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Originally Posted by davem
If we strip the flesh off any human being we would find the same skeletal structure. Archetypes in themselves are uninteresting. Stories are unteresting. And stories are set in a certain time & certain place, because they come from the minds & hearts of certain people. If you replace Robin with Otto, or William Tell, you've got a different story.
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You can scrutinize and strip apart every story to look for the human behaviour and they will be there, all your common love, hate, anger, pride and whatnots. After all story and indeed myths were connocted by human beings in the first place.
But nevertheless, in different cultures and at different times, there were characteristics that would have be very distinctive and different, and these two factors would have shaped the nature of the myth including the basic expressions of the human behaviour also, in addition to whatever indigenous identity pertaining to the myth creators. Hence when one reads of a myth from say China or Japan from 23 AD and 578 AD respectively, it would hardly make sense to him that it could apply to say England of the same era. The cutural favors that gave the myth its setting and gist would be distinctively Sinic for that example.
As I have mentioned the tale of Robin Hood was set in a time when the common nature of England was closely interwined with that of the rest of Europe. The orders of those days were religious piety to the Catholic Church and regional feudalism. So instead of thinking of Robin Hood and the characteristics of that tale as solely English in nature, I think of it more of European in nature. Reasons have been stated as before.