Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author but I also run the activities in the centre and one of my most favourite things to do is to interview my fellow authors who are working in the fantasy area and today Today, I'm so delighted that I'm being joined by Tim Hall, and we're going to be discussing all things to do with Robin Hood, who is one of those mythic figures who pops in and out of pseudo-history and fantasy all over the place. So we'll be talking about Robin Hood. And this is because Tim's book, The Shadow of the Wolf, which is the first part
[0:50] of a trilogy, has just been reissued. But we'll get to that in a minute. it so first of all hello hello tim hello julia hi thanks for having me so tim you actually publish under tk hall if people are googling you i'll just put that out there um but i suppose i wanted to ask you tim who is your first robin hood my first robin hood yes i was thinking about this earlier um and you know i was only i hadn't thought about it until recently but i've now.
[1:21] Kind of just twig that there are two first Robin Hoods to cheat a little bit and I think actually they probably say an awful lot about how I then came to write a book of this type because I was the first one I was in primary school and you know sometimes the teachers will put on a film if they've had enough and it's happened one day wet weather what are we going to do with the kids exactly exactly and um yeah it's always always feels like a treat and one that I remember particularly that was for yeah I don't know how old it was it came out before I was born but it was the Disney animated version of Robin Hood I mean you know the one that's got um Robin is a fox and oh completely that's my first Robin Hood uh yes yeah.
[2:10] And yeah, and it's kind of, you know, it's Robin Hood at its most playful, isn't it? So the wonderful thing about this legend that it can really occupy such a broad range of different storytelling tropes and types. And this Disney one is very much one end of a spectrum. It's Robin Hood at its absolute most fun. It's full of songs and Robin beats the sheriff through guile and trickery rather than any kind of violence. And so, yes, that was a very early thing for me. But then around about the same time, and this is something that I'd almost forgotten until I was thinking about it earlier, but there was a BBC program called Robin of Sherwood. Oh, yes. In the 80s. And again, I don't know how old I was, but I think I must have been about seven or eight.
[2:55] And therefore, I don't really even remember that much about it. But I remember the atmosphere of it. I remember that it was almost the opposite of where that Disney film took place. It was very much it wasn't the greenwood anymore it was a mist-filled mysterious wildwood and it featured her and the hunter is this sort of half man half stag sort of figure and yeah i didn't i didn't not sure i really understood any of any of it any of the i was probably too young for it and sometimes when you're too young and don't understand these things they go they stick pretty deep don't they because you kind of uh yeah i wasn't too young for it so i can tell you um i think the listeners will understand the atmosphere if i say the theme music was by clannad um you know the it's enya isn't it the singer um and the actor it had two actors it had like a reincarnation of robin as so it started off with an actor called michael pred who was this tall, dark, handsome, I remember, Robin Hood. And then he morphed into Jason Connery, who Sean Connery's son took over. And you're exactly right. It was definitely the mythic Robin.
[4:20] Yeah, so that's interesting because that makes an awful lot of sense when I sort of go to look at where you've drawn on the legend in your book.
[4:31] What about other notable Robins that you may have considered and rejected along the way because there have been others Kevin Costner, Yeah, and I was, yes, I can honestly, I think I'm probably a fan of all of them, just about. I'm not sure I ever saw the Russell Crowe one, but I, yeah, and in print too, I love the Robert Pyle Robin Hoods. Sort of more for children but they've got a lovely tone about them um and yeah even and right back now to the original ballads there's all sorts of but but what i suppose what what the those first two perhaps did for me was it's almost like they clash together and they and there was this sort of strange dissonance that that said to me even though i didn't you know remotely understand what's going on now i there was a sort of feeling of how can these both be robin hood you know they what is it that they how can these legends and these myths change so radically, and go undergo such transformations and yet somehow hold some of the core of what they are and why do they do that and how do they do that i think that was what fascinated me and still does I find that so thrilling about storytelling and about myth-making.
