Sir Walter Scott

Ivanhoe A Romance Sir Walter Scott

Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott is a historical novel published in three volumes, in 1819, as one of the Waverley novels. At the time it was written, the novel represented a shift by Scott away from writing novels set in Scotland in the fairly recent past to a more fanciful depiction of England in the Middle Ages. Ivanhoe proved to be one of the best-known and most influential of Scott's novels.

Set in 12th-century England, with colorful descriptions of a tournament, outlaws, a witch trial, and divisions between Jews and Christians, Ivanhoe is credited for increased interest in chivalric romance and medievalism. John Henry Newman claimed that Scott "had first turned men's minds in the direction of the Middle Ages", while Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin likewise asserted Scott's great influence upon the revival of interest in the medieval period, primarily based upon the publication of the novel Ivanhoe. Moreover, Ivanhoe much influenced popular perceptions of Richard the Lionheart, King John, and Robin Hood.




Composition and sources
In June 1819, Walter Scott still suffered from the severe stomach pains that had forced him to dictate the last part of The Bride of Lammermoor, and also most of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, which he finished at the end of May. By the beginning of July, at the latest, Scott had started dictating his new novel Ivanhoe, again with John Ballantyne and William Laidlaw as amanuenses. For the second half of the manuscript, Scott was able to take up the pen and completed Ivanhoe: A Romance in early November 1819.




For detailed information about the Middle Ages Scott drew on three works by the antiquarian Joseph Strutt: Horda Angel-cynnan or a Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits etc. of the Inhabitants of England (1775-76), Dress and Habits of the People of England (1796-99), and Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801). Two historians gave him a solid grounding in the period: Robert Henry with The History of Great Britain (1771-93), and Sharon Turner with The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1799-1805). His clearest debt to an original medieval source involved the Templar Rule, reproduced in The Theatre of Honour and Knight-Hood (1623) translated from the French of André Favine. Scott was happy to introduce details from the later Middle Ages, and Chaucer was particularly helpful, as (in a different way) was the fourteenth-century romance, Richard Coeur de Lion.