What age it works at
Three to four is early but workable if you are telling rather than reading, and if you keep the cast to Robin, Little John and the Sheriff.
Five to seven is the sweet spot. The archery contest, the disguises and the river fight all land, and this is the age at which fairness becomes an obsession — which is the actual subject of the story.
Eight and up can take the real thing: the ballads' moral untidiness, the fact that Robin loses fights, the idea that there is no single true version.
The stealing, which is the real question
Most parents who hesitate over Robin Hood are not worried about arrows. They are worried they are about to hand a four-year-old a hero whose main activity is theft, and the instinct is right — "stealing is fine if you have a good reason" is not a lesson anybody is shopping for.
The thing that resolves it is specificity, and it is in the old songs already. Robin does not rob the rich. He robs people who got rich by abusing an office — a sheriff who takes a widow's last coins under color of law, a churchman charging for things that should be free. The target is not wealth. It is power used to take from people who cannot say no.
Children find that distinction easier than adults assume, because it is the distinction they already apply to a bigger child taking a smaller one's toy.
The sentence that does most of the work, if you want one: he takes it back and gives it to the person it came from. That is both closer to the ballads than "robs the rich" and far easier to live with.
What to leave out
The hanging. Several ballads build to one, and an execution that is interrupted at the last moment is a sharper scene than a small child needs. The rescue works perfectly well from a prison.
The ending, in the oldest version. Robin is bled to death by a prioress who is betraying him. It is genuinely good and genuinely bleak. Save it.
Most of the cast. Much, Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck and Marian can all wait. Four characters is plenty and a crowded forest is hard to follow.
King Richard, optionally. The returning king is a late addition and a slightly deflating one. The story stands without him.
Doing the Sheriff's voice
Worth the effort, and worth doing a particular way.
The temptation is to make him a snarling villain. He is better played as someone completely certain he is in the right — patient, reasonable, faintly bored. A villain who thinks he is the hero is more frightening and much funnier, and it gives a child something genuinely useful: the understanding that people doing unfair things usually have an explanation ready.
Little John is the other one to commit to. Enormous, slow, and the only person who ever tells Robin he is wrong.
Four things to ask afterwards
Not comprehension questions. Things worth actually discussing.
Was the Sheriff breaking the law? Mostly he was not, which is the whole point and takes a minute to sit with.
Robin gives away everything he takes. Why not keep some?
Little John beats Robin in a fight and then joins him. Would you?
If you found something somebody had taken from your friend, what would you do with it? This is the stealing question, arriving sideways, where it is much easier to answer honestly.
How long it takes
Our free telling runs about nine minutes aloud, which is one sitting for a five-year-old and two for a three-year-old. The archery contest is the natural place to stop if you need a break, because it ends on a question.
Where this comes from
- A Gest of Robyn Hode and Robin Hood and the Monk, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Knight & Ohlgren (TEAMS) — for the targets of the robberies and the prioress ending
- Our own retelling, which is where the nine minutes and the stopping point come from