[5:51] That they can metamorphose in such a way that they can be so different. And I think that's largely what I enjoyed about writing my Robin Hood was discovering what I thought the core of it was. What can you strip away and still be left with something that is a Robin Hood legend? And what are those elements that we need? And what are... Yeah, I think that fascination has stayed with me, not just Robin Hood, but any of those mythical characters and any of those legends, Boudicca or Thor or whoever it might be, the way that they transpose over time is something that was always... King Arthur, I think, is the other one in the same sort of breath as Robin Hood, isn't it? Yeah, yes, exactly. So I was reminded when I was reading your story by the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, when there's the voiceover from Galadriel saying history became legend, legend became myth. And it made me think that perhaps all Robin's stories are found somewhere along this line in where they think they sit. And I think it'd be quite a good scene setter, if you don't mind, just reading your, is it like a kind of preface or an epigraph at the front of your story, which I think sets the table for your telling. Certainly, yes. Yeah, I'd be delighted to.
[7:19] First, forget everything you've heard. Robin Hood was no prince and he was no dispossessed lord. He didn't fight in the Crusades. He never gave a penny to the poor. all. In fact, of all those Sherwood legends, only one holds true. Robin was blind. No, even that's not right. True to say, Robin Hood didn't see with his eyes. Perhaps, after all, he was the only one who saw clearly in this place of illusion and lies. Forget, too, all you know of Marion. She was never a nun or an abbess, much less a damsel in distress. She was the destroying angel, the the most desperate and deadly of them all. Look around you and listen. A wasted world now, shrunken and burned. A howling winter and a silent spring. But it's all still here, lurking amid the mist. A world of gods and monsters rolling their final dice. A time of heroes and demons, and the horror that shadows both. The world of Robin Hood. Thank you. So, you mentioned that, thinking about it, you had these sort of clashing robins. I think the Disney one is a little bit Errol Flynn, you know, the Fox is the Mennonites type playful, I think it's picking up on that tradition. And then you've got the mythic Robin of Sherwood one.
[8:41] So how did you actually then come to sit down somewhere, presumably in the early 2010s, somewhere around there, because your book was first published in 2014? How did you actually, what was the spark that made you sit down and write this? Yeah, and it was a very specific spark.
[9:01] As I tell it now to myself, anyway, it's sort of a memory could be a bit slippery kind of, but I, I, um, the, yes. So, so obviously there was obviously a fascination with these English legends, but King Arthur too. But I, it was when I went, I took a, I was working as a journalist in London and took a sabbatical to go traveling in South America.
[9:22] And as part of that trip, I went to the Amazon rainforest and we, my, um, my girlfriend at the time is now my wife together. Together, we took this journey by canoe.
[9:37] We asked a couple of fishermen to take us along the waterways into the Amazon. We went quite a long way and traveled a few days into the Amazon. And it was there in this most amazing place. Something kind of shifted in me. I suppose up until then, my relationship with the natural world had been, I'd grown up in England in this very temperate landscape that i had never i'd never kind of felt threatened by it particularly we'd had you know holidays in devon and playing in the stream that sort of thing it was all a very i suppose very disney it was all very uh greenwood and then suddenly here i was in this in the rainforest in the jungle and it was a entirely different and such an alien landscape for me to be in in. And, um, yeah, I, again, I felt so entirely out of my depth. There was, uh, we, we saw what we thought was logs floating, half submerged in the water, the town would be crocodiles and there were stakes disguised as, uh, vines and there were howling monkeys calling from everywhere and nowhere. It seemed that it was this most extraordinary environment. And it was there, I think that I, I felt kind of connected to the wilderness in a way that I never had before.
[10:57] And it was honestly pretty daunting. There was a morning where we woke up, we came out of our tents, the fishermen had put up hammocks. We came out of our tents in the morning and the fishermen had gone. We were completely alone for three days into the jungle. And it just hit us that we were that far out of our element. We had no idea how to hunt or fish or how to survive in this place in any way. And at the same time they were real thankfully they came back they'd been out early morning fishing for our breakfast and they made this amazing fish stew for breakfast.
