Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Walter Scott

  “You leave England, then?” said Rowena, scarce recovering the surprise of this extraordinary visit.

  “I leave it, lady, ere this moon again changes. My father hath a brother high in favour with Mohammed Boabdil, King of Grenada: thither we go, secure of peace and protection, for the payment of such ransom as the Moslem exact from our people.”

  “And are you not then as well protected in England?” said Rowena. “My husband has favour with the King; the King himself is just and generous.”

  “Lady,” said Rebecca, “I doubt it not; but the people of England are a fierce race, quarrelling ever with their neighbours or among themselves, and ready to plunge the sword into the bowels of each other. Such is no safe abode for the children of my people. Ephraim is an heartless dove; Issachar an overlaboured drudge, which stoops between two burdens. Not in a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions, can Israel hope to rest during her wanderings.”

  “But you, maiden,” said Rowena—“you surely can have nothing to fear. She who nursed the sick-bed of Ivanhoe,” she continued, rising with enthusiasm—“she can have nothing to fear in England, where Saxon and Norman will contend who shall most do her honour.”

  “Thy speech is fair, lady,” said Rebecca, “and thy purpose fairer; but it may not be—there is a gulf betwixt us. Our breeding, our faith, alike forbid either to pass over it. Farewell; yet, ere I go, indulge me one request. The bridal veil hangs over thy face; deign to raise it, and let me see the features of which fame speaks so highly.”

  “They are scarce worthy of being looked upon,” said Rowena; “but, expecting the same from my visitant, I remove the veil.”

  She took it off accordingly; and, partly from the consciousness of beauty, partly from bashfulness, she blushed so intensely that cheek, brow, neck, and bosom were suffused with crimson. Rebecca blushed also; but it was a momentary feeling, and, mastered by higher emotions, past slowly from her features like the crimson cloud which changes colour when the sun sinks beneath the horizon.

  “Lady,” she said, “the countenance you have deigned to show me will long dwell in my remembrance. There reigns in it gentleness and goodness; and if a tinge of the world’s pride or vanities may mix with an expression so lovely, how should we chide that which is of earth for bearing some colour of its original? Long, long will I remember your features, and bless God that I leave my noble deliverer united with—”

  She stopped short—her eyes filled with tears. She hastily wiped them, and answered to the anxious inquiries of Rowena—“I am well, lady—well. But my heart swells when I think of Torquilstone and the lists of Templestowe. Farewell. One, the most trifling, part of my duty remains undischarged. Accept this casket; startle not at its contents.”

  Rowena opened the small silver-chased casket, and perceived a carcanet, or necklace, with ear jewels, of diamonds, which were obviously of immense value.

  “It is impossible,” she said, tendering back the casket. “I dare not accept a gift of such consequence.”

  “Yet keep it, lady,” returned Rebecca. “You have power, rank, command, influence; we have wealth, the source both of our strength and weakness; the value of these toys, ten times multiplied, would not influence half so much as your slightest wish. To you, therefore, the gift is of little value; and to me, what I part with is of much less. Let me not think you deem so wretchedly ill of my nation as your commons believe. Think ye that I prize these sparkling fragments of stone above my liberty? or that my father values them in comparison to the honour of his only child? Accept them, lady—to me they are valueless. I will never wear jewels more.”

  “You are then unhappy!” said Rowena, struck with the manner in which Rebecca uttered the last words. “O, remain with us; the counsel of holy men will wean you from your erring law, and I will be a sister to you.”

  “No, lady,” answered Rebecca, the same calm melancholy reigning in her soft voice and beautiful features; “that may not be. I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell; and unhappy, lady, I will not be. He to whom I dedicate my future life will be my comforter, if I do His will.”

  “Have you then convents, to one of which you mean to retire?” asked Rowena.

  “No lady,” said the Jewess; “but among our people, since the time of Abraham downwards, have been women who have devoted their thoughts to Heaven, and their actions to works of kindness to men—tending the sick, feeding the hungry, and relieving the distressed. Among these will Rebecca be numbered. Say this to thy lord, should he chance to inquire after the fate of her whose life he saved.”

