Petro Katerynych’s ZN.UA essay surveys how medieval ballads and later authors reshaped Robin Hood from a brutal outlaw into a defender of the poor. Katerynych traces the story from the 14th-century mentions through Tudor rewrites (notably John Major in 1521) and Romantic and Hollywood reinventions that added noble lineage, Marian, and a social mission.
The piece then compares this process to Ukrainian cases: Oleksa Dovbush and Ustym Karmaliuk. Katerynych cites recent cultural work — including the 2023 film Dovbush — and historians such as Myroslav Voloshchuk, who caution that documentary evidence often paints a more ambiguous picture than popular legend. He invokes Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of the “social bandit” to explain how collective memory elevates ambiguous or violent figures into symbols of resistance.
The essay is framed as an opinion piece and invites readers to reconsider familiar heroic narratives by separating archival evidence from later myth-making.