The origins of Robin Hood

'He was not a hero': How the dark, violent medieval origins of Robin Hood were erased

Caryn James

17 June 2026

Robin Hood began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century before morphing into a heroic, family-friendly stereotype – here's how new takes are restoring his dark side.

When writer and director Michael Sarnoski began shooting his new film, he showed the cast and crew one he has always loved. It was Disney's 1973 animated Robin Hood, its hero a fox with a feather in his green cap, robbing the rich to give to the poor.

That beloved version could not be further from The Death of Robin Hood, Sarnoski's dark, thoughtful drama. Hugh Jackman stars as a grey-haired, battle-weary Robin, reflective at the end of his life and acutely aware of his own legend.

Warning: This article contains a graphic description of violence that some may find upsetting.

When he encounters a woman who talks about the virtuous, justice-seeking Robin Hood, he denies who he is and speaks of himself in the third person. "He was not a hero. He robbed and killed for the joy of it, nothing more."

It turns out that this violent Robin Hood and other revisionist takes pushing back against his heroic, do-gooder image are closer to the original medieval legends than the family-friendly stereotype we might think of today.

Knowing the Disney Robin Hood and then reading the Death of Robin Hood, those two versions of the character, really stuck with me as a kid – Michael Sarnoski

The depiction of Robin Hood has morphed through the centuries, each change reflecting the era that reinterpreted him. These darker 21st-Century variations look backward to the story's origins, but as some of their creators note, they also speak to the present. Complicated views of the character challenge a polarised world in which heroes and villains are often starkly good or bad, as simplified as the Robin Hood legend became over the centuries.

Who was Robin Hood?

Although there has been plenty of speculation about an actual Robin Hood, historians largely agree that there was no single, living person behind the character, just a vastly unequal society of wealthy landowners and impoverished peasants that inspired his creation. The stories began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century, but the first written accounts didn't arrive until two centuries later, in ballads that showed him as a celebrated figure even then.

In those first written accounts, he wasn't the noble Sir Robin of Locksley as later versions made him. He wasn't noble at all, but a yeoman, a rung above a peasant. There was no Maid Marian in the story until the 16th Century. And while he was perfectly nice to the poor, helping them was not his main purpose. His enemies were the corrupt clergy and the land-owning nobles who took advantage of their underlings.

Stories about Robin Hood began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century – with the first written accounts arriving 200 years later (Credit: Getty Images)

In an afterword to her revisionist novel, The Traitor of Sherwood Forest (2025), medieval historian Amy S Kaufman describes the Robin Hood of the early legends as "a morally grey medieval trickster," and a "violent, irreverent rogue". Disney was right about one thing: the first ballads suggest that Robin was as sly as a fox.

A major change in the story came in the 16th Century. King Henry VIII was a fan and sometimes dressed up as Robin Hood. During the reign of the monarch who split from the Catholic Church, Robin's devotion to the Virgin Mary vanished from the legend.

As the upper classes embraced him, in influential chronicles of the time the character no longer hated the nobility, but became noble himself. Positioned as a morally upright nobleman battling his disreputable equals, he stopped questioning the power structure of society. He was enlisted to help the good King Richard return to the throne that had been usurped by his evil brother, Prince John, a trope that persists through Disney's depiction of John as a greedy, power-hungry lion.

Disney's 1973 film with a fox Robin solidified his swashbuckling do-gooder image in the culture (Credit: Alamy)

During the 19th Century, children's books helped turn Robin Hood even more into a sanitised do-gooder acceptable to the Victorians. And in the 20th Century, cinema perpetuated that portrayal, with the matinee idol Errol Flynn as the swashbuckling Sir Robin in 1938's popular The Adventures of Robin Hood. Disney, in perhaps the most formative version, solidified that image in the culture.

'Two versions of the same character'

Sarnoski tells the BBC that the contrast between the Disney film and the original legends has fascinated him since childhood, when he read a storybook version of the medieval ballad The Death of Robin Hood. There, Robin dies quietly, killed by an evil prioress and her lover. "Knowing the Disney Robin Hood and then reading the Death of Robin Hood, those two versions of the character – trying to grapple with that and understand how that can be the same character really stuck with me as a kid," he says.

I grew up on the fox Robin Hood, and then I went into medieval studies and discovered the ballads and thought, 'Where's my Robin Hood that I know and love?' – Amy S Kaufman

In Sarnoski's film, Robin is injured during a graphic battle – an arrow flies through the back of a boy's head and comes out through his eye – and is taken to a priory to recover. Jodie Comer plays the prioress, who, departing from the ballad's depiction of her, is kind.

