The Sword in the Stone is a fiction book about a young, poor boy named Arther. He is a squire and is going to assist a knight in a contest. Auther meets Merlin, a magician. They become good friends and Merlin shows Auther all of his magic. Auther forgets the knights swords and has to find another sword quickly. Auther goes to the sword in the stone and pulls, and it comes right out. He is now hailed as King Auther.

My four-year-old son loves this book! He likes the "eye spy" aspect of the story and all of the clues that lead you through the book. The colorful and very detailed drawings will appeal to any child -- boy or girl. It is appropriate for his age, and I believe he will like it for a few more years. We recommend this highly.

Do you know need a reason to buy this book? I can give you an excellent one -- it's called the Table of Contents. It lists 700 pages worth of Robin Hood ballads, plays and more. It has the earliest ballads and plays where Robin is merely a yeoman, the first play that casts him as the Earl of Huntington, and later ballads that give the "origins" of Little John, Maid Marian and Will Scarlet. Also, there's an introductory article on the history of the legend and complete introductions and notes to all the ballads and plays. The notes and introductions are by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, two top Robin Hood scholars. If you want to read the original tales of the outlaw, or if you are teach a course in Robin Hood, this book is an excellent buy. Just treat it with care. I notice my cover is fraying somewhat.

The photographs are really captivating! They are all from Brit pop magazines like The Face and BIG... It's really worth to get this book and make it part of your artistic senses collection. Some of the photographs aren't really special and are TOO obviously alterted by computer (which even I can do it) but a lot of them are fresh ideas. The 6 ladies including the one on the cover are already stunning for a start so, well!

The strength of this volume is that it is a good compilation of essays that focus in on scholarship on Robin Hood. There are treatments of Robin Hood in relation to literary criticism, history, media, and a range of topics. I found the section on history to be the most interesting. Some of the essays provide model studies for investigating intriguing issues that relate to the development of ballads and stories about Robin Hood, and there is a great deal of scholarship for investigating historical kernels associated with the stories. The section on media includes a few strong essays -- I enjoyed the treatment of Robin Hood on screen from the earliest movies into contemporary cartoons and even satires. But some of the essays and in fact entire sections are really weak. I thought that by far the least interesting (and the poorest written) essays were in the area that focused on literary criticism. This facet of scholarship surprised me because I thought that literary critics would know how to write due to the nature of their study.

Okay, this book isn't for people beginning to study the Robin Hood legend. For that, I'd recommend Stephen Knight's Robin Hood: A Complete Study, J.C. Holt's Robin Hood and R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor's Rymes of Robin Hood.

But for those of you somewhat familiar with the history and development of the outlaw legend, this book makes great reading. It collects a variety of articles and chapters from over two centuries of Robin Hood scholarship. Detailed discussions on the earliest ballads, historical outlaws, mythic themes, Renaissance plays, and modern movies (in particular, Flynn's Adventures of Robin Hood and Men in Tights).

Many of these articles are classics in the field of Robin Hood scholarship. For example, Joseph Hunter's 19th century examination of a real-life man named Robin Hood from the court of Edward II. Or the 1950s-1960s debate between Rodney Hilton and J.C. Holt on the audiences of the early ballads. Their debate triggered much of the modern academic writing on Robin Hood.

If you've heard of (but never read) those articles before, then this book is definitely for you.