ABSTRACT
Medieval writers did not, apparently, want to talk about the death of Robin Hood. His aristocratic alter ego, King Arthur, has a death so portentous that it overwhelms his life-medieval writers transform accounts of the King Arthur’s triumphs into protractions of King Arthur’s fall. By contrast, Robin Hood’s death is oddly unthinkable-except in the arms of a friend where it can be made to speak of a kind of immortality rather than an ending. This chapter explores peculiar brands of social reproduction and immortality that the Robin Hood ballads engender between men, in the steady-state, self-perpetuating equilibrium that Stephen Knight calls “the greenwood stasis.” By looking at what exists just over the boundaries of medieval Robin Hood traditions, in works where the outlaw’s death can move to center stage, we can explore how the tradition itself is constituted by refusing other, more mortal kinds of social and literary reproduction involving women, children, and historical change.
