Ivanhoe

Introduction

From the beginning, Ivanhoe was distinguished by its huge readership and cult appeal. It sold 10,000 copies in its first two weeks, an unheard-of rate in 1819. That same year, a stage version opened in New York, and later Rossini composed Ivanhoe, the opera. Walter Scott had begun his literary career two decades earlier as a collector of Scottish ballads. He then turned his hand to poetry, specializing in grand romantic vistas and heroic themes from Scottish history. “The Lady of the Lake” (1810) made his name and fortune (which he later lost). But then along came Lord Byron. Almost overnight, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage made Scott’s narrative poetry seem provincial and old hat. Making a virtue of necessity, Scott turned to fiction, with spectacular results. Waverley (1814), which looked back to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Scots rebellion of 1745, was something altogether new to the British reader: the recreation of an entire historical canvas, populated by romantic but credible characters, acting out Britain’s painful emergence from its tribal past into modernity and nationhood. Variations on these themes inspired a further sequence of highly successful “Scottish” novels until in 1819, the ever-restless Scott felt the Caledonian well had run dry, and he ventured a new tale removed in both time and place: the England of the Middle Ages. The result was a book that can lay claim to being the most widely read novel of the nineteenth century, and among the most popular of all time.

Ivanhoe maintains a strong readership today, when the rest of Scott’s extraordinary literary output has sunk into obscurity, but it has never been a great critical success. The Scott purists wish he had never traveled south to England at all, and his compatriot David Daiches typifies the twentieth-century scholarly opinion of the novel: “Ivanhoe, though it has qualities of its own, is much more superficial than any of the Scottish novels, and is written throughout on a much lower plane. Scott did not, in fact, know the Middle Ages well and he had little understanding of its social or religious life” (“Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist,” p. 46; see “For Further Reading”). Since the 1980s, critics have turned back to Ivanhoe as an important thesis on British nationalism, and for its racial and sexual themes, but whatever the vicissitudes of its reputation among literary scholars, the novel always has enjoyed a cultural afterlife that much exceeded its scope and pretensions as literature. Ivanhoe single-handedly revived the age of chivalry in the Western popular imagination, and produced a cult of medieval rites and manners that persists into our own age, with its “Dungeons and Dragons” and Lord of the Rings. As for its cultural politics, the impact of Ivanhoe has been felt most deeply and controversially not in Britain, but in the United States.

“I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter,” wrote Mark Twain to a friend in 1903 (Letters, p. 738). Scott loomed large for Twain the writer, who lamented the impact of his “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’” on American literature. But far more serious for Twain was the enduring cultural impression made by Scott’s Ivanhoe on the American South. The antebellum South was an essentially feudal system of rank and caste, and its white ruling class found in Scott’s romantic tale of chivalrous knights, powerful land-owning barons, and loyal serfs a glorious mirror image of itself. For Twain, whatever impetus toward modernization had existed toward “liberty, humanity, and progress” in the South was effectively smothered by the popularity of Scott, whose novels “set the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” The Scott “disease,” he went so far as to say, had caused the Civil War (Mississippi Writings, pp. 500-501). Ivanhoe became, arguably, even more necessary to the South after that war was lost. Scott’s title character spends much of the novel in disguise, and achieves his greatest triumph in the character of “The Disinherited Knight.” He is named for his estate—he is Wilfred of Ivanhoe—but does not or cannot claim it. Ivanhoe the place is never visited and barely mentioned, as if forgotten. The novel’s title thus points to a glaring absence in the world of the novel, both spiritual and material. England has been conquered, and the spoils have gone to the victorious Normans. As his chivalric pseudonym suggests, Ivanhoe the man is a complex figure representing both inherited nobility and loss, a romantic composite uniquely designed to appeal to the defeated Confederate sensibility.