"I didn't want the prioress to just be this simple evil nun and I didn't want Robin to just be this simple goodly hero," Sarnoski says, about creating more nuanced characters. And as Robin reflects on and begins to regret his past, "It [the film] really becomes a story about him grappling with his own legend and then grappling with his own desire for what he sees as a right death," he says.

Hugh Jackman stars in the new A24 film, a revisionist take on Robin Hood that harks back to the original, dark medieval legend (Credit: A24)

The falsity of legends is also a major theme in Kaufman's novel, and Disney shaped her early impressions too. She tells the BBC, "I grew up on the fox Robin Hood, and then I went into medieval studies and discovered the ballads and thought, 'Where's my Robin Hood that I know and love?'"

The Traitor of Sherwood Forest centres on the fictional Jane, a peasant who falls for Robin Hood's legend. She swoons over him and becomes part of his outlaw band, but begins to wonder if his heroic image and the seductive Robin himself have led her astray. Kaufman's Robin, neither hero nor villain, is true to the character's origins. In the ballads, she says, "He is incredibly subversive when you look at the way he goes up against people in power, like kings, like nobility, like the church. But he also, in every one of the ballads, either has a tragic end or is a victim of his own flaws."

In the last century, such complex views of Robin Hood have been rare. On screen, actors from Douglas Fairbanks to Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe have played the part, and almost all follow the stereotypical image. One notable outlier is Robin and Marian (1976), a smart, elegant film that deserves to be much better known. Sean Connery plays the ageing Robin, reunited after decades with Marian (Audrey Hepburn), now a prioress. This Robin denies that the legendary stories are true, and is contemplative at the end of his life. "I keep thinking of all the death I've seen," he tells Marian, and wonders what it was for.

On screen, actors from Douglas Fairbanks to Kevin Costner have played the part, and almost all follow the stereotypical image (Credit: Getty Images)

Such questions – about power, heroes, and how their stories are told – are exactly what make revisionist views feel so contemporary. "The world is consolidating power in ways similar to what the Middle Ages had," Kaufman says. "Some of the things that they had to think about are things that we are going to have to think about."

Sarnoski points out how his characters wield stories as power. "Robin used stories as a weapon and as a way to perpetuate violence," as he lured in followers, he says, while "The prioress uses stories as a way to help and heal people."

Those strategies are everywhere today. "We are so steeped in narrative right now between social media and the internet and just everything that's swirling around us," Sarnoski says. "We're so quick to dive into camps and tribalism and create heroes and villains and not live in the grey area that life actually exists in."

As bracing as darker new versions of Robin Hood are, they are not likely to replace the Disneyfied image. "Not everybody wants to have their Robin Hood fantasy disrupted," Kaufman says. "He's become like Santa Claus in the sense that he stands for something bigger than whatever the actual legend was."

Frankenstein horror story is so misunderstood

'It speaks to us about being human': Why Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's chilling 1818 horror story is so misunderstood

Rebecca Laurence

30 October 2026

A groundbreaking classic of the horror genre that has inspired generations, why is the message of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel still overshadowed by its success, more than two centuries on?

"It's alive! It's alive!! It's alive!!!" – Frankenstein (dir: James Whale, 1931)

One night during the strangely cool and wet European summer of 1816, a group of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. "We will each write a ghost story," Lord Byron announced to the assembled party, which included Byron's doctor John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley).

"I busied myself to think of a story," she wrote. "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." Her tale became a novel, published two years later as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It told the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young natural philosophy student, who, burning with crazed ambition, brings a body to life but rejects his horrifying "creature" in fear and disgust.

Frankenstein is simultaneously the first science-fiction novel, a Gothic horror, a tragic romance and a parable all sewn into one towering body. Its central tragedies – the dangers of "playing God" on one hand; parental abandonment and societal rejection on the other – are as relevant today as ever.

Mary Godwin (later Shelley) first thought of the story that became Frankenstein when she was 18 years old (Credit: Alamy)

And are there any other fictional characters more powerfully cemented in the popular imagination? The two central archetypes Mary Shelley brought to life, the "creature" and the overambitious "mad scientist", lurched and ranted their way off the page and on to stage and screen, electrifying theatre and filmgoers as two of the most enduring icons not just in the horror genre – but in cinematic history.

