The legendary outlaw returns in MGM+’s new Robin Hood series, where rebellion brews beneath Norman rule. Episode one, “I See Him,” reimagines the hero’s origins with fresh faces, familiar tensions—and an unexpected frog.
By Richard Utz
The narratives surrounding the legendary Robin Hood should already have ended when the late medieval ballad “The Death of Robin Hood” told the story of how Robin’s cousin, the Prioress of Kirklees Priory, betrays and kills him by bleeding him to death. And the popular hero’s epic degeneration is about to be portrayed again in a forthcoming movie, The Death of Robin Hood (directed by Michael Sarnoski, and scheduled to be released in 2026), in which Hugh Jackman, of X-Men and Wolverine fame, “grapples with his past life of crime and murder while in the hands of a mysterious woman after being badly injured” (says Internet Movie Database). This could become a real downer, similar to the final scene of Tankred Dorst’s play, Merlin, oder das wüste Land (1981), in which Arthur and Lancelot, after the collapse of the Round Table, reflect back as old men on the failure of their utopian project and their lives.
However, the die-hard Robin Hood fans among us will always believe that any claims of his death have been greatly exaggerated. It is in this spirit that I watched the first episode (“I See Him”) of the new action-adventure television series Robin Hood, produced by Lionsgate Television for MGM+, and featuring Jack Patten (Rob) and Lauren McQueen (Marian), together with the notorious Sean Bean (think Ned Stark in the first episodes of Game of Thrones) as Sheriff of Nottingham and Steven Waddington (think Ivanhoe in the 1997 Ivanhoe TV series) as Earl of Huntingdon.
The framework of the narrative is the oppressive Norman rule in 12th-century England under Henry II, during which Saxons are forced to pay heavy taxes, convert to Christianity, and all hunting privileges are reserved for the king. Some Saxons resist the injustice brought upon them by the Norman settler-colonialists by living as outlaws, protected by the vast forests.
The story centers on Robert (Rob), the son of the proud Saxon Hugh of Locksley, a forester who hopes to reclaim his ancestral land. Hugh petitions the Norman Sheriff of Nottingham, but his efforts are rejected, and he is instead pressed into service as a royal forester, deepening his resentment of the Normans. We see him in his younger years in a flashback, as he inculcates his son with the story of the legendary Wild Aedric, who “didn’t believe England had been conquered, even when a Norman king came and stole the English crown. He rebelled. And he retreated into the woods and became an outlaw. For many summers, Aedric defied the king’s soldiers, and he and his men feasted on the king’s deer.” Aedric, so Hugh tells his son, wed Godda, the wild huntress fairy, who “turned him into a magnificent stag” and eternal “protector of the forest” who watches over the allegedly indigenous Saxons.
Robert grows up a skilled archer (several scenes offer a nod to the most English of weapons, the longbow) and forms a friendship with Marian, the kind-hearted daughter of the bellicose Norman Earl of Huntingdon. Tensions between the Saxons and Normans continue to rise, and Hugh’s attempts to navigate the political landscape end in disaster. Huntingdon’s men bribe a Saxon prisoner to attack Hugh. One of the guards is accidentally killed during the scuffle, and the soldiers accuse Hugh of the murder. He is arrested, brought before the Sheriff, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to be hanged.
Rob rushes from the Greenwood to Nottingham to save his father. Powerless, he watches as his father is led to the gallows. Before his execution, Hugh prays for Robert’s protection and for his son to become a weapon for his people’s deliverance from what medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis called the Norman “yoke” (referred to as “Norman rule” in the episode’s prologue). The episode ends with Robert witnessing his father’s public hanging, an event that marks the end of his former life and motivates his transformation into the legendary Robin Hood. In its dramatic setting, the scene is reminiscent of the desperation Arya Stark feels as she watches her father’s execution in Game of Thrones. And so, as the brief description of this first episode in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) summarizes: “A Saxon forester’s son loses everything. A legend is born in blood. The fight for England’s soul begins.”