If Ivanhoe’s fall from land-owning scion to homeless errant knight elicited a fragrant bitterness for the southern reader, no less intoxicating was the situation of his heart, torn between the blond, blue-eyed Saxon princess, Rowena, and the exotic Jew, Rebecca. It is one of literature’s most intriguing love triangles. Much controversy surrounds Scott’s representation of Jews in Ivanhoe, but one suggestive means of understanding the intense and destabilizing desires Rebecca inspires is as a figure for the white man’s attraction for and resistance to the prospect of racial mixture. This is certainly how the late-nineteenth-century African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt interpreted Ivanhoe’s dilemma. For Chesnutt, Scott was “the literary idol of the South,” and Chesnutt’s novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), contains a fascinating revision of one of Ivanhoe’s central episodes, the tournament at Ashby where the victorious Ivanhoe awards the crown to the fair Rowena. In Chesnutt’s novel, the Queen of Love and Beauty is also named Rowena, but she is dark: In fact, she is a mulatta passing for white. As another character later remarks, “She should have been named Rebecca instead of Rowena” (p. 92). In Chesnutt’s novel, Rowena’s rival is not a person, but a racial “other” incorporated within the romantic heroine herself. Ivanhoe’s romantic triangle is dissolved into an image of racial ambiguity, a mirror of his own ambivalence. Unsurprisingly, Chesnutt’s “black” Rowena dies in tragic circumstances. In Scott’s novel, the hero begins as a figure for cultural crossing—he has left his Saxon household to follow the Norman king—but the question of whether he is capable of making a second crossing, this time into an ostracized racial group, hangs over the novel until the very end. On the last page, describing Ivanhoe’s marriage to Rowena, Scott refuses to inquire “whether the recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity did not recur to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved.” If Scott is reluctant, generations of readers have not been so coy. It is a cliché of Ivanhoe’s reception that the reader will inevitably wish the hero to have chosen the dark and inspiring Rebecca over her bland, blond rival.

As Chesnutt’s revisionary novel makes clear, Ivanhoe, fairly or not, has been put to use as a racist text. The American historical novelist Thomas Dixon based his reconstruction trilogy on a white supremacist reading of Ivanhoe—beginningwith A Leopard’s Spots (1902). Likewise, the Ku Klux Klan’s very name echoes the romantic “clans” of Scott’s fiction. The concluding chapters of Ivanhoe, which focus on the rituals of the Templar Knights, are especially haunting for the American reader. A secretive order of Christian militant men, dressed in white, take a dark-complexioned woman as prisoner, then conduct an extra-legal show trial at which she is condemned to burn at the stake. Rebecca is, of course, a Jew, and is saved at the last, so Scott could not have known in writing Ivanhoe that he was producing the iconography—the hooded white garb, the Masonic rituals, the burning cross—for the vilest and most feared racist organization in modern America.

But the Klan were poor readers of Ivanhoe. The reason that the inevitable marriage that concludes Scott’s romance has often seemed less than satisfying to readers is that it takes place outside the erotic space of the novel. As the union of two Saxons, Ivanhoe’s marrying Rowena is anomalous to the novel’s deep investment in the mixture of races, cultures, and languages. Scott’s assertion that the marriage marked a “pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races” (p. 461) makes no sense, biologically or symbolically, since Ivanhoe and Rowena belong to the same race and are, in most respects, undifferentiated. Ironically, the greatest proponents of racial purity in the novel are not the Templar Knights or the Norman rulers but Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, who takes a eugenic approach to the cause of Saxon restoration. He enforces his ideological commitment to Saxon purity even at the expense of his own son, whom he doesn’t consider sufficiently well born for Rowena. That said, Cedric’s nationalism is as much about policing English sexuality as it is about race. He blames the decline of Saxon culture on the Circe-like enchantment of “Norman arts”: “We became enervated by Norman arts long ere we fell under Norman arms. Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror!” (p. 211). The Saxon way of life, Cedric argues, was not lost on the battlefield, but at the dinner table and in the dressing room, where Norman “luxury” imported its tantalizing customs and emasculated its fighting men. During the almost century-long sequence of wars against France that had just concluded when Scott wrote Ivanhoe, modern British masculinity was essentially constructed in opposition to perceived French “effeminacy.” His readers would thus have been well aware of “luxury” as a code-word for degraded French manhood, and taken delight in his sardonic descriptions of the “fripperies” of Norman dress.