Frankenstein spawned interpretations and parodies that reach from the very origins of the moving image in Thomas Edison's horrifying 1910 short film, through Hollywood's Universal Pictures and Britain's Hammer series, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – and it foreshadowed others, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins and a Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein; Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton all have their own takes.

The characters or themes appear in or have inspired comic books, video games, spin-off novels, TV series and songs by artists as diverse as Ice Cube, Metallica and T'Pau's China in Your Hand: "It was a flight on the wings of a young girl's dreams/ That flew too far away… And we could make the monster live again". In 2025, sci-fi/horror director Guillermo del Toro finally realised his childhood dream of bringing Frankenstein to the screen, a true labour-of-love project that was more than 30 years in the making.

Thomas Edison’s 1910 short film was the first time the story of Frankenstein appeared on screen (Credit: Alamy)

As a parable, the novel has been used as an argument both for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism. The prefix "Franken-" thrives in the modern lexicon as a byword for any anxiety about science, scientists and the human body, and has been used to shape worries about the atomic bomb, GM crops, strange foods, stem-cell research and both to characterise and assuage fears about AI. In the more-than-two centuries since she wrote it, Mary Shelley's tale, in the words of Bobby Pickett's 1962 novelty song, Monster Mash (itself inspired by Boris Karloff's performance), has truly been "a graveyard smash" that "caught on in a flash".

'Mysterious fears of our nature'

"All them scientists – they're all alike. They say they're working for us but what they really want is to rule the world!" – Young Frankenstein (dir: Mel Brooks, 1974).

But why was Mary Shelley's vision of "science gone wrong" so resonant at the time? She certainly captured the zeitgeist: the early 19th Century teetered on the brink of the modern age, and although the term "science" existed, the concept of a "scientist" didn't. Great societal change often brings fear that is played out through culture. "With modernity comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do and particularly an anxiety about science and technology, " says Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein fused these contemporary concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the very first time – with electrifying results. Far from a completely outrageous fantasy, the novel imagined what might conceivably happen if people – and in particular overreaching or out-of-control scientists – went too far.

Several points of popular 19th-Century intellectual discourse appeared in the novel. Mary Shelley's writings reveal that in that 1816 Villa Diodati tableau, Shelley and Byron discussed the "principle of life". Contemporary debates raged on the nature of humanity and whether it was possible to raise the dead. In the book's 1831 preface, Mary Shelley noted "galvanism" as an influence, referring to Luigi Galvani's experiments using electric currents to make frogs' legs twitch. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini would go further in 1803, using a newly dead murderer as his subject. Many of the doctors and thinkers at the heart of these debates – such as the chemist Sir Humphry Davy – were connected to Mary Shelley's father, the pre-eminent intellectual William Godwin, who had developed principles warning of the dangers and moral implications of "overreaching".

Luigi Galvani’s experiments using electricity to reanimate dead frogs was possibly one of the inspirations for the novel (Credit: Alamy)

Despite these nuggets of contemporary thought, though, there's little in the way of tangible theory, method, or scientific detail in Frankenstein. The climactic moment of creation is described simply: "With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." The "science" of the novel is rooted in its time and yet timeless. It is so vague, therefore, as to provide a malleable reference point for the following two centuries' greatest moments of change and fear.

Monster mash-up

But surely the reason Frankenstein became a shorthand for anxieties about science is down to the impression the "monster" and "mad scientist" have had on its audience. How did this happen? Just as the science is vague in the book, so is the description of the creature as he comes to life. The moment is distilled into a single, bloodcurdling image:

"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

It's perhaps a double-edged sword that Hollywood's vision secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it

With his "yellow skin", "watery eyes" and "shrivelled complexion", the creature is far from the beautiful ideal Victor Frankenstein had imagined. This spare but resonant prose proved irresistible to theatre, and later film-makers and their audiences, as Christopher Frayling notes in his book, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. The shocking novel became a scandalous play and a huge hit, first in Britain and then abroad. These early plays, Frayling writes, "set the tone for future dramatisations". They condensed the story into basic archetypes, adding many of the most memorable elements that audiences would recognise today, including the comical lab assistant, the line "It lives!" and a monster who barely speaks.

