by Walter Scott
It would be highly desirable that a cork model should be taken of the Castle of Mousa, as it cannot be well understood by a plan.
The Castle of Coningsburgh is thus described:—
“The castle is large, the outer walls standing on a pleasant ascent from the river, but much overtopt by an high hill, on which the town stands, situate at the head of a rich and magnificent vale, formed by an amphitheatre of woody hills, in which flows the gentle Don. Near the castle is a barrow, said to be Hengist’s tomb. The entrance is flanked to the left by a round tower, with a sloping base, and there are several similar in the outer wall; the entrance has piers of a gate, and on the east side the ditch and bank is double and very steep. On the top of the churchyard wall is a tombstone, on which are cut in high relief two ravens, or such-like birds. On the south side of the churchyard lies an ancient stone, ridged like a coffin, on which is carved a man on horseback; and another man with a shield encountering a vast winged serpent, a man bearing a shield behind him. It was probably one of the rude crosses not uncommon in churchyards in this county. See it engraved on the plate of crosses for this volume, plate xiv. fig. 1. The name of Conninesburgh, by which this castle goes in the old editions of the Britannia, would lead one to suppose it the residence of the Saxon kings. It afterwards belonged to King Harold. The Conqueror bestowed it on William de Warren, with all its privileges and jurisdiction, which are said to have been over twenty-eight towns. At the corner of the area, which is of an irregular form, stands the great tower, or keep, placed on a small hill of its own dimensions, on which lie six vast projecting buttresses, ascending in a steep direction to prop and support the building, and continued upwards up the sides as turrets. The tower within forms a complete circle, twenty-one feet in diameter, the walls fourteen feet thick. The ascent into the tower is by an exceeding deep flight of steep steps, four feet and a half wide, on the south side leading to a low doorway, over which is a circular arch crossed by a great transom stone. Within this door is the staircase which ascends strait through the thickness of the wall, not communicating with the room on the first floor, in whose centre is the opening to the dungeon. Neither of these lower rooms is lighted except from a hole in the floor of the third story; the room in which, as well as in that above it, is finished with compact smooth stonework, both having chimney-pieces, with an arch resting on triple clustered pillars. In the third story, or guard-chamber, is a small recess with a loophole, probably a bed chamber, and in that floor above a niche for a saint or holy-water pot. Mr. King imagines this a Saxon castle of the first ages of the Heptarchy. Mr. Watson thus describes it. From the first floor to the second story (third from the ground) is a way by a stair in the wall five feet wide. The next staircase is approached by a ladder, and ends at the fourth story from the ground. Two yards from the door, at the head of this stair, is an opening nearly east, accessible by treading on the ledge of the wall, which diminishes eight inches each story; and this last opening leads into a room or chapel ten feet by twelve, and fifteen or sixteen high, arched with freestone, and supported by small circular columns of the same, the capitals and arches Saxon. It has an east window, and on each side in the wall, about four feet from the ground, a stone bason, with a hole and iron pipe to convey the water into or through the wall. This chapel is one of the buttresses, but no sign of it without, for even the window, though large within, is only a long narrow loophole, scarcely to be seen without. On the left side of this chapel is a small oratory, eight by six in the thickness of the wall, with a niche in the wall, and enlightened by a like loophole. The fourth stair from the ground, ten feet west from the chapel door, leads to the top of the tower through the thickness of the wall, which at top is but three yards. Each story is about fifteen feet high, so that the tower will be seventy-five feet from the ground. The inside forms a circle, whose diameter may be about twelve feet. The well at the bottom of the dungeon is filled with stones.”—Cough’s Edition of Camden’s Britannia. Second Edition, vol. iii. pp. 267, 268.
CHAPTER XLII
1 (p. 430) epigraph: The lines are written by Scott himself.
2 (p. 436) Athelstane... stood before them ... like something arisen from the dead!: [Author’s note] Raising of Athelstane. The resuscitation of Athelstane has been much criticised, as too violent a breach of probability, even for a work of such fantastic character. It was a tour-de force, to which the Author was compelled to have recourse by the vehement entreaties of his friend and printer, who was inconsolable on the Saxon being conveyed to the tomb.