Scott’s fascination with mixture extends to all aspects of the novel, including language. There is no better image of the “multiculturalism” of early Norman England, as conceived by Scott, than Ivanhoe and Richard’s horrified reaction to Athelstane’s animated appearance at his own funeral: “Ivanhoe crossed himself, repeating prayers in Saxon, Latin, or Norman-French, as they occurred to his memory, while Richard alternately said, Benedicte, and swore, Mort de ma vie!’ (p. 436). Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew are likewise spoken in the novel. The master language of Ivanhoe itself, modern English, is a product of this historical moment, a ”mixed language” in which the linguistic distinctions between Saxon and Norman have ”disappeared” along with the deep cultural antagonisms in the aftermath of the Conquest. That the many languages and cultures should be ”completely mingled” is the endpoint of Ivanhoe’s historical trajectory, and the book travels back to a time when this amalgamation was as yet unachieved. Its heroes therefore are those who intuit and obey the imperative to cross over from their ”home” culture to a new order. What Cedric sees in his son as an act of betrayal, the reader perceives as a necessary, if perhaps over-enthusiastic embrace of the new post-Conquest order. But if Ivanhoe embarks on the exemplary crossing of the novel, from Saxon to Norman, it is far from the most imaginative or interesting. That distinction belongs to the illicit, cross-cultural desires of Rebecca for Ivanhoe and, most spectacularly, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert’s reckless passion for Rebecca.

Bois-Guilbert’s emotional signature is vacillation—“a man agitated by strong and contending passions” (p. 403)—but he never gives up his desire for Rebecca, and literally dies of her rejection. We admire Rebecca for her choice of religion (and celibacy) over her love for Ivanhoe, but Bois-Guilbert thrills us with his readiness to take the Jewess at any odds, giving up fame, religion, honor, and everything that has heretofore constituted his heroic, chivalric identity. He talks to her of returning to Palestine, to install her as queen of some new, supra-national Masonic order. Rebecca calls it a “dream … an empty vision of the night” (p. 399), and she is probably right. But Bois-Guilbert is the only character capable of such imagining, and he is willing to make the most scandalous crossing of all, from Templar Christian Knight to Jew. In looking so far beyond the cultural boundaries of twelfth-century Europe, it is Bois-Guilbert who most belongs to Scott’s own global, post-enlightenment moment. “England—Europe—is not the world” (p. 398), he tells Rebecca. He calls conventional religion “nursery tales” and “bigotry” and instead makes a religion of himself and his own will, like a character in Byron or Dostoevsky. He is not a man of his age, and by the end his fellow knights cannot even look at him: “His general appearance was grand and commanding; but, looking at him with attention, men read that in his dark features, from which they willingly withdrew their eyes” (p. 447). Note Scott’s odd turn of phrase: not repulsion, but a “willing” withdrawal of the eyes. The knights refuse to “read” the futurity in Bois-Guilbert’s face, mistaking it for darkness. As with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, villainy is not incompatible with lyricism in Ivanhoe. Bois-Guilbert might despise religion, but it is to him that Scott gives the most poetic theological reflection in the novel, when he speaks to Rebecca of the transfigurations of the body at death, “dispersed to the elements of which our strange forms are so mystically composed—not a relic left of that graceful frame, from which we could say this lived and moved!” (p. 399). Rebecca’s stoic faith has grandeur, but not such depths as Bois-Guilbert’s despair. The fact that he dies not from Ivanhoe’s lance but his own “contending passions” is a fantastic, even surreal moment in the text that has embarrassed and perplexed Scott’s readers, but in fact manifests beautifully the historical impossibility of the Templar Knight’s continuing presence in the book. It would do as well for him to have disappeared in a puff of smoke, and awakened on the streets of St. Petersburg in 1895, or Paris in 1968.