James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Pictures starred Boris Karloff as the creature (Credit: Alamy)

It's perhaps a double-edged sword that the monstrous success of Hollywood's incarnations (notably James Whale's 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the creature) in many ways secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it. "Frankenstein [the film] created the definitive movie image of the mad scientist, and in the process launched a thousand imitations," Frayling writes. "It fused a domesticated form of Expressionism, overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualisers – and the American carnival tradition – to create an American genre. It began to look as though Hollywood had actually invented Frankenstein." And so, a movie legend was born.

And just as Hollywood cherry-picked from Mary Shelley to cement its version, she had borrowed from historical and Biblical stories to create her own message and mythology. The subtitle of the novel, "The Modern Prometheus", recalls the figure of ancient Greek and Latin myth who variously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, and represents the dangers of overreaching. The novel's other great allusion is to God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the book's epigraph: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?". It is arguably the creature's humanity – and his tragedy – that in his cinematic transformations into a mute but terrifying monster, has often been forgotten.

The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the latest adaptation

Shelley gave the creature a voice and a literary education in order to express his thoughts and desires (he is one of three narrators in the book). Like The Tempest's Caliban, to whom Shakespeare gives a poetic and poignant speech, the creature's lament is haunting: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

If the creature is perceived as a misshapen human rather than a monster, his tragedy deepens. He is first rejected by his creator, which Christopher Frayling called "that post-partum moment", and is often identified as a parental abandonment. Considering that Mary Shelley had lost her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft at birth, had just buried her own baby girl, and was looking after her pregnant step-sister as she was writing the book – which took exactly nine months to complete – birth (and death) is pertinent.

The newborn creature is alienated further as society recoils from him; he is made good, but it is the rejection that creates his murderous revenge. It's a robust allegory for a responsibility to children, outsiders or those who don't conform to conventional ideals of beauty. "The way that we sometimes identify with Frankenstein – as we've all taken risks, we've all had hubristic moments – and partly with the creature, they are both aspects of ourselves – all our selves" Fiona Sampson says. "They both speak to us about being human. And that's incredibly powerful."

The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the most recent adaptation, however. Before its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, director Guillermo Del Toro told Variety that his version, which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature, was less a horror than about "the lineage of familial pain", with Isaac the abusive father abandoning his son, the creature.

Guillermo del Toro's new film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein (Credit: Netflix)

"He was an outsider. He didn't fit into the world. He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid," Del Toro said of the creature, going on to describe Shelley's story as being central to his own life and work. "Frankenstein is a song of the human experience… There's so much of my own biography in the DNA of the novel." When he was collecting a Bafta in 2018 for a different monster fable, The Shape of Water, Del Toro thanked Shelley for inspiring him. "She picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own, and parables do that for us".

Surely it would seem unfathomable that when the then-Mary Godwin first thought up her chilling monster parable in that summer of 1816, she could have imagined that it would go so far to shape culture and society, science and fear, continuing to inspire debate – and art – well into the 21st Century.

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," she wrote in the preface to the 1831 edition. The creator and creature, parent and child, the writer and her story – they went forth, and did they prosper? More than 200 years since its publication, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is no longer a tale of "thrilling horror" but its own myth, sent out into the world.

Why is the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels so misunderstood?

'Depicts humanity at its most grotesque': Why the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels is so misunderstood

Tamlin Magee

First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's adventure novel has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a "misanthropic satire" or a "fantastical nursery tale"?

You may be familiar with the story of Lemuel Gulliver. He wakes up after a shipwreck only to be pinned down by ropes and surrounded by tiny Lilliputians, who clamber up to the incapacitated adventurer.

It's a scene that's been replicated and satirised ever since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, 300 years ago.

Yet fewer may know of Gulliver's darker exploits, where the voyaging anti-hero encounters scientists inserting bellows into dogs, or the society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who calmly debate eradicating the Yahoos, their brutish human-like cohabitants.

In the three centuries since Swift set out to "vex the world, rather than divert it", as he wrote, two Gullivers have competed for the public imagination: one, the excoriating, misanthropic satire that sends up the Crown, the Church and English politics, and the other, a fantastical nursery tale of an adventurer navigating worlds big and small.

Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a series of topical and general satires on humankind, not a kind of adventure – Abigail Williams

Packed with toilet humour, the original Gulliver's Travels also takes aim at the legal system, colonialism and, ultimately, human nature. It darkly concludes with a Gulliver so disgusted by humans after meeting the rational Houyhnhnms that he spends his final days locked in a stable with a horse.