  There was an involuntary tremour on Rebecca’s voice, and a tenderness of accent, which perhaps betrayed more than she would willingly have expressed. She hastened to bid Rowena adieu.

  “Farewell,” she said. “May He who made both Jew and Christian shower down on you His choicest blessings! The bark that wafts us hence will be under weigh ere we can reach the port.”

  She glided from the apartment, leaving Rowena surprised as if a vision had passed before her. The fair Saxon related the singular conference to her husband, on whose mind it made a deep impression. He lived long and happily with Rowena, for they were attached to each other by the bonds of early affection, and they loved each other the more from the recollection of the obstacles which had impeded their union. Yet it would be inquiring too curiously to ask 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.

  Ivanhoe distinguished himself in the service of Richard, and was graced with farther marks of the royal favour. He might have risen still higher but for the premature death of the heroic Cœur-de-Lion, before the Castle of Chaluz, near Limoges. With the life of a generous, but rash and romantic, monarch perished all the projects which his ambition and his generosity had formed; to whom may be applied, with a slight alteration, the lines composed by Johnson for Charles of Sweden—

  His fate was destined to a foreign strand,

  A petty fortress and an ‘humble’ hand;

  He left the name at which the world grew pale,

  To point a moral, or adorn a TALE.4

  Endnotes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 (p. 3) Parnell’s Tale: The poetry that follows is from Thomas Parnell’s “A Fairy Tale, in the Ancient English Style” (1729; lines 97-99), slightly altered.

  2 (p. 4) Men bless their stars and call it luxury: The line, slightly altered, is from Thomas Addison’s Cato (1713; 1.4.70).

  3 (p. 5) “wonder that they please no more”: From Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749; line 263).

  4 (p. 5) Logan’s tragedy of Runnamede: John Logan (1748-1788) was forced to give up his ministry in the Church of Scotland because of his success as a playwright. Runnamede, which concerns the events surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, was first staged in 1783.

  5 (p. 6) trick upon trick: Scott misquotes from Maria Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life (1802; 3.95).

  6 (p. 7) Il Bondocani: Stories of II Bondocani, a robber chief featured in The Arabian Nights, were known in Europe in various forms beginning in the late Middle Ages.

  7 (p. 11) Tring, Wing, and Ivanhoe ... And glad he could escape so: The historical circumstance of the rhyme is disputed, as these villages (with their manors) never belonged to the Hampden family. What is certain is that they are located in Buckinghamshire, far away from the action of the novel.

  8 (p. 12) the freedom of the rules: Scott’s first profession was the law, and this refers to the right Scottish lawyers enjoyed to appear in English courts.

  DEDICATORY EPISTLE

  1 (p. 13) Rev. Dr. Dryasdust, F.A.S.: A fictitious character of Scott’s invention who first appears in his 1816 novel The Antiquary, Dryasdust is also the addressee for the “Introductory Epistle” to The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) and is t
he “author” of frame matter in two other Scott novels. His name has become proverbial, signifying the pedantic, fact-laden practice of history.

  2 (p. 14) a second M’Pherson: James Macpherson (1736-1796) was responsible for the greatest literary hoax of the eighteenth century. His translations (1760-1763) of “Ossian,” an ancient Scottish bard who was greeted as the Celtic Homer, were fakes, written by himself.

  3 (p. 14) Mohawks and Iroquois: The Iroquois, of which the Mohawks are one tribe, fought with the English against the French in the seventeenth century, and against the Americans in the War of Independence. In Scott’s time, an analogy between Native American tribes and the Highland clans of Scotland was commonly drawn.

  4 (p. 15) the Bruces and Wallaces of Caledonia: Robert (the) Bruce (1274-1329) was crowned king of Scotland in 1306; he defeated the English in a famous battle at Bannockburn in 1314. Sir William Wallace (1270-1305) was another storied champion of Scottish independence, captured and executed by the English in 1305.

  5 (p. 15) Erictho ... in corpore quærit: Erictho, the witch consulted by Roman general Pompey in Lucan’s Pharsalia (first century A.D.), resurrects a corpse from the battlefield: “Prying into the inmost parts cold in death, till she finds the substance of the stiffened lungs unwounded and still firm, and seeking the power of utterance in a corpse” (6.629-231), translated by J. D. Duff (London, 1928), p. 351. The “Scottish magician” to whom Erictho is likened is Scott himself.