As an object of desire in the novel who chooses exile over those who might love her, Rebecca resembles no one in the novel more strikingly than King Richard, who is likewise the object of Ivanhoe’s (and England’s) frustrated love. Richard tantalizingly comes within the precincts of his kingdom, but remotely, in disguise. And when he reveals himself, it is only a temporary emergence from his preferred elusive career as a knight errant. Although the novel ends at a moment of promise for Richard’s reign, Scott has already informed us that he will fail as king, and die on some foolish military adventure in Belgium. Rebecca might belong to an ostracized community, and Richard be merely “brilliant, but useless” (p. 424), but in terms of the generative energies of the novel itself, they are equals. Their remoteness, their unavailability, governs it all. Only Richard’s neglect has allowed the political ambitions of his brother John, and the resistant romantic nationalism of the Saxon Cedric, to flourish. Only Richard’s failure in Palestine has brought Ivanhoe home at all. And it is Rebecca who produces the final showdown between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, the former ready to desert Rowena even at the very moment of their betrothal. In riding, half-dead, to Templestowe to rescue Rebecca, Ivanhoe shows us that the impediments to his union with Rowena have never been important. It is the impossible union with Rebecca that drives him, and with it the real action of the novel.

But Rebecca, like Richard, is a love object who will not be loved, an exile who will soon return to exile. Thus the central love objects of the novel are never properly integrated into the national community, leaving the prospects for the emergent Anglo-Norman civilization meager and almost uninteresting. Without Christian chivalry and its magnificent opposite, Jewish martyrdom, Scott’s England is left in a muddle, and it is no wonder that he does not extend the novel to describe its bleak return to what Rebecca calls “a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions” (p. 462). This is the pessimistic counterpoint to the progressive theme of cultural mixture in the novel, and one that seems particularly relevant to the time of Scott’s writing, when Britain’s devastating war against Napoleon had only just concluded, and citizens protesting for political reform lay dead in the town squares of the north at the hands of their countrymen.

Unlike the magnanimous Rebecca, however, Rowena’s more dangerous rival never quits the scene. Ivanhoe’s true love object is chivalry itself, his knightly career, of which Richard is merely the earthly embodiment. Rebecca recognizes the unhealthy grip of chivalric ideology on Ivanhoe’s imagination and, in terms that seem uncannily to anticipate Mark Twain, does her best to disabuse him: “Is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?” (p. 293). As Cervantes makes plain in his grand satire of chivalry, Don Quixote (1605), knight-errantry was always more a literary phenomenon than an historical one, and Rebecca perceives that Ivanhoe’s self-image is essentially poetic, not a thing of the world. In mockingly pointing this out, Rebecca casts an ironic light on the generic complexities of Scott’s own project, where history lays perpetual siege to the glitter of romance, in fact to literature itself. Scott’s novel might have spawned a global fad for jousting and knights-errant, but his historical critique of chivalry is sincere.

In his essay “Chivalry,” written just prior to Ivanhoe for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott shows that he has far fewer illusions about the romance of chivalry than generations of his readers. Because “every institution becomes deteriorated and degraded” by our animal passions, he argues, the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages stood little chance of fulfilling their lofty union of chastity and righteous militarism: “the devotion of the knights often degenerated into superstition,—their love into licentious-ness, —their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil, —their generosity and gallantry into harebrained madness and absurdity” (Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 6, p. 166). Chivalry, in Ivanhoe, is a form of male self-love that draws its avatars into aggressively homo-social communities such as the Templar Knights or, in the individual case of Ivanhoe, renders him unable properly to love his family, his home, or (we can guess) his wife, preferring instead the wandering life with his fellow narcissist knights. As Wamba the jester is fond of saying, knightly valour is ever the companion of the fool. Even Ivanhoe’s fascination with Rebecca can be read as an extension of self-defeating chivalric desire, of his inability to settle down. The Crusades introduced the exotic, dark-complexioned heroine to the West, and the homeward-returning knights of Ivanhoe have still not left Palestine as a dreamland of desire. According to the orientalist logic of the chivalric romance, Rowena cannot but seem disappointing to Ivanhoe after the seductions of the East, hence the perfunctoriness of his pursuit of her. Rowena might be the blond queen of Ashby, but Rebecca, for both Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, is Jerusalem itself: the irresistible but unreachable goal of the chivalric quest for whom they end up fighting each other rather than the Saracens. It would be wrong to simply equate Ivanhoe with Bois-Guilbert, however. While Ivanhoe’s desperate ride to Templestowe reinforces his militant Christian identity, Bois-Guilbert effectively renounces his knighthood on the field there. He has attempted to break out of chivalric self-love through his passion for Rebecca, and her refusing him that exit forces a kind of libidinal implosion: “yonder girl hath wellnigh unmanned me” (pp. 401-402). To this extent then, it is Bois-Guilbert, not the hometown boy Wilfred, who most represents the condition of England, which, like a spurned suitor, is suffering under a king who does not return the violent love of his people.