[11:31] But then I remember some extraordinary wonder as well. We went out into this one evening at dusk, we went out into this forest lake and things started bumping against the boat and we were worried about what this might be because we'd seen crocodiles and things. But then the fishermen were laughing and pointing and it was pink river dolphins that were bumping against the boat. So there was just, it was this magical, threatening, menacing, mysterious place that, and for some reason, and whatever, it was already in me, as it were, the English landscape and the stories of Robin Hood. I started thinking about Sherwood Forest and would Sherwood once upon a time have seemed like this to people when England was covered in woodland? Lots of it would have been unknown and explored, would have had dangerous animals in it and outlaws at various times. So would would it started ideas about people's relationship with forest and what that means and what it's like what it what it would be like as much as anything else to to get back to a relationship with the earth where you are surviving and in a more sort of uh primal way of life and so that that was really the so the starting point was my was the sherwood forest it wasn't robin so much it was it was an idea of a forest and then then i came back to england and.
[12:54] I started working in London again and felt the city pressing in on me. And then I worked in Bermuda for a while and came back to England and we settled in Gloucestershire where we've got woodland. And so, yeah, and so that original seed from the Amazon grew for years and years until I think, you know, what it's like with storytelling. You've got this seed growing and growing until you just can't kind of hold it anymore and it has to spill out onto the page. and so eventually I got on writing it. That makes an awful lot of sense because when I think about how you've written about the Wildwoods, it does feel like a jungle without the tropical elements.
[13:36] And I think what you've just described is, when we think back to this sort of medieval-ish period that we're talking about, you have to sort of flip the The tree cover from being little patches to the cleared areas being the little patches and the wood being everything else until it was cleared by Normans for their hunting purposes and what have you. And I think that's really brilliantly evoked in the story.
[14:09] We now talk about the urban jungle, don't we? So we have feelings about cities, but actually for them, it would have been that feeling about the forest that they do not control. control, they cannot control, that has wolves and.
[14:24] Boar and the other things bears i suppose the other things that were the predators um at at the time and just interestingly i'm thinking that of all the films the not kevin the um russell crowe one does try and bring the harshness of that world into its story but there's a lack of trees i think not trees um but it does seem to try and get to that grit which i think you've also so it captured so um this is a revised version of your 2014 version for a new edition, and you were saying to me just before we came online that you have actually revised it a little bit what what kind of changes have you made as because you're looking at it pretty much well a decade on um how how's your thoughts and feelings about the story changed yes yeah it's So as you say, it first came out in 2014. The trilogy took me a lot longer than I originally planned for various reasons.
[15:28] I got very bogged down in the second book, as happens. And yeah, just overthinking and overthinking it and not sort of reaching the quality that myself or the publisher, David Ficklin Books, wanted.
[15:44] And so, yeah, that became a long process. And I think I learned a lot in the meantime. So all three books are finished now. And by the time I got to the end of the third one, I think I knew a lot more about storytelling than I did when I started this first one. So there were always things about the first one that wouldn't quite work for me, no matter how much I tried to make them. And I think that was part of the problem, really. I was over-trying to make everything. Thing um yeah uh yeah it was a sort of a perfectionism but at the same time though by the time i got to the end of the book i could look back at the first one and there were quite a few structural things that i wasn't happy with that i was able to address and in some revisions so i really i i it was largely uh a bridgement of the first sort of third of the book i did a fair bit of cutting down to make it make the time frame run more smoothly that was the the thing that that uh bugged me the worst in in the book i mean i think you're always going to have.
[16:47] Elements of of a novel that you're not 100 happy with because it's it can't it can't be perfect so there's still things i would change if i could but yeah um at some point you have to um give it give it over don't you and i've given over again and that's yeah it's good yes and also that thing of writing a trilogy um people sort of say oh yes fantasies they're trilogies i mean it's it's actually quite it's hugely difficult to orchestrate something like that and make all the pieces click into place um yeah yeah yes it is um yeah i think you're right i think it's it's yes it's, perhaps perhaps people underestimate how how hard that is and and and hence a lot of trilogies do will disappoint in the second and third books because it's very very hard to get all those pieces to fit again and i know so so i am it's taken a lot longer than i wanted to but i am very pleased that I feel like it's a trilogy that does get better and better as the stories go on. And that's quite rare, I think.
