Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves by Alexandre Dumas
Published 2001 · 224 pages · 61,600 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction
How hard is Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves to read?
Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves scores 31 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- A nineteenth-century adventure romance of the Robin Hood legend, with readers noting an archaic-sounding register. That puts it above contemporary popular fiction but well below the literary heavyweights, closer to The Great Gatsby in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Serial adventure fiction of the period favours direct, readable sentences, and this translated work likely follows suit. It is plainer than Anna Karenina and nearer to the clear prose of Fathers and Sons.
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- A legend of outlaws set in twelfth-century England is built from concrete action and adventure. It sits near Asterix the Gaul and Atomic Habits at the concrete end, with little philosophical content.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- At about 61,600 words for this volume, the book is a moderate-length adventure with a historical setting from 1162 to 1166. Its density is light, comparable to Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 28 out of 100
- Adventure tales in the Dumas tradition tell their stories plainly, leaving little to infer. It reads closer to 1984 in directness than to any unreliable-narrator novel.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The Robin Hood legend carries familiar associations of outlaw justice and resistance, but a popular adventure edition gives no sign of dense motif work. It sits near Beach Read in symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Historical adventure romance of this kind is earnest in tone, with heroes and villains clearly marked. It resembles the sincere voice of The Tattooist of Auschwitz more than satire.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- This is the first volume of a two-part work, so the story is left open for the sequel. Within the volume, adventure conventions favour clear plot resolutions, which keeps it well short of the ambiguity of Lolita.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Serial historical adventures are usually linear and chronological, here spanning 1162 to 1166. The structure resembles the plain divisions of 1984.
How Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves is regarded
Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves holds a literary regard score of 32 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.