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Merry Ballads of Robin Hood

by Laurabelle Dietrick, Joseph Franz-Walsh, Edna Reindel (Illustrator)

Publisher: Macmillan

Hardcover, 87 pages

Used Price: $12.00 (1 in stock)

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Described on the title page as "The whole story of that Robin Hood known as Earl of Huntington, and Locksley Hall in the days of King Henry II and Richard the Lion's Heart: first sung by minstrels, later set down in the ballad books of Percy, Ritson, and Evans," this collection of seventeen poems was written in the 1930s by a California university professor, together with her poet friend. Each poem is introduced by a brief remark from the "Chroniclers," usually indicating that they have created a paraphrased abbreviation of some longer work, presumably from the list of sources provided at the rear. The ten verse Robin Hood and the Beggar, for instance, is taken from a thirty-verse work....

Opening with The Birth and Pedigree of Robin, and closing with The Last Words and Death of Robin Hood, this poem sequence covers many of the outlaw's famous encounters, with figures such as Little John, Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck, and Sir Guy of Gisborne. Maid Marian makes an appearance, and so too does Clorinda, Queen of the Shepherds, a romantic interest less known in these modern times. (Excerpt from Goodreads review.)

Author Laurabelle Dietrick (1878 - 1936) was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She also wrote under the name "Larry Sampson". Her co-author Joseph Franz-Walsh was a poet and scholar. Linocut illustrations are by Edna Reindel (1894–1990), who was a subtle Surrealist and American Regionalist painter, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, muralist, and teacher active from the 1920s to the 1960s. She is best known for her work in large-scale murals, New England landscapes, and later for her commissioned work of women workers in WWII shipyard and aircraft industries as published in Life magazine in 1944.