Down the Rabbit Hole With Allan a Dale and Christabel

 

From wikipedia: 1912 depiction of Alan-A-Dale by Louis Rhead

Yesterday, the third day of the new year, I went out to the park around the same time of the afternoon, but the sky in the west was overcast with a clumping of stratocumulus and cirrus over the distant mountains, dimming the sun and giving a darkening late afternoon light that would still provide plenty of light for reading.

As I approached the free library box, I began to hope that my Robin Hood book would still be there, as I had gotten used to my little solo book club. When I opened the little door with its big wooden handle, at first I thought the book was gone, but it turned out that the books on the top shelf had been rearranged. Later I reflected how it was good that the book had yellow highlighting and some water damage, as that would make it less likely that someone would snag the book based on aesthetic appeal for their alone. 

Immediately I marched the book over to the picnic shelter and read the next chapter, which the day before I had seen was about the wedding of Allan-o-Dale. Allan-o-Dale is not a character I knew much about, other than the was played by a rooster in the Disney cartoon, which I last saw, if ever, in the late 1960s.  Looking the name up in Wikipedia later, I saw that he was probably a later addition to the Robin Hood canon, although he is attested in old English ballads.  In the 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood (the most significant classic Robin Hood film), he is not in the story, but is combined with the character Will Scarlet. 

In my book-club book, the story of Allan-o-Dale is borrowed from old ballads. It goes like this: one day Robin Hood is out in the Green Wood and sees a young knight dressed all in scarlet red, singing and in merry mood. He tells his merry men about the knight and the next day they accost him. Only now is dressed all in grey and in a deeply sad mood. Upon questioning he reveals that he had intended to be married to his true love the day before, after waiting seven years for year, but that he had been told by her father that he could not have her, and that she was instead to be married an ugly old knight the next day.

Robin finds out the location of the church in which she is to be married and infiltrates it as harper. He discovers that the women of the community feel pity for the bride. He confirms that the bride loves Allan-o-Dale and is approaching her wedding day as if it were going to be funeral.

Being Robin Hood, he decides to act in favor of the life force, and restore true love to the young lovers. He has arranged for four-and-twenty archers of his band, as well as Allan-o-Dale and Friar Tuck to be present when he interrupts the wedding and insists that the bride pick her husband from among the men present. Her cheeks flush with life when she sees her true love, Allan-o-Dale. 

There is an interesting twist in that the Bishop, whom Robin distrusts, as he disobeyed Richard's orders by giving rulership over to Prince John, states that the wedding between the young woman and the old knight was already announced three times in church, which is the minimum requirement for a legal wedding. Robin improvises by saying that he will go around the church asking for objections person by person seven times, which he does, and receives no objections. But this is because his men silence both the father of the young woman and bishop. Friar Tuck performs the ceremony. In some variations, Robin himself performs a "forest wedding." 

This is amazingly both anti-patriarchal and partriarchal. In the name of true Christian love, the living spirit of the land, acting as a regent of God, restores the natural order (true love) because both the religious and secular hierarchies have fallen into deep corruption and disorder.  The classic 1938 Warner Brothers movie has Robin tell the returning King Richard to his face that his absence was the reason his kingdom fell into tyranny, requiring an outlaw to act as an agent of Justice (and Love, in a very Celtic Green Man sort of way). 

Ah youthful love! What do the young know but folly? A forest marriage, with an outlaw? What kind of life is that? Last night I woke in the night wondering if the young woman would have been better off obeying her father and following the dictates of ecclesiastical law. 

In the H.E. Marshall version I am reading on my walks for this book club, the true love of Allan-o-Dale is called Lady Christabel. The name was familiar to me from a book written by an Englishwoman named A.S. Byatt I had many years ago about two fictional Victorian poets, one of which was named Christabel. I remembered I quite enjoyed the book, which had an intriguing dual plot with one set in Victorian times between the poets and another in the present day (1990) between a man and woman researching these poets.  So I went down the rabbit hole, as they say, on the name Christabel to see if there were any direct connections with the rescued bride of the Robin Hood stories. I couldn't find any evidence of it, and it turns out her name is different in different versions of the story, and in some vesions she is the daughter of the Sheriff of Nottingham. I did find out the name is the title of a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The lovely lady, Christabel,

Whom her father loves so well,

What makes her in the wood so late,

A furlong from the castle gate?

She had dreams all yesternight

Of her own betrothèd knight;

And she in the midnight wood will pray

For the weal of her lover that's far away.

In the Coleridge work (wikpedia article), Christabel is a young woman who comes to the rescue another mysterious young woman named Geraldine, whom she meets in the forest, claiming she is pursued by abductors.

The poem is unfinished, and as such it is quite ambiguous in regard to nature of Geraldine (is she an evil creature such as a vampire?). The wikipedia article linked above mentions the the A.S. Byatt novel I read years ago but makes no claims on a connection other than the use of the name.

In the end I can't help myself going down these rabbit holes. 

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