As always with historical fictions, reviewers find fault with anachronisms, for this series specifically the advent and spread of Christianity (“Portraying Saxons under Henry II as pagans is a blatant historical insult and ignorance.” “A dash of historical accuracy with a lot of creative license and a pinch of druidic mysticism.”). As for the acting, costume design, scenery, and screenwriting, viewers seem to disagree wildly, arguing on the one hand that “Lauren McQueen shines as Marian, bringing warmth and quiet strength that make her scenes among the most engaging in the series so far. The actor playing Rob shows flashes of real emotion – especially in the rain – though his range still feels limited in quieter or more reflective moments”; and on the other hand: “MGM+ had all the ingredients for a definitive Robin Hood… Sean Bean, historical gravitas, and one of literature’s greatest legends. Instead, they’re desperately trying to be Game of Thrones, throwing in gratuitous violence and unnecessary sex scenes while burying the actual goldmine they’re sitting on.”
There is no doubt that any medievalist post-Game of Thrones TV series will take some cues from the most widely successful series ever produced. And the presence of Sean Bean should be a warning to all audiences of such inter-series connectivity. The directors and producers immediately immerse their viewers in a bloody skirmish between the (indigenous?) Saxon resistance fighters, led by the legendary Wild Aedric, leaving no doubt that the fans of grimdark medievalism will feel at home in this new series.
The historical tension between Saxons and Normans, even if anachronistic, provides a great motivator for this series’ actions. That historical conflict was one of Rudyard Kipling’s favorite yarns, expressed so well in his “Norman and Saxon,” a poem written specifically to demonstrate how the fusion of both these medieval traditions was necessary to create and shape the Great Britain the poet so cherished. If only the Normans in Robin Hood had heeded the warning the Norman baron gives to his son in Kipling’s poem:
The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own, And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.
The full value of the storyline will still take some time to unfold throughout the remaining nine episodes of this first season. For now, what we have here is a quite original and entertaining retelling of the Robin Hood narrative, especially with Robin’s loss of land and title connected to post-1066 Norman England.
And the Norman vs. Saxon tension also enables some of the humorous aspects of this first episode: For reasons yet unclear, Rob’s mother Joan (played by Anastasia Griffith) teaches her son French. This is gloriously funny when the Saxon family break into real French, but all the (real) Norman French characters, who certainly would have spoken varieties of Norman French, converse in English.
More importantly, when Marian and Rob meet for the first time as kids, Marian’s support animal is a sizable green frog. Luckily for the frog, Marian was not aware of the “Frog Prince” fairy tale. She only catches the animals in the meadows and then releases them in the Huntingdon moat.
Years later, when Marian and Rob encounter each other again, another frog appears on scene to help Marian (and perhaps some viewers) to remember their first encounter as children. And when they later speak with one another and he demonstrates he recognizes her, too, he calls her “the frog girl” and uses French to impress her with his education; similar to how William Wallace uses Latin and French in Braveheart to impress Isabella of France. From Rob’s (twenty-first-century) Saxon perspective, the Norman French Earl’s daughter is very much a “frog girl,” especially when one considers the habit of many English speakers who refer to the French as “frogs.”
However, while “frog” is on record (by the Oxford English Dictionary) as an insult for men and women since the fourteenth century and was used since the seventeenth as an insult for the Jesuits and the Dutch, as an anti-French insult it is only recorded since the French Revolution. Of course, the screenwriters may have been influenced by the story of the French King Clovis’ decision to replace three frogs on his heraldic sign with three lilies (fleurs-de-lis), as part of his conversion to Christianity. According to that story, calling the French “frogs” could have begun in the Middle Ages.
All this said, the appearance of a frog in the first episode of the 2025 Robin Hood TV series should be recorded as an authentic inaugural use of an amphibian in the long tradition of Robin Hood narratives. In addition to “Robin Hood and the Monk,” “Robin Hood and the Potter,” “Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Notyngham,” and “Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow,” we now also have “Robin Hood and the Frog.”
