Don't waste your money
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The claim that this is any kind of comprehensive guide to the legend of Robin Hood through the ages is simply a lie. The author has simply read one novel (Henry Gilbert's "Robin Hood" (1912)), and written a character guide and chronology to THAT NOVEL, not the legend as a whole, then stuck it in the same volume as a collection of old ballads. It wouldn't even fool somebody entirely unfamiliar with Robin Hood: if a Martian read this they'd spot that the character guide had little to do with the development of the legend, by the fact that it has next to nothing in common with the ballads that are inexplicably cited as "sources".
If, however, somebody without much prior knowledge of the subject were to read the first half of the book and ignore the ballads, they would be left with the impression that Henry Gilbert's somewhat idiosyncratic retelling was the whole - or at least a very substantial part - of the Robin Hood legend. That makes this book not merely worthless as both scholarship and entertainment (for the latter one could read the original novel, or any one of a hundred others), but actually fraudulent. If there isn't a law under which the author can be sued by those unfortunate enough to have bought it, there damn well should be.
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