Saxon Wicca T.V.: Robin of Sherwood (1984-1986)

The idea of witchcraft, rooted in the Old English “wicca” or “wise one”, whether as an expression of pre-Christian religion, or as the subject of horror fiction, had a very marked presence in the popular media of the latter half of the 20th century. Even when a certain degree of genuineness in the folkloric elements of modern Pagan belief are conveyed (perhaps most popularly in Robin Hardy’s 1973 film The Wicker Man), the stories never quite abandon the idea that Paganism, ancient and modern, must be inherently wicked, abusive, and superstitious nonsense, or at the very least incompatible with the kind of freethinking and freedom-loving ideals that made its more public cultural expressions possible in the face of Christianity’s long hegemony in Western societies to begin with.

One television program in the ’80s stood out in strong contrast to this popular media trend, and portrayed the spirit of pre-Christian British religion, (and we would personally contend the spirit of Saxon Wicca in particular), in an inherently honorable and liberty-championing light, (and for many people around the world it has become the definitive depiction of one of the Anglo-sphere’s best loved and iconic culture heroes), and that is Robin of Sherwood.

Robin of Sherwood, the brainchild of Richard Carpenter (1929-2012) and originally starring the handsome Michael Praed in the titular role, originally ran on television from 1984 until 1986, and is in many ways emotionally and aesthetically evocative of what Saxon Wicca expresses to us, as spiritual “outlaws” both from more culturally-dominant religious expressions, and the supposed “freedom from religion” secularism that has its own presumptions and biases. Carpenter’s obvious fascination with ancient spiritual and magical themes and their carryover into medieval Britain, combined with a serious depiction of the hard lives of the common people who were our English-speaking ancestors, found a meaningful expression in this notable contribution to the Robin Hood legend. So definitive and inspiring a take on a classic myth was Robin of Sherwood at the time, that Kevin Reynold’s would include a Saracen knight in his 1991 film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, thinking it was a traditional element of the Robin Hood tales, when it was in fact a completely modern, and innovative, addition specific to Carpenter’s version of the myth.

To anyone even remotely familiar with Wicca as a Pagan religion generally, but even more so with the anthropological theories of Margaret Murray specifically, the religious elements of Robin of Sherwood are not only explicit, but refreshingly positive. Not only do the peasant folk and Merry Men of Sherwood Forest and its environs share in communal drinking rituals, worship at a sacred Tree, and bow reverently to a Priest who embodies their God by putting on the skin and antlers of the deer it has now been deemed by their overlords illegal for them to hunt, the characters from time to time utter to one another a joyful “Blessed be”, a phrase which has become so famously associated with Wicca ever since Gerald Gardner ended Witchcraft Today with the phrase in 1954. Richard Carpenter even expressed frustration that the romance between Robin of Loxley and Marian of Leaford (portrayed by the elf-like Judi Trott), had to be portrayed more chastely than he felt was ideal, being on a prime-time family slot. Which leaves one to imagine if Carpenter would have gone so far as to have included either skyclad ritual dancing around a bonfire, or perhaps even a Great Rite, if left to his own devices! That the very role of “Robin Hood” as depicted in the show, (also known variously as “Robin in the Hood” or the “Hooded Man”,), is perceived as an explicitly religious role, determined by a man’s fate or destiny, rather than the legendary life story of only one particular individual, (to wit one Robin of Loxley, the orphaned nephew of the local miller who fulfills this role at the beginning of the series), is itself a significant amplification of the spiritual potential of the Robin Hood myth as a culture hero. That he is known as the “Hooded Man” specifically, is likewise evocative of the mysterious Celtic “Hooded Men” or ” Hooded Spirits”, known in Latin as the Genii Cucullati, recorded in carvings both at Hadrian’s Wall and across the Romano-Celtic world (see Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson, 1988). In the context of the show, the “Hooded Man” is put in the specific role of defending the wellbeing of the local peasantry from their tyrannical overlords as “Herne’s Son”, emphasizing the importance of kinship ties, either of Birth and Hand-Fasting (a ritual Hand-Fasting of Robin and Marian being conducted by Herne in the show), or as a matter of Initiation, symbolized by Herne’s bestowal of the magical sword Albion (the most ancient known name for Britain attested by the ancient Greeks), and Robin Hood’s personal ties to, suffering in companionship with, or besting in combat each of the major Merry Men who join his crew (as in the traditional Robin Hood folk ballads). All this for the wellbeing, mutual support and defense expected of all for all, and reflected in the ideal social dynamic of the kinship bonds of free individuals in a Saxon coven. That Maid Marian is no less a full participant in the group as a skilled archer is likewise evocative of Saxon Wicca’s sexually egalitarian nature.