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
The legendary outlaw returns in MGM+’s new Robin Hood series, where rebellion brews beneath Norman rule. Episode one, “I See Him,” reimagines the hero’s origins with fresh faces, familiar tensions—and an unexpected frog.
By Richard Utz
The narratives surrounding the legendary Robin Hood should already have ended when the late medieval ballad “The Death of Robin Hood” told the story of how Robin’s cousin, the Prioress of Kirklees Priory, betrays and kills him by bleeding him to death. And the popular hero’s epic degeneration is about to be portrayed again in a forthcoming movie, The Death of Robin Hood (directed by Michael Sarnoski, and scheduled to be released in 2026), in which Hugh Jackman, of X-Men and Wolverine fame, “grapples with his past life of crime and murder while in the hands of a mysterious woman after being badly injured” (says Internet Movie Database). This could become a real downer, similar to the final scene of Tankred Dorst’s play, Merlin, oder das wüste Land (1981), in which Arthur and Lancelot, after the collapse of the Round Table, reflect back as old men on the failure of their utopian project and their lives.
However, the die-hard Robin Hood fans among us will always believe that any claims of his death have been greatly exaggerated. It is in this spirit that I watched the first episode (“I See Him”) of the new action-adventure television series Robin Hood, produced by Lionsgate Television for MGM+, and featuring Jack Patten (Rob) and Lauren McQueen (Marian), together with the notorious Sean Bean (think Ned Stark in the first episodes of Game of Thrones) as Sheriff of Nottingham and Steven Waddington (think Ivanhoe in the 1997 Ivanhoe TV series) as Earl of Huntingdon.
The framework of the narrative is the oppressive Norman rule in 12th-century England under Henry II, during which Saxons are forced to pay heavy taxes, convert to Christianity, and all hunting privileges are reserved for the king. Some Saxons resist the injustice brought upon them by the Norman settler-colonialists by living as outlaws, protected by the vast forests.
The story centers on Robert (Rob), the son of the proud Saxon Hugh of Locksley, a forester who hopes to reclaim his ancestral land. Hugh petitions the Norman Sheriff of Nottingham, but his efforts are rejected, and he is instead pressed into service as a royal forester, deepening his resentment of the Normans. We see him in his younger years in a flashback, as he inculcates his son with the story of the legendary Wild Aedric, who “didn’t believe England had been conquered, even when a Norman king came and stole the English crown. He rebelled. And he retreated into the woods and became an outlaw. For many summers, Aedric defied the king’s soldiers, and he and his men feasted on the king’s deer.” Aedric, so Hugh tells his son, wed Godda, the wild huntress fairy, who “turned him into a magnificent stag” and eternal “protector of the forest” who watches over the allegedly indigenous Saxons.
Robert grows up a skilled archer (several scenes offer a nod to the most English of weapons, the longbow) and forms a friendship with Marian, the kind-hearted daughter of the bellicose Norman Earl of Huntingdon. Tensions between the Saxons and Normans continue to rise, and Hugh’s attempts to navigate the political landscape end in disaster. Huntingdon’s men bribe a Saxon prisoner to attack Hugh. One of the guards is accidentally killed during the scuffle, and the soldiers accuse Hugh of the murder. He is arrested, brought before the Sheriff, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to be hanged.
Rob rushes from the Greenwood to Nottingham to save his father. Powerless, he watches as his father is led to the gallows. Before his execution, Hugh prays for Robert’s protection and for his son to become a weapon for his people’s deliverance from what medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis called the Norman “yoke” (referred to as “Norman rule” in the episode’s prologue). The episode ends with Robert witnessing his father’s public hanging, an event that marks the end of his former life and motivates his transformation into the legendary Robin Hood. In its dramatic setting, the scene is reminiscent of the desperation Arya Stark feels as she watches her father’s execution in Game of Thrones. And so, as the brief description of this first episode in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) summarizes: “A Saxon forester’s son loses everything. A legend is born in blood. The fight for England’s soul begins.”