[17:53] That's certainly the right direction to go in. Yeah, no, it is. Exactly, yes. So, yeah, the second book comes out in October. So I'm looking forward to seeing if people agree. But I personally feel like it's a lot stronger than the first book. So I feel like it's the themes that wanted to come out in the first book, the core and the heart of the book that wanted to come out in the first book really do in the second book and then the third one even more so it becomes the story that I think Robin Hood as we started to talk about at the beginning the legend of Robin Hood.
[18:29] Transmutates over time and goes through all these amazing shifts and can cover such a big range and as I say I was trying to kind of distill down what my Robin Hood What can you take away and still have Robin Hood? And I feel like in the end, it's almost all of it. You can take away him giving, taking him rich to give support. As I say, perhaps in the first page of my book, you know, you don't, you can take away almost everything, even his bow and arrow. And you've still got, but the one thing you can't take away from Robin Hood is the forest. I feel like that's his element. That's where he is. And that's, he represents the spirit of the forest. And therefore I feel like he represents the spirit of the earth and in this series he doesn't understand that in the first book but as it goes on he becomes the guardian of the forest and I feel like it's very much a book about, our relationship with nature and what we've done to the planet and what we continue to do and how we might fight to change things. So in that rather helpful way of publishers, the story comes with a sort of quote saying that it's compared with Game of Thrones and X-Men. Do you see what's meant by these comparisons? I mean, I can hazard a guess, but...
[19:50] Why why do you why do you ask do you not see the comparison i do see it but i, one well game of thrones is easier the x-men is because of their contemporary um setting within the superhero franchise that is a bit more of a stretch but anyway i'm not going to gloss that tell me why you think what you think people because if you like game of thrones and you like x-men what are they going to find in your book that will be hitting the same you know good good vibes for them yeah no it's it's interesting i've got to be honest i've never quite uh loved that uh quote i think um maybe because it talks about mashup which makes it feel like you've kind of intentionally cut out different bits of things and squish them together yeah um but at the same time it's i can as you say i don't blame the publishers for using it for one bit because it allows people it gives people a little bit of a reference and and game Game of Thrones, coincidentally, actually, I don't know how coincidentally it is, but on that travel in South America that I talked about earlier.
[20:54] We stayed in a hut of Boris and Bill. And in this hut, it was completely bare except for one book on the shelf, and it was Game of Thrones. And that was before it was famous. So I know. Considering, I mean, I picked it up and thought, it's been a long time since I've read any kind of high fantasy, as it were. and I thought oh it looks a bit dragon-y for me I don't think I'm not sure I'll bother but of course within half a page I was absolutely mesmerized because it's a it's a masterwork and I think you're, If you're going to write a fantasy now, I think there are certain books you're going to have to answer to, and Lord of the Rings being the absolute epitome of that, but Game of Thrones too. You can't write a fantasy now without being aware that you're either following it or not following it, as it were. It changed what fantasy could do.
[21:50] And, yeah, so yes, I'd be very pleased if anyone thought that I had any of that in it. But an X-Men thing, I think specifically they might be talking about Robin Hood in my version of the legend. He takes on certain arcane powers from the forest. He wears the pelt of a slain wolf gold, and that wolf skin can heal at a sort of supernatural rate. It's a protection. It's a bit like a Hercules cloak, I suppose. That's, I think, my mind was the image. Um so yeah so i think specifically they might have been around because he wields this bow of pure shadow that that can kill through uh pure fear so i suppose you yeah i can absolutely see why in actual fact i think when i first pitched the book to my agent i talked about robin hood being england's first superhero so i think it well i think i was already kind of um trying to to steer people in that direction. But it was actually, and then Batman, I often think that Batman is a big influence on it too. Yeah, I think, personally, I think that's closer. Because it's got the darkness in it, hasn't it? The Batman legend.
[23:09] And Robin's more like a ninja. The solitary aspect to it. Yes. Yes, yes, exactly. And the angst, actually. Robin is quite a soul-searcher, really, isn't he?