  6 (p. 16) valley ofJehoshaphat: Scott seems here to confuse two biblical references: the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, and the valley of Jehoshaphat, referred to in Joel 3:12.

  7 (p. 17) Dr. Henry ... Mr. Strutt... Mr. Sharon Turner: Robert Henry, Joseph Strutt, and Sharon Turner were late-eighteenth-century historians whose work was vital to Scott’s reconstruction of the Middle Ages in Ivanhoe.

  8 (p. 17) goblin tale: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) is considered the first modern Gothic novel in English, inaugurating a genre whose popular appeal is undiminished today.

  9 (p. 19) “well of English undefiled”: The quoted phrase is from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596; 4.2.32). Spencer is referring to Chaucer’s English, not his own.

  10 (p. 19) the unfortunate Chatterton: Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was the so-called “marvelous boy” whose forgeries of fifteenth-century poems were uncovered by Horace Walpole—which prompted his early suicide. Chatterton afterward became an icon of the Romantic movement.

  11 (p. 19) “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions ... same winter and summer”: These passages are near-quotations from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (act 3, scene 1).

  12 (p. 21) Ingulphus ... Geoffrey de Vinsauf: Ingulphus’s twelfth-century “History of Croyland” (not Croyden) is now thought to be a forgery. Similarly, Geoffrey de Vinsauff, a poet supposed to have accompanied Richard I on the Third Crusade, is no longer thought to be the author of the account of Richard alluded to here by Scott. He inherited the mistakes from Robert Henry’s The History of Great Britain (1771-1785).

  13 (p. 21) the gallant Froissart: Fourteenth-century French poet and historian Jean Froissart provided romantic accounts of the age of chivalry in his Chronicles of England, France, and Spain. That work, which Scott read in the 1523-1535 translation by Lord Berners, had great influence on the writing of Ivanhoe.

  14 (p. 22) Sir Arthur Wardour: Wardour is a Tory antiquarian in Scott’s The Antiquary (1816). The manuscript referred to is thus also fictitious.

  15 (p. 22) the Bannatyne MS., the Auchinleck MS.: Scott refers to poetic manuscripts dating from the sixteenth and fourteenth centuries, respectively. The Auchinleck manuscript contains a fragment of the anonymous romance Richard Coeur de Lion, an important source for Ivanhoe.

  16 (p. 22) Robin of Redesdale: This is the popular name given to the prehistoric image of a hunter carved into stone in a Northumberland field. In the late eighteenth century, the landowner was so annoyed by trespassing tourists that he blew up the stone.

  17 (pp. 22-23) Gath ... Arthur’s Oven: With “Tell this not in Gath,” Scott quotes the Bible, 2 Samuel 1:20, where. David orders that news of Saul’s death not be broadcast among the Philistines; the phrase is used colloquially to mean keeping something secret. Arthur’s Oven was an ancient dome-shaped building thought to mark the northern edge of the Roman occupation of Britain. It was destroyed by the local landowner in 1743 and its stones used to repair a dam. The reference to King Arthur is to the site of his last battle, in nearby Camelon (Camlann).

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 27) epigraph: The lines are from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey (1725; 14.453-456), slightly altered. The passage refers to the return of Odysseus, which is implicitly compared to Ivanhoe’s return from the Holy Land.

  2 (p. 33) “A devil draw . . . confound the ranger of the forest”: [Author’s note] The Ranger of the Forest. A most sensible grievance of those aggrieved times were the Forest Laws. These oppressive enactments were the produce of the Norman Conquest, for the Saxon laws of the chase were mild and humane; while those of William, enthusiastically attached to the exercise and its rights, were to the last degree tyrannical. The formation of the New Forest bears evidence to his passion for hunting, where he reduced many a happy village to the condition of that one commemorated by my friend, Mr. William Stewart Rose—Amongst the ruins of the church

  The midnight raven found a perch,

  A melancholy place;

  The ruthless Conqueror cast down,

  Woe worth the deed, that little town,

  To lengthen out his chase.