As always with historical fictions, reviewers find fault with anachronisms, for this series specifically the advent and spread of Christianity (“Portraying Saxons under Henry II as pagans is a blatant historical insult and ignorance.” “A dash of historical accuracy with a lot of creative license and a pinch of druidic mysticism.”). As for the acting, costume design, scenery, and screenwriting, viewers seem to disagree wildly, arguing on the one hand that “Lauren McQueen shines as Marian, bringing warmth and quiet strength that make her scenes among the most engaging in the series so far. The actor playing Rob shows flashes of real emotion – especially in the rain – though his range still feels limited in quieter or more reflective moments”; and on the other hand: “MGM+ had all the ingredients for a definitive Robin Hood… Sean Bean, historical gravitas, and one of literature’s greatest legends. Instead, they’re desperately trying to be Game of Thrones, throwing in gratuitous violence and unnecessary sex scenes while burying the actual goldmine they’re sitting on.”
There is no doubt that any medievalist post-Game of Thrones TV series will take some cues from the most widely successful series ever produced. And the presence of Sean Bean should be a warning to all audiences of such inter-series connectivity. The directors and producers immediately immerse their viewers in a bloody skirmish between the (indigenous?) Saxon resistance fighters, led by the legendary Wild Aedric, leaving no doubt that the fans of grimdark medievalism will feel at home in this new series.
The historical tension between Saxons and Normans, even if anachronistic, provides a great motivator for this series’ actions. That historical conflict was one of Rudyard Kipling’s favorite yarns, expressed so well in his “Norman and Saxon,” a poem written specifically to demonstrate how the fusion of both these medieval traditions was necessary to create and shape the Great Britain the poet so cherished. If only the Normans in Robin Hood had heeded the warning the Norman baron gives to his son in Kipling’s poem:
The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.
The full value of the storyline will still take some time to unfold throughout the remaining nine episodes of this first season. For now, what we have here is a quite original and entertaining retelling of the Robin Hood narrative, especially with Robin’s loss of land and title connected to post-1066 Norman England.
And the Norman vs. Saxon tension also enables some of the humorous aspects of this first episode: For reasons yet unclear, Rob’s mother Joan (played by Anastasia Griffith) teaches her son French. This is gloriously funny when the Saxon family break into real French, but all the (real) Norman French characters, who certainly would have spoken varieties of Norman French, converse in English.
More importantly, when Marian and Rob meet for the first time as kids, Marian’s support animal is a sizable green frog. Luckily for the frog, Marian was not aware of the “Frog Prince” fairy tale. She only catches the animals in the meadows and then releases them in the Huntingdon moat.
Years later, when Marian and Rob encounter each other again, another frog appears on scene to help Marian (and perhaps some viewers) to remember their first encounter as children. And when they later speak with one another and he demonstrates he recognizes her, too, he calls her “the frog girl” and uses French to impress her with his education; similar to how William Wallace uses Latin and French in Braveheart to impress Isabella of France. From Rob’s (twenty-first-century) Saxon perspective, the Norman French Earl’s daughter is very much a “frog girl,” especially when one considers the habit of many English speakers who refer to the French as “frogs.”
However, while “frog” is on record (by the Oxford English Dictionary) as an insult for men and women since the fourteenth century and was used since the seventeenth as an insult for the Jesuits and the Dutch, as an anti-French insult it is only recorded since the French Revolution. Of course, the screenwriters may have been influenced by the story of the French King Clovis’ decision to replace three frogs on his heraldic sign with three lilies (fleurs-de-lis), as part of his conversion to Christianity. According to that story, calling the French “frogs” could have begun in the Middle Ages.
All this said, the appearance of a frog in the first episode of the 2025 Robin Hood TV series should be recorded as an authentic inaugural use of an amphibian in the long tradition of Robin Hood narratives. In addition to “Robin Hood and the Monk,” “Robin Hood and the Potter,” “Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Notyngham,” and “Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow,” we now also have “Robin Hood and the Frog.”
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
Top Image: Photo by Aleksander Letic/MGM+
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