Herne the Hunter, while in non-Wiccan English literature most famously the name of the ghost of a woodsman who’d hung himself from an oak tree and was then said to be haunting Windsor Forest in William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), was theorized in the interwar period of the 20th Century, (particularly in R. Lowe Thompson’s The History of the Devil: The Horned God of the West, 1929) to have been the survival of a pagan god, specifically the “Horned God” motif as described by anthropologist Margaret Murray in The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and explored further in her later book The God of the Witches (1931). Eric L. Fitch’s book In Search of Herne the Hunter (1994) goes into a exploration of the variant Herne legends, of which Shakespeare’s is the earliest literary reference, and comes to the conclusion that if the myths were indeed based on a pre-Christian pagan survival, the most likely candidate for the god-in-question is the Anglo-Saxon God Woden, whom the Father of Saxon Wicca, Raymond Buckland, himself chose as the Name of the God of the Seax-Wica. Interestingly, however, Woden does not himself feature in Buckland’s telling of the tradition’s Myth of the Goddess of Saxon Witchcraft, where Heardhen (a kind of Heimdall-Wayland the Smith composite) and the Mercurial Northern Loki are the contrasted and battling figures of the seasonal division of The Wheel of the Year into Light and Dark halves of plenty and hardship, the necessity of each brought into continual Life-affirming balance by the worship practices of Wiccans themselves.

Robin Hood himself (or rather the man chosen from among the people to fulfill this role), features in the Murrayite witch-cult hypothesis, with her even going so far as to say that the Merry Men were a coven, and that “Robin” was the priest, while the coven “Maiden” (as in Maid Marian) was the coven’s priestess. References to “Robin”, a popular name in the post-Norman period, was often used in naming fairies (necessarily characterized by orthodox Christianity as “evil” in some fashion, whereas in antiquity gods and spirits outside the Christian cosmology were not sacrilegious and therefore not universally baneful – context was everything). Robin Goodfellow was considered a pseudonym of not only a fairy or lesser demon, but when depicted as horned and cloven-hoofed like the Greek god Pan, with erect phallus, and holding a lighted candle and broom, with a coven of witches dancing around him as in an illustration for an old “Robin Goodfellow” ballad, interpreted by Murray as a remembrance of the witches’ pre-Christian god of fertility. Robin Goodfellow is also famously one of the names of that mischievous fairy, (and “trickster” figure so often identified by folklorists), alternatively known in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) as “Puck”. And in that play, he is characterized as a vassal of the Fairy King, itself a concept evocative of our own God Frey or “Lord”, King of the Elves – himself anciently depicted with a frankly erect phallus.

Likewise, Robin Hood can easily be interpreted himself as a “trickster” figure, with his primary vocation being an extremely liminal one, whose inherent morality is largely a matter of perspective, what with the central theme of “robbing from the rich to give to the poor”. The romanticization of the Merry Men’s repeated conflicts with the Sheriff of Nottingham (who when at their mercy the Merry Men invariably release, while no such mercy is shown to the countless henchmen they quite casually dispatch) is definitely the show’s weak point from both an ethical and narrative (it gets repetitive!) perspective, but the glimpses given of what an illiterate peasantry holding on to, and finding meaning in, their Old Religion might have felt like, in addition to the show’s sense of humor and likable cast of characters makes the show a must-watch. Interestingly, “Wolfshead”, the English translation of the old Latin idiom Caput lupinum denoting an “outlaw”, is how Robin is commonly referred to by the Sheriff of Nottingham and his steward Guy of Gisburne, evocative of how what is a menace to one man, is often simply a matter of survival for another. As we say during our Esbat rite, “Take that which is not yours to take, and you may find it not what it seemed”. The wolf itself is of course also one of the sacred animals of Woden, well-attested to in the Old Norse sources as being particularly associated with the Allfather.

While the show did end on a sombre note, and with a very rushed feel that in many ways seems a reversal of the sense of independence and courage in the face of tyranny that was the spirit of the entire show up until that point, the sympathetic (and accurate, from a Saxon Wiccan folkloric and spiritual perspective, at any rate) portrayal of what the religion is about on a fundamental level: bravery, love, fellowship, and the quest for freedom, makes Robin of Sherwood a remarkably unique artistic achievement with real spiritual meat and mead.

“Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.”