King Richard’s reign is more than the setting of Ivanhoe. It is, in important respects, its subject. The early nineteenth century—with its museums and new academic formations—effectively invented History, and Scott was the first writer successfully to commercialize the new nostalgia. The great majority of his nearly thirty novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, are excursions into the Scottish, English, and European past, and his enormous popularity established the historical novel as a literary genre. For the reader, this places a special importance on understanding at least the basic lineaments of the period setting. The action of the novel takes place in the summer of 1194, with King Richard still a prisoner of Leopold, duke of Austria, his erstwhile ally on the failed Third Crusade. More than a century has passed since the Norman Conquest of Britain was secured at the Battle of Hastings, and the Saxons—in Scott’s time the great colonizers of the world—find themselves a colonial outpost of the Franco-Roman commonwealth of Europe. The thirty-year reign of the great Plantagenet king Henry II had brought stability and the rudiments of rule of law to the unconsolidated British Isles, but as a Frenchman, and the ruler of considerable domains in France and elsewhere, Henry spent less than a third of his reign in England. His son Richard, called Lion-Heart, is even less attached to his island dominion. The historical Richard spoke only French and spent but a few months of his ten-year reign on English soil. He joined the Third Crusade to Jerusalem almost immediately after his accession to the crown in 1189, and was ultimately killed a decade later in Belgium, fighting one of innumerable internecine skirmishes among the Plantagenet rulers of western Europe. His last thoughts were not of England, his neglected kingdom, but of the archer who had inadvertently killed him and whom he wished to pardon. This in a nutshell is Richard, for whom the rites of chivalry meant so much more than the duties of kingship. Even his death is a personal affair between warriors, not a matter of state. It is almost fitting that the unfortunate archer was flayed alive, to show how little the fantasies of chivalric beneficence extended into twelfth-century reality. Scott, of course, rehabilitates Richard to a great extent. He bestows on him at least the desire to be a better king, but this is no less a romantic fiction of Ivanhoe than his carousing with Friar Tuck or speaking fluent Saxon.

Richard’s prolonged absence from England in the 1190s created a vacuum of power and a return to the political instability of a half century before, when the first family of Norman kings had exhausted themselves fighting a two-front war against the local population and ambitious French barons. In Ivanhoe, the ambitious rival is Richard’s own brother, John, and the embers of Saxon resistance flare once more in the shape of Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, the arch-nostalgist who dreams of a return to Pre-Norman days and the renewal, through the union of his noble cousin Athelstane with Rowena, of the ancient line of King Alfred. But if Cedric thinks in terms of ancient blood, he lives in a modern world of money. The Norman barons—those for whom the Crusades were a folly—have shown, in the absence of the King, an insatiable appetite for taxes and the extra-legal appropriation of Saxon land. Their self-aggrandizement is further funded, in turn, by the Jewish moneylenders, represented in Scott’s novel by Rebecca’s father, Isaac. Almost everyone in the novel, from Ivanhoe to Robin Hood to Prince John himself, is indebted to Isaac, whose tense and ambivalent relationship with his clients is modeled on Shakespeare’s Shylock. Like Shylock, Isaac’s representation as a gross anti-Semitic stereotype is mitigated by Scott’s evident sympathy for his suffering at the hands of Christians and, more importantly, his deep love for his daughter. It is striking that the Jews of the novel fund both the hero’s appearance at the Ashby tournament (as well as John’s production of the event itself) and heal his wounds after it. Ivanhoe’s career, we must infer, is not self-sustaining, and the chivalric ethos of beneficence and charity no substitute for responsible government. England’s condition, as a leaderless state without standard currency or centralized system of credit, is, as Scott puts it, “sufficiently miserable” (p. 84). While the knights defend their honor and prose on about the purity of their souls, it is the Jews who hold the world of Ivanhoe together. We fear for England at the novel’s conclusion when Rebecca announces that she and her father are to leave the country. By sending Isaac and Rebecca away to Moorish Spain, Scott presages the disastrous expulsion of the Jews from England a century later.

