when Robin Hood is a vital force in men’s lives. The ‘Robene Hode’ of the Middle Ages. wild man ‘Gude Felowe Sherwood’s symbol of lust and magic haunts the imaginations of Lord John Late Arrival uneasy usurper of his brother Richard’s castle and of John’s daughter Eleanor And centuries later in 1812 observed by an apparently ageless Eleanor the myth flares briefly back to life in Sherwood Forest. Now no more than a metaphor for the hopes of an England already lost it becomes identified with the spectral General Ludd machine-breaker outlaw. leader of a doomed cause in a doomed forest. (LL)