One element of the outlaw hero tradition that contributes greatly to the ambivalence of noble robber figures is its ability to inhabit the opposing realms of myth and reality. A few outlaw heroes are totally fictional figures, but the majority are historical persons. In the case of these historical outlaw hero traditions the actual events of their lives rapidly turn into legend. The legends then feed on whatever outlaw scripts exist in the cultures that produce and sustain them. As time goes by it becomes increasingly difficult, sometimes impossible, to separate fact and folklore as they twine with each other into thickets and even forests of myth. In the often complex legends of outlaw lives we can also trace the influence of other heroic types who populate the folk traditions of the world. These include warriors, tricksters, shape-shifters, great thieves, magicians and even saints. While these figures inhabit the fictional, even fabulous, domains of the human imaginary they nevertheless impact on the historical activities of many outlaw heroes. The permeability of the barriers between factual and fictional outlaw heroes is fundamental to their usually contested reputations, in life and after.

Warriors

The individual who bears arms against enemies – either human, animal or supernatural – is found in all cultures, in all times and in all places.

Frontiers are continually progressing movements of human beings, usually sweeping aside other human beings before them. They are a naked confrontation between those who were already there and those who have newly arrived. As frontiers move, those on either side of them come into a form of mobile contact and, almost inevitably, conflict, as the pioneering or colonising group moves ever deeper into the territory of those who own the land. Outlaw hero traditions frequently erupt on both sides of these often intangible but fraught lines of demarcation, and ride the physical and the cultural spaces that lie between them. Colonial frontiers are a form of border, though their boundaries are either fixed or oscillating between one or more sides as people move across them, probing, skirmishing, smuggling, and fleeing. While they may be pushed one way or another from time to time, they rarely involve major movements of territory. Nevertheless, they are often the physical markers of social, economic and political ruptures along which tensions mount from either side and across which conflicts may be fought out. Underneath these often violent confrontations between the old and the new, the colonised and the colonisers lay the same concern – who will own the land and control whatever resources it may possess?

In the historical study of political thought, it is a cliché that periods of practical innovation and theoretical fecundity are initiated “when words lose their meaning.” The confusions attending the Peloponnesian War, which are documented by Thucydides, are said, accordingly, to have enabled the work of Plato and Aristotle; the obsolescence of the pivotal distinction between king and tyrant, as well as the language of natural hierarchy, that came with the Religious Wars of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, opened the way to Bodin and Hobbes and competing discourses of the modern state. The decline of aristocracy and the rise of democracy, according to John Stuart Mill and other observers of the time, put the language of the party of order in crisis. All of these contentions have a certain plausibility.

In the past few decades, correspondingly, it has been maintained that the languages of citizenship, legal orders, popular self-rule, and the like, all oriented to the geographically and culturally bounded nation-state, have been made irrelevant (or obscurantist) by conditions variously characterized as globalization, post-colonialism, or post-modernism. The concept of exile, understood as a distinctive political status associated with defeat, banishment, exclusion from a bounded location and similar attributes, appears as one of these terms of an obsolete political discourse.

Exile reappears, however, as a key term in a counter-discourse, to refer precisely to the condition of dis/location, which is said to define the world beyond national identities and relations.

Famously, the neglect came first. Born in 1809, Edward FitzGerald was approaching his fiftieth birthday when he started translating some of the rubáiyát or quatrains attributed to the twelfth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám to whom his younger friend Edward Cowell had introduced him a few years earlier. In May 1857 he told Cowell, who had gone to Calcutta as Professor of History at Presidency College, that ‘Omar breathes a sort of Consolation to me! Poor Fellow; I think of him, and Olivier Basselin, and Anacreon; lighter Shadows among the Shades, perhaps, over which Lucretius presides so grimly.’

These were particularly grim times for FitzGerald. He had need of consolation in the wake of his miserable marriage to Lucy Barton the previous November, a grievous error at least partly provoked by Cowell's departure for India; he would soon have need of more when William Kenworthy Browne, another younger friend, was fatally injured in a riding accident. By the end of 1857 FitzGerald had sent 35 of the ‘less wicked’ stanzas to the editor of Fraser's magazine John Parker (Letters II, 419). Still too wicked for Parker, they languished with him for a year until the author took them back and, along with 40 more quatrains, had them printed privately and anonymously. There was no rush to buy the slim brown pamphlet from Bernard Quaritch's bookshop in the spring of 1859.