[23:24] He doesn't commit these violent acts easily. He does a lot of soul-searching, whereas Marion is much more pragmatic, much more down-to-earth. She's a kind of whirlwind of action and vengeance. She drives the story, really. She's plotting a sheriff's downfall even when she's in a jail cell. She was the most fun part of the story to write, I think. So I also thought that one area which I was very much reminded of is werewolf stories, by which I mean traditional myths and legends of werewolves, not kind of twilight werewolves. You'd be pleased to hear. Right. In fact, because one of the things we at the Oxford Centre for Fantasy are interested in is the Inklings. And Charles Williams, who was one of the Inklings and a very interesting writer and poet, it. He has a very fascinating Arthurian cycle, in one of which poems, Sir Lancelot turns into a werewolf. They're sort of in the style of The Wasteland. They're sort of flashes of imagery as opposed to a narrative Browning-style poem.
[24:42] I was thinking about that because you're definitely drawing on the idea of the wolf wolfish element to the words to to robin was there any i suppose if maybe you know of another werewolf story which you had in the back of your mind or was it just a natural evolution of your robin because of his association with the dangerous sides of the forest yeah it wasn't it wasn't um specifically i wasn't conscious of a werewolf exactly although um obviously he fights a creature called the warg wolf but i i adapted that from tolkien and he obviously adapted it from um the one the word warg so there was obviously um so yeah so i suppose it's all connected somehow but it wasn't it was it was less conscious the conscious thing i think might have been um met the metamorphosis of its metamorphosis and the greek myths i was i've always been drawn to stories of transformation and i'm not in entirely sure why i think i think it might be partly to do with that those themes that i've talked about about nature and getting back to nature and regaining our relationship with nature a.
[26:06] Tapping back into those rhythms that we seem to have lost. And I think probably that's partly what's happening in those Greek myths of transformation.
[26:17] You know, various figures are becoming, literally becoming nature for whatever that might symbolize. It symbolizes lots of different things. But I think that's what Robin is doing in my story. He is kind of almost literally becoming the forest. He's putting it on. he's adopting and.
[26:37] They say this wolf skin that belonged to a forest god he is in it and at times it take control of him he is gradually during the during the story as he's becoming the forest and if that i mean yes to some people that looks like uh becoming a werewolf and he's certainly becoming something more bestial he's certainly um getting back to yeah something more primal i suppose it's also making me think of june now with that idea of i mean in the desert context there the relationship with the sandworms or whatever they're called uh and the sort of metamorphosis that goes on in the frank herbert stories fascinating area but all of this raises a problem as a writer how do you handle a character who's becoming something more than human because obviously we need to remain in touch with the character who we in some ways empathize with and care about um did you find that a struggle what was your what was your sort of relationship with the character as robin was changing from the the kind of abused child really a vulnerable child yes to being this.
[27:48] More powerful entity yes i mean i i personally didn't struggle to stay in contact with him but whether readers do or not and i i i don't know um i'm it's not something i'd i'd thought about consciously i i kind of just followed him through his his journey of transformation um but yeah i suppose the more uh the challenge there were lots of challenges once he robin takes this as you say solo journey into the forest and so there were quite a number of challenges in terms of keeping the narrative going without anyone to play off of it's a quite a lonely long stretch of of story and that perhaps won't be for everyone but um but for me personally i think that's at the core of the book and and it's the part of it perhaps that i enjoy the most uh as robin as i suppose we haven't uh as as the introduction pointed out robin is blind in this story so there was that added challenge of keeping the narrative descriptive without Robin's sight, because we rely on that an awful lot. Yeah, that's an interesting point, because so many times you must be reaching for something that he's seeing when he's sensing it. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And yeah, there was quite a lot of editing went on. I can't see that.
[29:18] But at the same time, I think there is, I think they do that in creative writing workshops, don't they or not? I've really taken any, but I think that sort of idea where you, if you limit something, it's actually quite good for creativity.
[29:32] Yeah, definitely. and i feel like the discipline of of writing a blind character in the woods was was quite good it was enjoyable because i it meant i had to really sink into the other senses and find a way for robin to sense the forest in a way that we can't i think that's that's essentially i think why he's blind in this story as well as i it was a as well as thinking it was going to be a a good game of thrones twist as it were when the blinding happens um i didn't i didn't want to hide that from anyone because it wasn't just for shock value it was i think he's blind because as i say the story started with the forest that was this new this more this darker more mysterious more mythical sherwood forest that had developed in my mind that was the start and therefore and robin grew out of that so i knew just to even survive somewhere like that this this robinhood was going to need to sense the world in a way that's deeper than than we sense it and the loss of his sight was was kind of almost the price he paid is very it's that it's there in a lot of the old myths as well isn't it the norse myths like odin gives up an eye for for for knowledge of the the world tree and and all the greatness you you there's there's there's always a cost to the to.
