That’s the lines from the movie Stan and Ollie.
A: I mean this scene in the movie where I fall into the river.
B: But that’s historical, you know. It’s famous. Robin Hood has a fight on the middle of the log. We gotta do that.
A: It’s a made-up story. It’s not historical. All right, look, all I can say is I’ll do the best I can.
Question: What does “on the middle of the log” mean here?
Thank you!!!
I havent seen the movie but a log is a piece of a cut down tree. So it sounds like he‘a standing on a piece of tree. Maybe it’s floating in the river and he’s balancing on it.
This is how Robin Hood met his great friend and fellow outlaw ‘Little John’, a classic story emanating from an English ballad of the seventeenth century. It is one of the most famous scenarios in British mythology, possibly based on some kernel of reality, but encrusted with plenty of fiction. Robin Hood is the archetypal heroic outlaw and according to legend a highly skilled archer and sword fighter. He is often depicted as of noble birth but returning from the Crusades he finds all his lands taken by the despicable Sheriff of Nottingham. So he takes to the forests, dressed in Lincoln green clothing, and is said to have ‘robbed from the rich to give to the poor’. On crossing a brook by a rudimentary bridge, the tree laid down as a log to allow passage, he is confronted by a man who is described as seven feet tall - the ironically named ‘Little John’. Neither will give way. As Robin Hood has his bow and quiver full of arrows at the ready the stranger comments that this would be an unfair advantage [get the drift of English fair play inherent in this story…], while he only has his stave. So Robin Hood, courteous as ever, cuts himself an oak staff and then they both fight each other fiercely until Little John topples Robin Hood into the water. Robin Hood then blows his famous horn to summon his ‘Merry Men’ who are aghast that their leader has been swiped into the brook and want to exact punishment, but Robin Hood asks the stranger to join them and when he asks his name and is told ‘John Little’ he immediately dubs him with the reverse soubriquet. There are countless stories, ballads, books and even television and film versions of the ‘Merry Adventures of Robin Hood’, and this ‘log scene’ is in most versions as the iconic first encounter between Robin Hood and ‘Little John’. Even historians now have real difficulty in separating truth from fiction on who these characters really were!
