Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
Summary
England, 1194. King Richard is a prisoner somewhere in Austria, his brother John plots to keep the throne warm for himself, and the conquered Saxons still glare at their Norman masters a century after Hastings. Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a Saxon knight disinherited by his own father for following Richard to the Crusade, comes home in disguise to win a great tournament, and the plot gathers in every direction: the siege of Torquilstone castle, where an outlaw band led by one Locksley, who proves to be Robin Hood, storms the walls; a black knight errant who fights like a king because he is one; and above all Rebecca, the Jewish physician's daughter, tried for witchcraft because a Templar, Brian de Bois Guilbert, cannot master his obsession with her, and saved by a trial by combat at the last possible moment.
Fair warning and honest praise together: the opening chapters move slowly, thick with antiquarian scene setting, and the plot creaks exactly where Scott wants it to. But once the tournament begins the book becomes what it has been for two centuries, the template of the medieval adventure, tournaments, sieges, disguises and outlaws in the greenwood, executed with a breadth nobody has improved on. And Rebecca is the book's conscience and its finest creation; readers since 1819 have wished Ivanhoe had chosen her over the Saxon princess Rowena, and Scott knew exactly what he was doing in refusing the wish.
Published in December 1819, it was his first novel set outside Scotland, launched with a print run of ten thousand copies.
Historical Context & Significance
Reviewers praised its descriptive power, and Rebecca was admired almost unanimously; Thackeray spoke for generations of dissatisfied readers with Rebecca and Rowena, an 1850 burlesque that marries the hero off properly. Scholars have objected from the start that the Saxon and Norman hatred Scott depicts had largely faded by 1194, and the anachronism became part of the book's legacy anyway.
Few novels have shaped a legend so directly. Ivanhoe fixed Robin Hood as Locksley, the dispossessed Saxon patriot of a divided England, the version every film still uses, and it did as much as any single book to launch the nineteenth century's medieval revival. It even coined a name: Cedric, Scott's respelling of the Saxon Cerdic, entered the stock of English first names. The 1952 film brought it three Academy Award nominations.