Such is the broad historical backdrop to the novel. But the subtitle of Ivanhoe describes it as a “romance” not a “history,” and Scott certainly plays fast and loose with historical detail. The most striking image of the opening chapter, Gurth’s iron collar declaring him to be a serf of Cedric’s, is simply made up, and the novel’s most famous scene, the tournament at Ashby, has no historical foundation earlier than the fourteenth century. In his fascinated description of clothing, heraldry, and domestic interiors, Scott felt little qualm in borrowing from sources spanning a century or more, and this is to say nothing of his description of startled characters as “electrified,” perhaps the most notorious anachronism in English fiction. Indeed, for all its rich weave of Saxon and Norman vocabulary, the language spoken by the characters is entirely bogus, a pseudo-medieval patois Scott patched together from the Elizabethan canon of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. The stagy feel of the novel is due in large part to the characters’ tendency to declaim and sermonize as if before a large audience.

Critics have long taken Scott to task for this form of novelistic license, but from the very beginning of his text Scott assumes an ironic relation to historical writing. When Ivanhoe first appeared in 1819, Scott had not yet acknowledged authorship of any of his novels. To the titillated press, he was the “Great Unknown”: Scott’s attachment to his barely credible anonymity (almost everyone saw through it) is difficult to understand beyond his abiding passion, shared by so many of his characters, for feint and disguise. An instance of this appears in the form of the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe, in which Scott, writing under the name “Laurence Templeton,” defends himself in advance against the petty corrections of the “dry as dust” historians, and even provides a fictional source for his tale, an Anglo-Norman manuscript belonging to Sir Arthur Wardour, himself a character in one of Scott’s earlier novels. As far as literal historical truth in the novel is concerned, we should take Scott’s prefatory follies to heart, and take an expansive, “romantic” view.

But this is not to say we should not take the historical lessons of Ivanhoe seriously. Scott’s most acute critic, György Lukács, extends the argument of Scott’s preface to challenge all those readings of the novel that equate its historical pastiche with shallow theatricality or, in the common phrase of contempt invented for Scott, mere “tushery.” “Scott’s greatness,” declares Lukács in his seminal work The Historical Novel, “lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types… [his] way of presenting the totality of certain transitional stages of history” (p. 35). Scott’s choice of historical subject is never accidental, far less ornamental. Heroes such as Ivanhoe or Edward Waverley might think of themselves romantically, but they are not themselves romanticized. Both are examples, says Lukács, of Scott’s distinctly modern “middling” heroes, whose imaginations far outstrip their real achievements. After his flirtation with the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Waverley retreats to his safe English estate and the bland anonymity of an English gentleman. Ivanhoe likewise has his day of glory at Ashby, only to recede thereafter into pale ineffectuality. His behavior during the battle for Torquilstone—where, from his sickbed, he encourages Rebecca’s lurid commentary on the fighting—is particularly pathetic, like a rabid sports fan shouting at the television. Then, when his spirit finally revives for the showdown with Bois-Guilbert at Templestowe, Scott denies his hero the crowning chivalric deed he so desperately desires. Ivanhoe does not so much as scratch his Templar foe: Bois-Guilbert merely self-destructs.

