Excerpt from Tales and Legends: Of National Origin or Widely Current in England From Early Times AN assemblage of fictitious narratives, presenting romantic adventures, supernatural episodes, and dark, if not even immoral, scenes, might seem to recommend itself only to an illiterate age or to a time of life when the opportunity for study and investigation has not yet been given. But nothing can well be more certain than the fact that tales of a fabulous cast have at all periods possessed an irresistible fascination alike for old and young, and that the knowledge of their unreality does not sen sibly or generally impair our affection for these compositions. All the wondrous myths Which have come to us from the East, and all the creations of Western fancy and belief, constitute for ourselves the same inexhaustible treasury of reading and meditation which they have been to our foregoers in this land from a period almost immemorial and as society grows more and more artificial and prosaic in its day by day routine, with a more powerful admixture of archaeological feeling, we may perhaps expect to see a' more widely diffused sym pathy with stories and traditions which owe much of their charm to their strong contrast with existing conditions and possibilities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how modern national consciousness comes into being through fictional narratives. Literature is of particular importance to this process, for it is responsible for tracing the nations evolution through glorious tales of its history. In nineteenth-century Britain, the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood played an important role in construction of contemporary national identity. These two legends provide excellent windows through which to view British culture, because they provide very different perspectives. King Arthur and Robin Hood have traditionally been diametrically opposed in terms of their ideological orientation. The former is a king, a man at the pinnacle of the social and political hierarchy, whereas the latter is an outlaw, and is therefore completely outside conventional hierarchical structures. The fact that two such different figures could simultaneously function as British national heroes suggests that nineteenth-century British nationalism did not represent a single set of values and ideas, but rather that it was forced to assimilate a variety of competing points of view.