From its very first edition, Swift's tale has been chopped and changed, adapted and altered. Eventually, the story became larger than life, much like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.

The image of Gulliver surrounded by tiny Lilliputians has been replicated ever since Jonathan Swift's novel was published (Credit: Getty Images)

"It's perhaps one of the most adapted texts in the world," says Daniel Cook, author of Gulliver's Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation. It has sparked spin-offs, illustrations, plays and films, all contributing to a broad "Gulliveriana". The titular antihero has appeared in Doctor Who and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he's met Tony Blair, and appears everywhere from family-friendly Disney romps to Soviet critiques of capitalism.

And of all the adaptations, it was those that simplified and sanitised the tale that endured most in the popular imagination, where the darkest episodes were edited, abridged or expunged.

"I doubt Swift would've envisaged Gulliver's Travels would last to the 21st Century, in the form we know it now," says Abigail Williams, professor of English at King's College, London, who once enlisted her infant son and an FBI analyst to decrypt nonsense words in Swift's letters. "Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a series of topical and general satires on humankind, not a kind of adventure."

"That's the really extraordinary thing," she adds. "He's taking the mick out of [adventure stories], but takes enough energy from them that Gulliver's Travels becomes an adventure story in its own right."

From satire to swashbuckling fairy-tale

Swift's peer and friend John Gay famously described the novel as "universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery". Upon its pseudonymous publication in 1726 – a precautionary manoeuvre given its outrageous content – the story was a hit, and the first run quickly sold out. Its fantastical elements appealed to young readers just as its cynical mockeries of humankind did to the literati. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire was in London and greatly enjoyed Gulliver's Travel – it influenced his own satirical Bildungsroman (coming-of age story), Candide.

Yet the tale was already being altered. Publisher Benjamin Motte added in defences of the reigning Queen Anne and removed some of the more quarrelsome political screeds. The reproduction of Gulliver's Travels through inexpensive booklets, called chapbooks, further simplified and changed Swift's story. "For most people, the book was pretty expensive when it first appeared," says Williams. These chapbooks, however, were an unexpected, roaring success with younger audiences.

Gulliver's combat with the wasps – the outrageous content of Swift's novel made it a hit with both young readers and the literati (Credit: Getty Images)

Half-a-century later, a publisher spotted an opportunity. Two decades after Swift died in 1776, Francis Newbery released an abridgement that boiled the story down even further. He cut out the land of Laputa, whose daft experiments in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers lampooned the scientific work of the Royal Society, and the talking-horse Houyhnhnms entirely.

The Victorians thought it was un-Christian, they hated the scatology and sexual elements, and they hated that bleak and persistent misanthropy – Hester Grant

This edition was more swashbuckling fairy-tale fare than satire, focusing on Gulliver's capers among the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. Younger audiences, perhaps appropriately, would not read of the small Gulliver noticing pockmarks and sores on the gigantic Brobdingnagians (or his allusions to being used to pleasure the queen's chambermaids), nor his efforts in putting out a Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it. Though scenes like these "carried on the great scatological tradition seen in Shakespeare and Chaucer", says Cook, they were, perhaps appropriately, deemed unfit for children.

By the 1790s, abridgements became the norm, with Gulliver's Travels becoming a much bigger hit in continental Europe than in England. "It was adapted into German, French, and Spanish very quickly," says Cook, "and they tended to use the simplified version. There's a crossing of language barriers."

Over time, cultural and religious views stratified Gulliver's Travels even further, on the one hand a bizarre parody full of body horror and the other a whimsical nursery tale.

'A complete attack on humanity'

Though the Victorians were not nearly as priggish as is assumed, they "largely loathed Gulliver," says Grant. Particularly rankling was the idea that humanity could be reduced to the brutish Yahoos in the land of the Houyhnhnms. In his 1853 book The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, Vanity Fair novelist William Makepeace Thackeray described the book as "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, and obscene". The Victorian author and critic Edmund Gosse concluded that Swift's "misanthropic genius" could only have been conceived by a diseased mind: "His vertigo became chronic, and so did his misanthropy... there is something which suggests a brain not wholly under control."

"The Victorians thought it was un-Christian, they hated the scatology and sexual elements, and they hated that bleak and persistent misanthropy," says historian Hester Grant. "So I think they were largely responsible for expurgating and stripping the ugly, as they perceived it, satire, and leaving this lovely, clean work of the imagination."

