New Word for our Collection of Homonyms

 I have been reading an (incidentally, very interesting) lesbian retelling of the Robin Hood story, called Heart of Sherwood.  It isn't easy to get enough of the idiom right, to convey a feeling of distance in time, without confusing ordinary readers who may be unfamiliar with the speech of medieval England.  This author does an amazing job of it, but she confused the words "might" and "mite", which leads me to believe that she was using a voice-to-text program.  So there's another entry in our Homonyms list.

In addition, she presents some of the interesting historical characters of the time, including Eleanor of Aquitaine, in addition to the usual suspects of the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Sir Guy of Gisborne, and of course, Prince John.  (But, if I'm not wrong, it was the dastardly John who put in place the Magna Carta, which set out the rights of English serfs.)

The author of this book is Edale Lane, an American author from Mississippi, now living in Canada, reportedly.  She has absorbed the features of the speech of old England very well, at least as found in Sir Walter Scott, and other writers of historical fiction and fantasy of those times.  (Some modernisms have crept in--which I believe should be weeded out--but even with those minor flaws, this book is a remarkable achievement.)

Finally, I must place on record that Edale's characters have a vitality and a realness that are amazingly convincing.  It seemed to me that her depictions of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian and Little John are all true to various types I have encountered.  Robin and Marian, in particular, seem to be the sort of women we would like to have known, but rather uncomfortably modern!  Marian's sunny disposition was exactly as I had imagined it all these years.  When I wrote an alternate Bronze Age story a decade ago, I too had to compromise my firmly anti-anachronistic stance, in order to permit a little of the intimacy that would drive the story along.  The story was Prisoner, though a more accurate title would have been "Slave".)