While Robin Hood is the archetype of all English language outlaw hero traditions, there are some who come before his earliest presumed dates and others who may or may not have lived around the same time. The surviving historical and other records on these historical and, like Robin Hood himself, probably mythical characters, are tantalisingly limited, vague and sometimes contradictory. But they are enough to show perhaps the earliest form of the outlaw hero tradition in English-language culture and the existence of certain of its elements in other cultures. Although the Scandinavian term utlah is first recorded in the reign of King Alfred (871–99), the first of such identifiable figures flit through the mists of the Norman conquest of what is now England, exactly the kind of power conflict that forms the basis of the outlaw hero tradition wherever it exists.

Norman Conquest

Earl Godwin

The story of the historical Earl Godwin (990–1053) is contained in a manuscript on the life of Edward the Confessor, thought to have been composed between 1065 and 1067. It is the earliest known detailed outlaw narrative in English and involves some of the essential elements of the tradition, including its setting along a contested border between Anglo-Saxon and Norman England as well as conflict over control of land and resources in the prelude to and the aftermath of the invasion of 1066.

The close connections between outlaw heroes and political figures can be seen in the early histories of Mao Zhedong and Josef Stalin. Mao was a reader of the Outlaws of the Marsh novel from an early age and a student of Chinese bandits, introducing their techniques and mentality into his Red Army. It was the custom in the clandestine days of early Russian communism for individuals to take political names to disguise their true identities. Joseph Stalin chose ‘Koba’, a legendary Georgian bandit, as his party name. Both these men were pivotal in large-scale and relatively long-lasting political revolutions and the elaborated philosophy associated with those historical developments. Although outlaw heroes rarely espouse more than a rudimentary, if any, political agenda, many have been actors in larger or smaller political activities, often involving the desire for a better deal, a fairer distribution of resources as well as vengeance on a long-hated group of occupiers, rivals or other oppressors. Politics have enveloped the lives, deaths and legends of many outlaw heroes, in many times and places, most notably in China, Mexico and Sicily. In other instances, we can glimpse a submerged politic being played out through the actions of street mobs supporting English highwaymen making their way to the gallows, and after.

Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) was not a fashionable writer in his day, and though his version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is often prominently quoted today, he rarely gets much credit for it; it is Omar Khayyám who is being quoted. When Le Gallienne the ‘translator’ does attract attention, it is rarely favourable. It scarcely needs to be said that Le Gallienne, like all other interpreters of the Rubáiyát, has been overshadowed by Edward FitzGerald's fame and esteem, but it might be said that Le Gallienne has been unfairly, if understandably, overshadowed by Omar Khayyám. It is not clear whether Le Gallienne himself understood the danger these two luminaries – FitzGerald and Khayyám – posed to his own prospects for fame, but the subtitle of his Rubáiyát is ‘a paraphrase of several literal translations by Richard Le Gallienne’, which suggests that the poet was keen to claim his share of the credit.

Yet the relationship between Le Gallienne and the very idea of a Rubáiyát translation is vexed. The paraphraser can hardly be accused of any deceit as he himself admitted that his Rubáiyát was not a translation at all, but rather a ‘paraphrase’.

Edward Heron-Allen was a remarkable man but his name is rarely remembered today, except by the members of the modest society that commemorates him and his achievements. Born in 1861, he lived until 1943 and his last entry in Who's Who listed his interests as ‘Persian literature; Marine Zoology; Meteorology; Heraldry; Bibliography; Occasional Essays and Scientific Romances; Auricula and Asparagus Culture.’ To these he could justifiably have added violinmaking, palmistry, Egyptology, archaeology, local history and many other more passing interests. He was an inveterate collector of all manner of things (but especially books), a pioneer of the Boy Scout movement, and the senior partner in his father's thriving legal practice until he retired at the age of 50. His diversity of interests suggests at first sight that he was a dilettante, a dabbler in diverse disciplines, knowing very little about a lot. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Edward Heron-Allen was a true polymath, a multidisciplinary savant with a natural aptitude for languages. Wherever he decided to put his efforts, he succeeded in becoming a leader in the field; a couple of examples will serve to demonstrate his talents. He was articled to his father's law firm in London's Soho when he was 18, but soon found a more interesting diversion round the corner at the workshop of Georges Chanot, one of the last of the great classical violin-makers.