This fourth voyage was viewed as a "complete attack on humanity", according to Cook, and its seemingly irreligious nature was what really shocked people. "It's Swift saying we are like the Yahoos," Cook says. "People thought making fun of the pettiness of politicians in voyage one was fine. We all know politicians are useless. But it's the fourth voyage where he's attacking the very basis of what it means to be a human being. It's no coincidence that, when we think about the children's version of Gulliver's Travels, it's just the first two voyages. We don't really get the full adaptation."

Gulliver meets a society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who debate eradicating the Yahoos, their human-like cohabitants (Credit: Getty Images)

Swift penned his own epitaph, which read: "Where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart". Fantastical and imaginative though Gulliver's Travels was, there's no getting away from that sense of indignation fuelling the tale.

Like the war that rages in the story between "Big-endian" and "Little-endian" factions, the supposed misanthropy of Jonathan Swift is the subject of intense academic debate. There are those, like Thackeray, who believe Swift really did hate humankind, while others view the witless character of Gulliver as the object of satire.

Gulliver's Travels was a late-career magnum opus for Swift, who'd long been a formidable satirist and political propagandist for the Conservatives in Westminster. He felt these were his glory years, when he wrote influential political pamphlets and rubbed shoulders with Tory grandees.

This charmed life died with Queen Anne in 1714, when the ministry he served collapsed. Swift "mourned the loss of political power," says Grant, and above all felt hard done by. Having hoped for a cosy senior position in the Church of England, he was instead rewarded with the deanship of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, which Swift viewed practically as exile. "That feeds very much into Gulliver's Travels, with all its satire of courts and talk of ingratitude and betrayal," says Grant.

Gulliver's Travels was a late-career magnum opus for Swift, who'd been a formidable satirist and political propagandist for the Conservatives in Westminster (Credit: Getty Images)

Though the writer was born in Dublin, Swift had a complicated relationship with Ireland, calling his home country a "wretched, dirty, dog-hole and prison" and "a place good enough to die in". But he also became a champion of Irish autonomy against England, reflected in political and parts of Gulliver's Travels – such as the flying island of Laputa keeping the Balnibarbi below in check, by threatening to crush revolts in their capital of Lindalino, a stand-in for Dublin.

This was all too controversial for Motte's first edition, which removed that critique on colonial subjugation. But Grant believes this is evidence that Swift was a reformer, who wanted to change the world through satire, rather than criticising humankind in a vacuum.

"He depicts humanity at its most grotesque because he wanted to shake his reader from the inertia that allows man to go about our everyday lives when terrible things are happening all around," says Grant. "He's beating us around the head, saying, 'this is what you're like, go do something about it.'"

The legacy of Gulliver's Travels now towers as tall as a Brobdingnagian giant. It is one of the most studied English books of all time, yet possibly one of the least understood due to its many sanitised adaptations. Its language has entered the lexicon, and been further adapted in the digital age, with the "endianness" of computer bytes and the search engine Yahoo. Even AI seemed to have been predicted, in a sense, with a great hand-cranked "knowledge engine" that produces books and mathematics without any expertise on behalf of the user.

It may have been the horrors of the 20th Century that put the original voyages back under the lens. Titans of literature from George Orwell to Sylvia Plath all referenced the text; Orwell called Swift a "Tory anarchist" who, with his "rancorous, pessimistic" fable, foresaw modern totalitarianism in the joyless dystopia of the Houyhnhnms.

Whether the original satire or its many bowdlerised editions, and whatever Swift's original intentions, Gulliver's Travels became much larger than itself. Rudyard Kipling said that Swift "tried to bring an indictment against all humanity, but left a book for children".

But perhaps Swift would have been both amused and dismayed by the endless debate and mutations of his picaresque tale.

"I think he would despair," says Williams. "He was so critical of the dumbing down of contemporary culture. But it's also a text that really plays with misunderstanding, like a lot of Swift's writing.

"Maybe Swift would be delighted by the fact that it was being misunderstood."