[30:58] That kind of transformation and i think that's why robin is it was very important that robin was like that in this story yes and i suppose that the episode of the blinding is you know it's as shocking as it is in king lear kind of thing um and this i is it pitched as ya or adult it's somewhere on the cusp isn't it as a book it is oh yes it is somewhere on the cusp i've i've oh yes i think i probably made a bit of a problem for my publisher with that i'm not sure but um again i i think i know now a lot more about how to perhaps pitch a book at a particular audience and i i didn't i wasn't really particularly cognizant of that at the time i i just read a story that I would want to read. Um, uh, but yeah, so in many ways I think of it as more of a fantasy book than a way, a way book.
[31:55] So that's interesting because it meant that you weren't in any way censoring yourself in the handling of things like violence as a result, which you might have done. It's obviously clearer when you're doing something like a middle grade book. You've got a set of rules that you're following in similar to a sort of cinema
[32:13] certification, but you didn't actually have that in your mind when you were writing. I mean, they're very powerful scenes, very shocking scenes, but they're also very medieval, which is, of course, the point. It's not, it's the world, it happens to people. Yeah, no, I think that's right. Again, I don't remember it being a particularly conscious decision. I just think it probably influences as much as anything else. I love the Bernard Cornwell Arthurian trilogy, and they're very violent, very, just very, but in a way that seems to fit that world at the time. Yeah. And I grew up on 2000 AD comics that are full of action violence. So I think it was, but again, it seemed very much how those worlds would be. So, yeah, hopefully it doesn't come across as gratuitous too often. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. so I would say that it's not comic book violence.
[33:19] It's earned violence that's integral to a world that, you're creating is it so it's a very different different way of looking at it you had a problem writing particularly the middle book um but you've now got the three in place so do i take from that that you were you didn't set out with knowing how it ended for example you you were setting out to see how it unfolded was that your writing experience yes yes it was i Well,
[33:52] I always thought it would be a bigger series. It felt like two bigger stories for one book, for sure.
[34:01] I had a sort of vague idea how I thought the second book would go. Probably thinking about it, I had too good an idea of how I thought the second book would go. And that is part of what many things tangled me up. But I think one of them was, yes, but thinking I knew where I wanted the second book to go. And I've learned, I think, very much the hard way. I've written four books now because I wrote a book for younger children called Earthsworn. And now I've just started on my fifth novel. And I think over those books, I think I've learned that where I should stand in relationship to planning. And I mean, it's always going to be a work in progress, but I think I can definitely over plan more than under plan. I know my publisher, David Fickling, I think has been sort of hinting that to me from the beginning, that you're better off not knowing too much about a story.
[35:09] Well, that's true, because of course, in David Fickling's, I don't know what they call it this day, his collection of authors is Philip Pullman, who I've heard him talking about writing into the dark, this idea that you write about exploring. And then somebody else who has been edited by David Fickling said that David always said to him, the pen is in your hand. You know, so not an interventionist editor who would demand a plan in advance. So that's that's the deal you get with David Fickling. Yeah, no, absolutely it is. And I and I very much value him for it.
[35:43] I've not always listened to his great wisdom. I've always known his wisdom when I've heard it. It um but i've you probably have to make your own mistakes even when people are telling you uh the right way and he he yes he's the particular phrase of his that really stuck with me.