History and myth begin to entangle during the lives of outlaw heroes and in relation to the social, economic and political factors of their particular time and place. Their deeds, real and imagined, are widely celebrated and their failings largely ignored. After their demise the deep processes of mythmaking begin to shape the outlaw hero in accordance with the already established tradition. The lives and legends of outlaw heroes are enmeshed in an ongoing interaction in which folklore, the media, art, literature, drama, tourism and the heritage industry dance with each other around the outlaw's image. The resulting conflicting and competing interpretations of the significance of individual outlaws can produce local heroes, media stereotypes, romanticised ideals and even national icons. As well as the processes of mythmaking inherent in the folkloric and media representations of outlaws, most of these individuals also play a role, often a significant one involving action and articulation, in the making of their legends. Together, these are the processes through which real and mythical outlaw heroes are retrospectively constructed and reconstructed.

One of the most commonly encountered outlaw hero folktales is told in many parts of the world in ballad or story form. A poor old widow woman (or other socially vulnerable individual) cannot pay her rent. Nevertheless, the avaricious landlord extracts the last penny she has, leaving her without the means of subsistence.

The Rubáiyát, loosely based on the verses attributed to Omar Khayyám, is one of the most widely known poems in the world. It has been republished virtually every year from 1879 (the year of its fourth edition) to the present day, and translated into over 80 different languages. This volume of essays is based on a conference held in 2009 to honour the bicentenary of the birth of Edward FitzGerald (1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). It was organised by the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Faculty of English) in collaboration with the Persian Department at the University of Leiden (who organised a complementary conference in the Netherlands). The conference was convened by Dr Christine van Ruymbeke (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge), Professor Adrian Poole (Faculty of English, Cambridge) and Professor Charles Melville (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge), in memoriam Peter Avery, OBE. We wish to express our warm gratitude to the following for the generosity of their support for the 2009 conference, without which the current volume would not have been possible: the Soudavar Cambridge Fund for Persian Studies; the British Institute of Persian Studies; the Iran Heritage Foundation; the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; the Ancient India and Iran Trust; Pembroke College, Cambridge; Trinity College, Cambridge; and Cambridgeshire County Council.

Published for the first time 150 years ago, Edward FitzGerald's translation of the quatrains attributed to the Persian astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyám acquired a cult in the English-speaking world, and then crossed linguistic barriers to become an international cultural phenomenon in its own right. According to the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat, who published the first modern study and selection of the quatrains in Persian, FitzGerald's Rubáiyát was a factor in rekindling interest in Khayyám's poetic legacy even in his native land, where the old sage had always been honoured as the greatest of mathematicians and astronomers, but never included in the rostrum of great Persian poets.

The quest for the cause of the Rubáiyát's celebrity is of long standing, but it has neither found a definitive answer, nor lost its relevance. The articles in Harold Bloom's collection Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám published in 2004 are as much a part of this quest as the challenge which Ezra Pound posed 70 years earlier in 1934 to would-be students of the art of reading poetry effectively: ‘Try to find out why the FitzGerald Khayyám has gone into so many editions after having lain unnoticed until Rossetti found a pile of remaindered copies on a second-hand bookstall.’ And immediately after, teasingly: ‘Did the “90s” [i.e. the 1890s] add anything to English literature or did they merely prune Swinburne? and borrow a little from the French symbolistes?’ [sic]

The title of my essay comes from Robert Browning's ‘House’ (1876), which describes a building that has lost its façade and so stands entirely open to public view: ‘Right and wrong and common and queer, / Bare, as the palm of your hand, it lay’. And my argument is that Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (first published in 1859) is in several respects both common and queer, both very usual and quite unusual, and that these two qualities are equally ‘bare’ or evident. Yet the poem's familiarity – for nearly a century the Rubáiyát was the best known and most widely read poem in English – has tended to obscure its oddity. As Daniel Schenker wrote in 1981, ‘the universal acceptance gained by FitzGerald's poem as a kind of timely wisdom has rendered the poem overly familiar…and therefore an uninteresting subject of inquiry for most modern readers’. In the years since Schenker offered this assessment, the poem's popular readership has declined, while critical interest has (perhaps in exact proportion) revived. But even now the poem's familiarity continues to distort critical perception of it: we see what is common or straightforward about the Rubáiyát, but not what is queer.

