Men in tights, men in caves

I can’t think of any good reason I would ever need a hastily researched, 12-year-old essay on the origins of the Robin Hood legend. And yet, as I discovered over the weekend, I have one.
I found the essay, which I wrote for an English 101 class my freshman year of college, in a box tucked away in one of my closets as I made a half-hearted attempt to get ready for a move next weekend. As a result, I find myself suddenly a little better informed on, among other things, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, gender roles in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” and the role alcohol played in three novels I have no clear recollection of ever reading. It’s a little bit like I imagine Milli Vanilli or Ashley Simpson must feel every time they hear a song they supposedly recorded.
The essays themselves aren’t particularly informative. Plato might be a little disappointed to learn the best an 18-year-old me could come up with to discuss his allegory about enlightenment is, essentially, “learning is hard,” but I try not to get too worked up about bad reviews from anybody wearing a toga. And it was still at least mildly interesting to see what my writing was like back then. Honestly, it’s not as bad as I might have guessed.
I certainly had a predilection for using song quotes in my younger days. Nearly every essay I found is either titled with a quote from a song I happened to like at the time or uses one between the title and the opening lines. Some of them had both. My essay on “The Legend and History of Robin Hood” begins with a quote from the REM song “Superman.” The essay about the Allegory of the Cave, which is, at least on the surface, about dragging people out of a cave and into the sunlight, is titled with a quote from the Matthew Sweet song “Looking at the Sun.” Although now that I think about it, given the message of the essay, maybe the Pink Floyd line “We don’t need no education” would have been more appropriate.
As you can see, I was really clever back then.
I was also big on superheroes. In one essay I compared Robin Hood to modern comic book heroes like Spider-Man and Batman. And while writing about Bede’s “A History of the English Church and People” made an argument by creating the character of “Super Bishop.” So, clearly I had a pretty broad view of literature.
The writing itself is, aside from a few awkwardly worded passages and some evidence of really halfhearted proofreading, surprisingly not horrible. I’m not sure why I thought it would be — I got good grades on all of the essays — but when I look back at some of the earliest stories I wrote for this paper it’s painful. I just assumed this would be the same.
Take this passage from the Robin Hood essay: In this difficult time, when peasants lack even the most basic of fights, they need a hero to rally behind.” If you can ignore the similarity to a Tina Turner song, that’s not entirely bad.
On the other hand, there’s this description of the Sheriff of Nottingham: “He is the evil man, enemy of all that is good. He is a bad man who must be struck down by the goodness of Robin Hood.” Even the writing in Keanu Reeves movies isn’t that overdone.
The feedback isn’t all positive. On an essay that starts “Isn’t there some old saying, something along the lines of ‘Hell hath no fury like a Greek guy scorned?’” the professor accused me of being too flippant.
It’s good to see I’ve grown out of that.