Healthcare is centered around pHARMa products

 

Society has been conditioned (mind-controlled) to confuse managing sickness with creating health. You develop a symptom. You’re given a pHARMa product. That product can cause side effects. Those effects may lead to another prescription — the recognized phenomenon known as a “prescribing cascade.” One drug becomes two, two become four, and the revolving door keeps spinning. Vaccines are not exempt from this conversation. They are pHARMa products, yet they’re often discussed as though questioning their ingredients, manufacturing, and lack of safety testing, is somehow off limits. Depending on the vaccine, formulations can contain toxic chemicals such as aluminum, formaldehyde, polysorbate 80, antibiotics, or other manufacturing residuals and excipients. Meanwhile, pHARMa companies make money selling vaccines, medications and other treatments. That financial reality makes transparency, independent scrutiny and informed consent especially important — but it will never happen — they have a business model to uphold, and money to make.  Nutrition. Sleep. Movement. Sunlight. Clean food and water. Reducing harmful, toxic exposures. Understanding root causes. These rarely receive the cultural emphasis that pHARMa interventions do. So ask the uncomfortable question: If we truly want healthier people, why is so much of “healthcare” centered around pHARMa products and lifelong sick-care management rather than helping people become genuinely healthy? Question everything. Read the ingredients. Examine the evidence. Follow the incentives. Never outsource responsibility for your health.  Lean into NATURE 🌱… Question everything ❤️✨ ______

The Entire Population is Now Prone to Blood Clots

 Dr McCullough is concerned about population wide exposure to the thrombogenic Wuhan spike protein

The Entire Population is Now Prone to Blood Clots

Peter A McCullough, MD, MPH

Oct 30, 2026

The pandemic has ushered in a new era of thrombotic disease in human populations never seen before. I brought this up on American Sunrise with Dr Gina Loudon. Overall use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs)—a class that includes Eliquis (apixaban), Xarelto (rivaroxaban), and Pradaxa (dabigatran)—has increased significantly since 2021. However, their individual growth trajectories have diverged based on clinical trial evidence, dosing convenience, and market entry dynamics. Fortunately in the US, Pradaxa and soon Xarelto will be generic.

The solution is to lower the burden the thrombogenic spike protein that was exposed to the world’s population via SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 vaccination, and for most both infection and vaccination during the pandemic years. If micro-blood clots caused by spike protein are dissolved, then the larger ones never form. As a proxy for interest and uptake, Amazon now lists many brands of spike detoxification with the best in class being the Ultimate Spike Detox from The Wellness Company. This is all based upon the principles published in 2023 embodied in McCullough Protocol Base Spike Detoxification.

India is pouring billions into semiconductors

By staying out of the competition to make cutting-edge AI chips, New Delhi is taking a smart approach to achieving its semiconductor ambitions 

India is pouring billions into semiconductors – just not where you might expect

By Zoya Hussain, Senior Correspondent, RT 

2 Nov, 2026

©  RT

India is plowing billions into becoming a global chipmaking hub, while smartly taking a route different from that of industry giants racing to produce the most advanced processors powering the AI boom.

The South Asian country already has a substantial presence in semiconductor design. Now, New Delhi wants to establish a domestic manufacturing industry and become a reliable global supplier.

That ambition was on display at the Semicon India event in New Delhi in September, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitched India as an alternative manufacturing destination amid growing demand and concerns over global chip production bottlenecks and supply uncertainties.

“The world needs new and trusted locations for chip manufacturing and India is preparing itself for this,” Modi told the conference.

A month earlier, in his Independence Day address, Modi had made semiconductor development an important component of the wider Make-in-India manufacturing push. “Chips are indispensable; without them, the world would come to a standstill,” he noted.

The initiative comes as artificial intelligence, data centers, electric vehicles, and expanding electronics production drive demand for semiconductors. But India’s strategy is not to immediately challenge the industry’s technological leaders on their own terms.

“I believe this is one of the smartest and most far-sighted choices India has made,” the co-founder and CMO of chip startup Indiesemic, Jinal Shah, told RT in emailed comments. Indiesemic is based in Ahmedabad, the capital of Modi’s home state Gujarat.

Why India is betting on older chips

While manufacturers such as Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung compete to produce ever-smaller processors, including 2-nanometer chips used in high-performance computing and AI, India is initially concentrating on established technologies known as mature nodes.

These chips, ranging from 28 to 180 nanometers, may not be at the cutting edge of technology, but are essential to automobiles, industrial machinery, telecommunications, household appliances, and electricity networks.

Even the AI boom needs them. Because data centers cannot work without power-management chips, networking components, and other such chips.

Mature-node technologies account for nearly 70% of global chip production by volume, said Neil Shah, the co-founder and vice-president of research at the think tank Counterpoint Research. Starting with mature-node fabrication, specialized semiconductors, and conventional chip assembly and testing is “the only commercially rational entry point for India,” Shah told RT.

