Thanks, Keith! I wanted to post these references to the word bower, because they seem to lend support to the theory that Robin Hood and his Merry Men are archetypal folk heros of the "Green Man" genre, rather than historical figures. But I didn't want to flog a dead horse!

The first one is found at the last link I posted above, the "Legends of Robin Hood". It describes Robin's role in the ancient Rites of Beltane, the "Greenwood Marriage" --

"In pre-christian Britain on Beltane Eve, large bonfires were lit on the hilltops, and the community gathered and danced around them. Young couples would sneak away from the festivities, into the shadows and nearby woods to tryst. They would stay out all night, ostensibly gathering hawthorn flowers (the "may" flower) to welcome in the dawn on May Day morn.

In anticipation of these trysts, the young men would prepare a lovers' nest somewhere private, in the nearby woods or countryside. They would make a bower, a crude shelter of branches, decorated with flowers. The folk name for these love nests is "Robin Hood's Bowers". The young couples would make love in these rustic arbours and their unions were sanctioned by the community and referred to as "Greenwood Marriages". Children born of these couplings were considered particularly blessed and known as "Children of the May" or "merrybegots". Some couples chose to make their liaisons more formal and entered into trial marriages at Beltane, becoming handfast for a year and a day. At some of these weddings, a Friar Tuck figure officiated."

And here's a reference to bower being the abode of another mythical being, The Lorelei, or Water Faeries of the Rhine. These are a few verses from a poem about them by Heine --

" …Combing her hair with a golden
    Comb in her rocky bower
She sings the tune of an olden
   Song that has magical power

The boatman has heard; it has bound him
In throes of a strange, wild love;
Blind to the reefs that surround him,
He sees but the vision above.

And lo, hungry waters are springing—
Boat and boatman are gone…
Then silence. And this, with her singing,
The Loreley has done. (Untermeyer 108)"


And all this has inspired me to coin some verse of my own ...

Oh give me the power of a Robin Hood Bower
Nestled snug in a sacred old Oak
But keep me oh please from a sudden demise
At the whim of the Lorelei folk

:>)   daylia