a friar, who murderously subverts the abbot's household while seeming to make himself useful in the kitchen and with chores, was suggested by the Shakespeare scholar George Lyman Kittredge, who noted the connection has been made in Reginald Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584. Sir Sidney Lee (1859–1926), editing the entry for Robin Hood in the DNB suggested that the name Robin Hood originally belonged to a forest-elf, and that "in its origin the name was probably a variant of 'Hodekin', the title of a sprite or elf in Teutonic folk-lore". He took his cue from the scholarly tradition, expressed by T. Crofton Croker in 1833, that Hood, "the title assumed by, or applied to the famous outlaw, was no other than one which had been appropriated to a denizen of fairy land — Hudikin or Hodekin, that is little hood, or cowl, being a Dutch or German spirit, so called from the most remarkable part of his dress, in which also the Norwegian Nis and Spanish Duende were believed to appear." Croker's and Lee's proposed connection with the woodland sprite Robin Goodfellow, in the absence of traces of magic in the Robin Hood ballads, has not been taken up by modern scholars. Notes References Arrowsmith, N. Morse G. (1977). A Field Guide to the Little People. London: Pan Macmillan. . Hölling, Johann Conrad Stephan (1730). Einleitung zur Weltlichen, Kirchen = und Reformations=Historie Des Hoch=Stiffts Hildesheim, Durch besondere Erörterungen solcher Begebenheiten in der Grafschafft Wintzenburg, und der darin belegenen Stadt Alfeld. Hildesheim:Ludolph Schröder (Contains a large number of very old reports about Hödecken.). Keightley, Thomas (1850). The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries. London: H. G. Bohn. Kobolds German folklore Household deities