Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature

<p>Arguing that outlaw narratives become particularly popular and poignant at moments of national ecological and political crisis Sarah Harlan-Haughey examines the figure of the outlaw in Anglo-Saxon poetry and Old English exile lyrics such as <em>Beowulf</em> works dealing with the life and actions of Hereward the Anglo-Norman romance of Fulk Fitz Waryn the Robin Hood ballads and the <em>Tale of Gamelyn</em>. Although the outlaw's wilderness shelter changed dramatically from the menacing fens and forests of Anglo-Saxon England to the bright known and mapped greenwood of the late outlaw romances and ballads Harlan-Haughey observes that the outlaw remained strongly animalistic other and liminal. His brutality points to a deep literary ambivalence towards wilderness and the animal at the same time that figures such as the Anglo-Saxon resistance fighter Hereward the brutal yet courtly Gamelyn and Robin Hood often represent a lost England imagined as pristine and forested. In analyzing outlaw literature as a form of nature writing Harlan-Haughey suggests that it often reveals more about medieval anxieties respecting humanity's place in nature than it does about the political realities of the period.</p>