For Lukács, Ivanhoe’s chivalric failures should not be confused with a literary failure by the novelist. Scott’s cool description of King Richard as “brilliant, but useless” could apply equally to Ivanhoe, and typifies the realism of his treatment of individual characters. It is this ironic detachment that appears “modern” to us when reading Ivanhoe. Scott reserves his romantic nostalgia not for people but for periods, for “the ruination of past social formations” (p. 55). In other words, Scott de-emphasizes his hero in Ivanhoe in order to bring into clearer focus his true subject: the transformation of medieval Saxon society as expressed in popular life, through its living participants. Scott’s famous detail-work-the clothes, the food, the scenery—is thus more than simply “color,” more than a mere screen of dubious authenticity: It is the raw material of a fully realized historical scene through which his thinking, feeling characters move, and though they rarely appear to us as real in the modern, psychologically detailed sense (Bois-Guilbert is the notable exception), they fulfill Scott’s purpose as vivid social beings, as genuine spirits of the age.

The novel opens amidst the ruins of one social formation, Saxon feudalism, and observes the embattled progress of its Anglo-Norman successor. Neither Cedric, with his fixation on Athelstane and Saxon restoration, nor the rapacious French barons and their scheming leader, Prince John, come off well. Front de-Boeuf, the blackest Norman villain, is both a serial rapist and a parricide, and the death-chant of his aged Saxon concubine, Urfried, is the most graphic indictment of Norman brutality in the novel (as well as its most unreadable scene: Scott’s melodramatic staging of the fall of Torquilstone has not aged well). With both the established Saxon and Norman orders subject to stringent critique, Scott reserves his considerable romantic sympathies for a third, marginal group, who live literally in the shadow of the greater Saxon-Norman struggle, in the arboreal gloom of Sherwood. Scott never fails to describe Sherwood—the quintessential English redoubt, the fabled greenwood of Shakespeare—with real poetry. It is a place, both symbolic and real, over which neither Saxon lord nor French knight can claim dominion: “The travellers had now reached the verge of the wooded country, and were about to plunge into its recesses, held dangerous at that time from the number of outlaws whom oppression and poverty had driven to despair, and who occupied the forests in such large bands as could easily bid defiance to the feeble police of the period” (p. 191). The chief outlaw is, of course, Robin Hood. Borrowed from folk legend, the merry men of Sherwood serve multiple trans-historical functions. Their stable self-government is designed to express a primordial English form of natural justice, while their undemonstrative decency and industry look forward to the bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century. Robin’s Sherwood is a primeval world, a fantasy of yeoman England that is the most romantic and least historical aspect of the novel. But in its idealization of Robin of Locksley, Ivanhoe adheres to, and in fact did much to sustain, the grand historical narrative of English liberalism, which traces its roots from the Magna Carta of 1215, to the creation of a uniquely British “mixed monarchy” in the bloodless revolution of 1688, to the Reform Bill of 1832. Robin Hood, so the story runs, is the reason England never needed a French Revolution. The outlaws of the greenwood will prevail over the course of the centuries, subtly subduing the hot blood of French tyranny and breeding the soul of English liberty in its stead. As such, the merry men’s disciplined performance during the attack on Torquilstone Castle speaks more to England’s recent triumph over the French on the field of Waterloo than to any realistic evocation of the rude Saxon-Norman struggles of the Middle Ages. The band of outlaws comports itself like a modern professional army. As Front-de-Boeuf tells his skeptical fellow Norman, Maurice de Bracy, when he shows contempt for the force advancing on Torquilstone, “Were they black Turks or Moors, Sir Templar… but these are English yeomen, over whom we shall have no advantage” (p. 243). Once Norman fanaticism has exhausted itself, Scott implies, it is these steady outlaws who will inherit England as its sensible and fair-minded middle class, and provide its sons as soldiers for her defense.

