Maid Marian isn’t present in the very earliest versions of the Robin Hood story in the 14th century, when the emphasis is on wild woodsmen living in the rough, outside of polite society, but she had become an integral part of the troupe by the late 16th century. The relationship between her and Robin then gives the tales a chivalric turn, and adds complexity to his character. He knows how to live the predatory life of the outlaw, but there is also now a capacity in him for tenderness.

The mythological roots of Marian’s own character make her just as complex. We needn’t see her as the delicate, simpering, fragile creature that the Victorians made of her, in which she stands for the archetypal damsel in distress. She too lives in the woods after all, and in earlier eras she was as skilled in hunting and archery as her male companions. In some of the tales she evokes Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting.

Marian began life as the Queen of the May, herself a version of Diana, the young woman chosen at May festivities to personify the end of winter, the return of fertility to the soil and the bursting forth of natural forces once more after the long, barren months of the year. Bonfires were lit, a maypole was set up and there was ritual dancing around it.

The May Games had two presiding spirits: Robin Goodfellow, the rough-and-ready huntsman, precursor of Robin Hood, and the white-clad Queen of the May, who was the spirit of the fields, of fertility and the anarchic excess of springtime growth. A May Queen was elected each year from among the villagers, crowned with blossom and garlanded with flowers, as a personification of the strength and abundance of the earth. When she made her entrance in the Robin Hood ballads and stories, she was the narrative embodiment of just this symbolic figure.

Not just a pretty face

There is no doubt that Marian is a gutsy, courageous presence in the classic ballads. In one version of her entry into the band of Merry Men, disguised in male costume, she challenges Robin, himself disguised, to a duel with swords, and gives as good as she gets:

They drew out their swords, and to cutting they went,
At least an hour or more,
That the blood ran apace from bold Robin’s face,
And Marian was wounded sore.

“O hold thy hand,” said Robin Hood.
“And thou shalt be one of my string,
“To range in the wood with bold Robin Hood,
“And hear the sweet nightingall sing.”

Note that it is Robin who concedes the contest. Far from being embarrassed when they discover each other’s true identities, he welcomes her with open arms into the woodland fraternity. She is already Robin’s lover, as an earlier verse of the ballad makes clear –

With kisses sweet their red lips meet,
For shee and the earl did agree;
In every place, they kindly imbrace,
With love and sweet unity.

- but now she is also his equal in the band.

20th century girl

In recent times, she has become more than his equal. The BBC children’s TV series Maid Marian And Her Merry Men (1989-1994) presented Marian as the real leader of the heroic troupe, while Robin is just a self-regarding wimp who has become the group’s figurehead by chance.

Maid Marian is the focus and title character of a mock-chivalric, early 19th-century satirical fable by Thomas Love Peacock, and also of a recent debut novel by Elsa Watson (Maid Marian, 2004), which relates the adventures of the merry band from Marian’s point of view.


In 1999, Cardiff University academic Stephen Knight posited, to outrage in many quarters, that in the original 14th-century ballads, there is no mention of women at all. He concluded that Robin Hood is probably gay, and that therefore the merriness of the Merry Men might not have been entirely a question of temperament. On this reading, Marian arrives among the cast of characters in the 16th century, as a way of making the stories more acceptable to an audience for whom homosexuality was now much more beyond the social pale. The theory has naturally been hotly contested.