[36:02] Um was he he says that the place for a writer to be is one step ahead of you one one step ahead of the reader one step behind the story and that that i often think of if i feel like if i if i am in that zone then then i'm okay i don't want to i always i always dislike the feeling i was making it up which is so which was when i first thought that i'm just making this up i thought that that's that's a bit strange but it's it's a it's a feeling of being too conscious about it if If I'm consciously making up a story, then that's not where it works at all. And the scenes in Shadow of the Wolf where Robin's alone and blind in the forest, those, I had no idea what was going to happen next. And yet I wasn't completely lost because I was building it, you know, bit by bit, you know, that feeling of no knowing where, perhaps where your next footstep is, but not, be able to see the end of the path. I don't know whatever the metaphor is. David would have a better metaphor than I've got.
[37:06] But yeah, so that's, I think, I think a large part of the, a large part of the
[37:12] game of writing stories for me has been very exciting, really. As hard and challenging as it's been, has been learning how to do it, learning what your relationship needs to be with your unconscious, and how to allow these words through. And that's, yeah, that's what I think will always be low. But I feel like I now have a much better feel. The third book of this trilogy, for instance, I feel like it, you know, it had several false starts, but that's only because, not only because, but the characters were finding out how to then relate to the first and second book. But once they did then they very much played out the rest of the story for me and that in the third book happened much more smoothly as a result.
[38:01] So if you would like to read a modern take, mythic take on Robin Hood, The Blind Bowman, The Shadow of the Wolf by T.K. Hall is available now with parts two and three shortly to be with us. So what are the publication dates for part two and three?
[38:22] October, I think the second of October anyway this year for part two and then part three is February 2nd. So all within the next few months. Excellent. Yeah. So just to sort of finish this off on a sort of cheery note.
[38:36] I like to ask my guests where in all the fantasy worlds that they've come across, it could be ones you've read about in books or on films or comics, really the choice is yours. I suppose video games these days as well. Where in all those places is the best place to be Robin Hood? And you can interpret it how you like. So you can take the old stealing from the rich to give to the poor version, or you can take your more mythic one. And where would you like to be Robin Hood?
[39:08] In all fantasy worlds, the thing that springs to mind would be Alan Moore's Swamp Thing graphic novels. They were a big sort of conscious influence on this book. Book and um yeah i feel i feel like they were i just love that world i love being in that world i reread those graphic novels most years and um so yeah i'd like to see robin hood meet swamp thing that would be a happy fun to face off yeah that's the kind of superhero swamp things the kind of superhero that i would that i could relate this robin hood to because he's he's yeah sort of primal he is the swamp and, I mean, there's so many intriguing places you could slot him in, isn't there? Because you could do a Thor on him and bring him into something like the Marvel Universe. That'd be quite fun. That'd be fun. Well, I think Green Arrow is based on Robin Hood. No, he's not English enough. No, no, no. Sorry. A fail from my point of view.
[40:15] But also being the Disney one, being a fox, that'd be quite cool. But i was thinking that the place i wouldn't mind bringing him is the lee bardugo's um world circle of crows that world which is about thieves i think being robin hood there would slot right in you're if you're doing the steals from the rich give the poor your morals are probably a bit better than most of her characters yes but you know uh i think it'd be an interesting challenge for Robin Hood to parachute into that world yes yeah it's a difficult question of Robin Hood because for me in my mind as I say the one thing you can't take away from Robin Hood is the forest English forest um so we would have to it would have to come with him um yeah so but but in in yeah but uh but let's say he as I well as this truism goes on he kind of um.
[41:12] I'm going to give too much away actually so maybe i shouldn't but he yes he his powers go to the degree where he kind of um he can generate forest so it's uh yeah maybe you can take it with him he would be quite good actually you mentioned tolkien and of course tolkien is often the people listening to his their favorite author robin hood in middle earth would be great fun because a lot of the admirable um human characters are quite sort of within the power structures you know aragorn and varamir and actually having a roguish thief knocking around yes yeah no i yeah i think that's right i think all stories can can benefit from outlaws essentially i mean they've got them in them and i think again i think that's why we're so part of why we're so drawn back to the robin hood stories is the very fact of outlawed and yeah we we feel so i think ever since civilization began i think we've felt hemmed in by all the rules and obligations and laws and the idea that we could just cast all that off and live free is is very attractive i think merrily under the greenwood boughs yes indeed thank you so much Tim and all the best with with the reissue of, well, the reissue of this book and the completion of the trilogy within the next few months. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Julia.
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