Robin, like his chivalric counterparts, has a penchant for disguise: he is a “nameless man” who employs a quiverful of pseudonyms—Locksley, Bend-the-Bow—when venturing into the treacherous post-Conquest world of castles and tournaments. Under the canopy of Sherwood, however, he assumes the open and natural disposition of a benevolent king. His court is the great oak tree, overhanging his “throne of turf” (p. 317). Many versions of the legend represent Robin Hood as a dispossessed Saxon lord, not unlike Ivanhoe. But Scott deliberately reduces his rank to yeoman and idealizes the Sherwood gang as a community of equals over which Robin rules by consensus, not fiat. The nineteenth-century Ivanhoe spin-offs, on page and stage, mostly surrounded Rebecca. But she, along with Ivanhoe and even Richard the Lion-Heart, have virtually vanished from popular consciousness, leaving Robin Hood the most enduring character of Scott’s ensemble. If, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Ivanhoe represented to dispossessed southern planters an ideal of themselves that would never be historically realized, then Robin Hood, the depredations of Hollywood notwithstanding, remains for us a figure of muscular egalitarian democracy (robs from the rich; gives to the poor), which, combined with the environmentally friendly occupation of the greenwood by his merry men, stands as a model of human community the citizen of the twenty-first century can hope to find only on a movie screen, or in the pages of Ivanhoe.

But why does Robin Hood render up his liberty so readily to a Norman king, especially one who has done so little to deserve his loyalty? The answer brings us back to Scott’s theme of necessary mixture, but with a more conservative political inflection. It is a revealing irony that, as Scott was writing Ivanhoe, the political consensus surrounding English liberty that he evoked in the glades of twelfth-century Sherwood was under as great a threat as at any time in its history. The influx of returning soldiers to Britain in the aftermath of Waterloo, combined with years of bad harvests and crushing national debts, had brought the country to the brink. The summer of 1819 saw violent clashes between government militias and the growing urban working class concentrated in the north. Particularly notorious was the so-called Peterloo Massacre in August, in which a dozen unarmed protesters were slaughtered at the hands of the national guard. Scott interrupted his writing of the third volume to contribute a long editorial in defense of the government, and it is his often rabid conservatism in this period—as the self-appointed “laird” of his grand estate at Abbotsford—that explains his rehabilitation of King Richard in Ivanhoe, and why he places such emphasis on the automatic obeisance of Robin Hood and his men to the King. Robin’s homage to Richard drives a wedge between him and Cedric, as it does between Cedric and Ivanhoe, but Scott’s romantic inflation of the Sherwood scenes leaves no doubt as to his sympathies and the overall purpose of the novel.

In short, the key historical imperative under which Scott wrote Ivanhoe was national unity, and he imposes that unity in the novel, where all factions are brought together under the awesome figure of the king. By re-inventing Richard so regardless of the historical facts, Scott shows that his mind was as much on the standing of his own king as the reputation of the Lion-Heart. Scott had always viewed himself as descended from the lost tradition of minstrel courtiers, and it is not too much to say, in the words of his most recent biographer, that the entire “plot of Ivanhoe can be construed as an elegant compliment to the [Prince] Regent” (Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 228). Scott’s novel of King Richard’s reign was published on the eve of the first British coronation in sixty years. Mad King George III, as mentally absent from his kingdom as Richard had been in person, had finally died, and his son, heretofore Regent, belatedly assumed the throne. The new George was widely loathed for his vanity and extravagance, but Scott idolized him, and the scene in the greenwood where the homely English yeomen bend a knee to their fickle but glamorous monarch must have touched the dandy Regent’s heart. Ivanhoe, where monarchs are flawed but monarchy is the only salvation, became the new George IV’s favorite novel, and Britain’s as well. The King’s reward was fitting for one who had risen in his defense at a time of crisis. He awarded the famous novelist the first baronetcy of his reign. Thus it was that Scott, who had done so much to rescue the knights of yore from oblivion, himself became Sir Walter, a knight of the modern world, wielding a patriotic pen in place of a lance.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Australia, and came to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1992. He took his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000, and is now Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of an historical novel, Hosack’s Folly (Other Press, 2005), and a cultural history of Romantic literature and art, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (Pal-grave, 2001), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century British literature and culture.