Two unusual aspects of the Rubáiyát in particular are thus hidden in plain sight. First, its language: the enormous popularity of the Rubáiyát has long led critics (both admirers and detractors) to assume that the poem must be simple, its diction and style easily comprehensible.

While the outlaw hero has long been an international tradition, it is only in the information age that the ability of individuals to be represented globally and, in some cases, to act globally has become a reality. Previously, outlaw heroes arose and met their fates in obscure localities or regions, sometimes with utopian, ethnic or other aspirations to independent status. The range of their depredations was constrained by transport realities of foot, horse and, more recently, the motor vehicle. Likewise, their ability to project their discontents outside their areas of influence was also restricted to scribbled messages and notes to local politicians and newspapers. Ned Kelly was the first to become a global media sensation when metropolitan journalists, able to take the train to the location and to place their stories on the newly installed telegraph wires, covered the showdown at Glenrowan in 1880. The local story made newspapers in London and elsewhere in the world. The outlaw heroes of Depression era America were the darlings of the state and national newspapers for a short time, while Salvatore Giuliano was the subject of considerable media romanticisation until his unromantic slaying.

All these figures and the many others discussed in this book can be considered the old guard of the outlaw hero tradition.

One of the indirect consequences of the coming of the railways was a transformation in French eating habits, particularly those of the middle classes. Before the railways were built, the availability of food was limited by the amount that horses or oxen could pull, but under the Second Empire the new rail network made it possible to move large quantities of food quickly from one part of France to another. For the first time, thanks to the steam train, serious famine could be averted, and the bad harvests of 1853, 1856 and 1861 passed without mass starvation. Peasants might still prepare the simple, traditional foodstuffs that had remained virtually unchanged for generations, but in towns and cities things were very different. The new urban middle classes craved more variety in their diet, and a growing industrial population needed more provisions, and wanted them more cheaply. As Auguste Luchet noted in 1867, steam transport allowed fashion rather than necessity to dictate eating habits: ‘Everything changed with the advent of the railway. Shortened distances made our heads swim with swiftly-satisfied pleasures.’ In Second Empire Paris, patterns of eating altered radically as new foodstuffs became available. Oysters, to take but one example, were consumed in huge quantities now that the trains de marée could deliver regular, fresh supplies from the coast; to meet growing demand producers began to farm oysters, and in 1866 more than 260 million of them were sold in the capital, mainly to cafés and restaurants, which flourished as never before.

Nowhere were the changes taking place in mid nineteenth-century France displayed in more concentrated form than at the two international exhibitions held in Paris in 1855 and 1867. The exhibition of 1855, announced by Napoleon III barely four months after the proclamation of the Second Empire, was seen as an opportunity for France to stamp its new identity on the world. It was to be an occasion for France to assert its superiority over other nations and to show off the achievements of the new Empire to the hordes of visitors who were confidently expected to travel from far and wide to see it and to marvel. The exhibition's aims were explicit: as Prince Napoléon, the Emperor's cousin, declared in a speech to the first meeting of the Imperial Commission, its purpose was ‘to illustrate nineteenth-century France and Europe’. But what did it mean, ‘to illustrate […] France‘? How was France to be presented?

From the outset, the 1855 exhibition, like its successor, was closely identified with the imperial family and the new régime. An Imperial Commission under the supervision of Prince Napoléon planned the exhibition. The Emperor set the scheme in motion and officiated at the opening ceremony, his profile was stamped on the exhibition medals, his sculpted bust presided over the main entrance, and he and the Empress made numerous public visits.