  The disabling dogs, which might be necessary for keeping flocks and herds from running at the deer, was called lawing, and was in general use. The Charter of the Forest, designed to lessen those evils, declares that inquisition, or view, for lawing dogs shall be made every third year, and shall be then done by the view and testimony of lawful men, not otherwise; and they whose dogs shall be then found unlawed shall give three shillings for mercy; and for the future no man’s ox shall be taken for lawing. Such lawing also shall be done by the assize commonly used, and which is, that three claws shall be cut off without the ball of the right foot. See on this subject the Historical Essay on the Magna Charta of King John (a most beautiful volume), by Richard Thomson.

  3 (p. 35) King Oberon: Oberon is the fairy king in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Wamba is certainly referring to a text more contemporary (although still anachronistic) to the setting of Ivanhoe, namely Huon of Bordeaux, a thirteenth-century romance.

  CHAPTER II

  1 (p. 35) epigraph: The lines are from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the “General Prologue,” I:165-172.

  2 (pp. 38-39) natives of some distant Eastern country: [Author’s note] Negro Slaves. The severe accuracy of some critics has objected to the complexion of the slaves of Brian de Bois-Guilbert, as being totally out of costume and propriety. I remember the same objection being made to a set of sable functionaries whom my friend, Mat Lewis, introduced as the guards and mischief-doing satellites of the wicked Baron in his Castle Spectre. Mat treated the objection with great contempt, and averred in reply, that he made the slaves black in order to obtain a striking effect of contrast, and that, could he have derived a similar advantage from making his heroine blue, blue she should have been.I do not pretend to plead the immunities of my order so highly as this; but neither will I allow that the author of a modern antique romance is obliged to confine himself to the introduction of those manners only which can be proved to have absolutely existed in the times he is depicting, so that he restrain himself to such as are plausible and natural, and contain no obvious anachronism. In this point of view, what can be more natural than that the Templars, who, we know, copied closely the luxuries of the Asiatic warriors with whom they fought, should use the service of the enslaved Africans whom the fate of war transferred to new masters? I am sure, if there are no precise proofs of their having done so, there is nothing, on the other hand, t
hat can entitle us positively to conclude that they never did. Besides, there is an instance in romance.

  John of Rampayne, an excellent juggler and minstrel, undertook to effect the escape of one Audulf de Bracy, by presenting himself in disguise at the court of the king, where he was confined. For this purpose, he stained “his hair and his whole body entirely as black as jet, so that nothing was white but his teeth,” and succeeded in imposing himself on the king as an Ethiopian minstrel. He effected, by stratagem, the escape of the prisoner. Negroes, therefore, must have been known in England in the dark ages.gw

  3 (p. 40) covereth a multitude of sins: See the Bible, 1 Peter 4:8.

  4 (p. 43) Knights Templars: The order, founded in 1118 during the Crusades, takes its name from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where the knights were headquartered. Their initial mission was to protect Christian pilgrims on their journeys to the Holy Land, but with the blessing of the pope, the order quickly spread throughout western Europe, gaining enormous wealth and political influence.

  5 (p. 44) Hereward... Heptarchy: The Anglo-Saxon hero Hereward’s resistance to William the Conqueror significantly postdates the demise of the Heptarchy, the name given to the seven original Anglo-Saxon kingdoms before the Danish invasions beginning in the seventh century.

  6 (p. 45) houris of old Mahound’s paradise: “Mahound” is a derogatory variation on “Muhammad”; the Prior is referring to a commonly held Western belief that the Koran promises virgins in paradise to the “blessed” who die in the name of Islam.

  CHAPTER III

  1 (p. 48) epigraph: The lines are from James Thomson’s long poem Liberty (1735-1736; 4.668-670).

  2 (p. 52) “I might even have made him one of my warders”: [Author’s note] Cnichts. The original has cnichts, by which the Saxons seem to have designated a class of military attendants, sometimes free, sometimes bondsmen, but always ranking above an ordinary domestic, whether in the royal household or in those of the aldermen and thanes. But the term cnicht, now spelt knight, having been received into the English language as equivalent to the Norman word chevalier, I have avoided using it in its more ancient sense, to prevent confusion.—L. T.