Robin Hood and His Merry Men

Last night I visited Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

They greeted me in the forest clearing in front of the rocks where they live.

Folks believe they live in trees or something, so I should say a little more about their dwelling place.

It’s a big heaped up jumble of rocks.  Boulders, really.  The average rock is about the size of a man.  I had plenty of time to compare as the merry men loved to leap up and down the rocks like mountain goats.

It’s a big jumble of rocks.  It is more than five men high.  I know, because I and some of the merry men decided for fun to measure it.  We got a chain of men standing on each other’s shoulders five-men high before we came tumbling down to be caught by the men waiting around below.  But the top man was still overtopped by the jumble.

They showed me inside.

What it was was you climb around over the rocks, find a little niche, and sometimes after squeezing through the niche and around the rocks a little you’d come to a room.  Fairly well-appointed, actually.  Still have cavity in the rocks, but there would also be furniture and lights and rugs and things, with some rock surfaces poking out here and there.  The rooms came like that, they said, with the furniture and lights and rugs and things already inside them.

If you poked around in some of the rooms you could sometimes find little gaps to get farther inside the jumble and then sometimes you could find rooms farther in.  It was a maze, they told me, and they  hadn’t navigated the half of it.  They showed me one of the further-in rooms.  It was nicer still.  It had a turkish rug and carved wooden furniture with a big chandelier hanging over.  There was a huge table there, where Robin presided over a feast.

They said that all the farther in rooms were like that–nicer, I mean.  The farther in you got, the nicer the chambers.

It came to me that if you went in far enough you’d come to a dock on a twilight shore and there just a little out on the water would be a ship, the most luxuriously fitted out of all, blazing with light and festivity.

Now that I’m done with the visit, I am starting to wonder if Robin and his band have found themselves a fairy mound.

Vaguely related:

The modern misunderstanding of Robin Hood is my personal vietnam pic.twitter.com/IVCKk8DnYM

— Conan, Esq (@conan_esq) January 16, 2022