A leading-edge 3-nanometer fabrication plant can cost more than $15 billion to construct, according to Indian government think tank NITI Aayog. Making them also requires specialized equipment and expertise accumulated over decades – the latter especially is why the US has found it difficult to quickly replicate TSMC’s manufacturing success.

Pursuing 2-nanometer production is “simply too expensive,” the secretary at India’s Electronics and Information Technology Ministry, S. Krishnan, recently admitted.

Although eclipsed by the AI chips, mature-node chips are a high-growth market. Industry researcher TrendForce reported in June that rising demand for power-related semiconductors, including those used in AI infrastructure, was tightening manufacturing capacity and could sustain price increases into 2027.

India designs chips for the world. Why doesn’t it make them?

India is hardly a newcomer to the semiconductor business. The country accounts for nearly a fifth of the global chip-design workforce and hosts major research and development centers for companies such as Intel, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.

Indian engineers contribute to the development of sophisticated chips used around the world. Yet, much of the actual manufacturing takes place overseas.

Imports currently meet an estimated 90%-95% of India’s semiconductor demand, according to NITI Aayog. The think tank projects that the country’s chip market will grow to more than $200 billion by 2035, driven by electronics, automobiles, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure.

Getting into chip fabrication gives India two opportunities: reducing the dependence on imported chips for its expanding domestic industries, and supplying overseas markets looking for alternative manufacturing locations.

Chips on display, during the India AI Impact Summit at the Bharat Mandapam on February 20, 2026, in New Delhi, India. ©  Pallava Bagla/Getty Images

Bridging the gap: From designing chips to making them

India’s first semiconductor mission resulted in 12 approved manufacturing projects involving more than $17 billion in planned investment. These include a silicon fabrication plant, two specialized semiconductor facilities, and nine assembly, testing, and packaging units.

Five of the nine units have already begun commercial production, including those operated by US memory-chip maker Micron and Indian companies Kaynes Semicon, CG Semi, CDIL Semiconductor, and Suchi Semicon. Modi inaugurated commercial production lines at CDIL in Punjab and Suchi Semicon in Gujarat during the September industry event.

However, these units largely focus on assembly, packaging and testing rather than manufacturing integrated circuits directly on silicon wafers. Building that capability is the next major step.

The Semicon 2.0 program, backed by $13.5 billion, is intended to build an industry around such factories, extending support to equipment manufacturers, specialized chemicals, raw materials, chip design, research, and workforce development.

“India currently relies almost entirely on foreign nations for these foundational raw materials and machinery,” the director of the Sudeet Foundation, Raghava Srinivasan Balakrishnan, told RT.

Indian conglomerate Tata Group is building an $11 billion fabrication plant in Dholera, Gujarat, with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. Commercial production is targeted for mid-2028, initially using 55-nanometer and 90-nanometer technology before moving to 28 nanometers.

At the September conference, US-based Applied Materials announced plans to invest $5 billion in India over the next decade, including in research, domestic supply chains, and workforce development.

The government is also trying to help Indian companies move from designing chips to developing commercially viable products of their own.

Centralized access to professional design tools and infrastructure “significantly lowers the initial capex barriers,” technology policy researcher Pranay Kotasthane wrote in August, welcoming the support for chip-design startups.

Could India eventually make advanced chips?

New Delhi’s ambitions don’t stop at mature-node manufacturing.

In a roadmap released in May, NITI Aayog proposed building a semiconductor value chain worth $120 billion-$150 billion by 2035, with India becoming one of the world’s top three destinations for outsourced semiconductor assembly, testing, and advanced packaging.

The roadmap identifies advanced packaging as an opportunity. Combining different chips into increasingly sophisticated packages can improve performance without relying entirely on the race to make transistors smaller.

”Instead of chasing the global wafer race from behind, India should define its own pathway,” the report says.

The NITI Aayog also recommends building strength in specialized analog semiconductors and materials, such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, which are important for electric vehicles, renewable energy, and industrial power systems.

India is not abandoning the ambition of making cutting-edge processors altogether, but just being pragmatic by going for the low-hanging fruit first.

Getting to the top of the hill will require experience in operating commercial wafer fabrication plants, developing a skilled workforce, and building a domestic network of equipment and materials suppliers.

For now, the country is seeking to establish itself in parts of the semiconductor industry where demand is already substantial and its existing strengths offer it a clear commercial edge.