CHAPTER XLIII
1 (p. 442) epigraph: The lines are from Shakespeare’s Richard II (act 2, scene 2).
2 (p. 443) meeting of radical reformers... “dunghills”: Scott refers implicitly to the infamous Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 (see Introduction). In his sardonic reference to the “heroic language of insurgent tailors,” Scott makes his contempt for the Manchester reformists clear. “Flints” refers to striking workers, and “dunghills” to those who earn lower wages in their stead (what would be referred to today as “breaking the picket line”).
3 (p. 450) Sadducees: In Matthew 22:23, the Sadducees are a breakaway Jewish sect that maintains that the soul dies with the body, a mainstream tenet of Judaism today.
4 (p. 451) Greek fire: Scott is historically accurate in this case, even to the very year. The Third Crusaders brought this sulfurous, combustible liquid back with them from the Holy Land, where it had been used at the siege of Acre.
CHAPTER XLIV
1 (p. 454) epigraph: The line, slightly altered, is from John Webster’s The White Devil (1612; act 4, scene 1).
2 (p. 458) good-natured brother. The reconciliation between John and Richard was initiated by John and presided over by their mother in France in 1194. Richard restored his younger brother’s lands the following year.
3 (p. 461) the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of London: Edward III officially instituted English, rather than Norman French, as the language of the court in his address to Parliament in 1367.
4 (p. 464) Johnson ... a TALE: Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (lines 219-222); “foreign” is substituted for “barren” to signify Richard’s dying in Belgium, and “humble” for “dubious” because that death, unlike the Swedish King’s, contained no element of mystery.
Inspired by Sir Walter Scott and Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott is the father of historical fiction. His work directly inspired writers who followed him, providing a virtual template for the setting of personal dramas against a well-researched background of historical detail. Because of the staggering success of his Waverley stories (named for the first book, Waverley, published in 1814), the historical novel became the most popular literary mode of the early nineteenth century, and Scott himself became an icon. The Waverley novels and tales—almost thirty in number, published between 1814 and 1832—portray various episodes in the history of Scotland, with settings in the English Middle Ages, Jacobean England, medieval France, the Middle East during the Crusades, and even the Roman Empire.
Because of Scott’s example and his enormous success, an attempt at historical fiction became routine for serious novelists in the nineteenth century. In his immediate wake, most of the nineteenth-century English heavyweights, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy, wrote at least one novel in the genre. (Jane Austen did not and was criticized for it.) Charles Dickens set A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in London and Paris during the French Revolution. George Eliot’s only historical novel, Romola (1863), takes place in the fifteenth-century Florence of the Medicis. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863-1869), composed in Russian and set during that country’s 1805-1814 war with Napoleon, is probably the greatest historical novel in any language. In America, Mark Twain lampooned historical fiction in his intentionally anachronistic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ( 1889 ) .
James Fenimore Cooper and Alexandr
e Dumas centered their careers on the historical novel. Cooper, sometimes called the “American Scott,” consciously patterned himself after the creator of Ivanhoe. He is best known for his Leatherstocking Tales, most memorably The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841), which recount the adventures of wilderness scout Natty Bumppo during the French and Indian Wars. Cooper first became famous with his second novel, The Spy (1821), and also wrote a series of nautical tales; the opening installment, The Pilot (1823), was the first American novel about the sea. Dumas, a Frenchman, began his career as a celebrated historical playwright before turning his attention to fiction. The Three Musketeers (1844), the story of four sword-wielding heroes and their marvelous friendship, was set in the seventeenth century and spawned multiple sequels, notably the novel Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, better known today as The Man in the Iron Mask (1848). Dumas and Cooper, like their predecessor, captured large audiences with their lively stories, which provide a satisfying blend of humor, adventure, and melodrama.
Ivanhoe (1819), the first of Scott’s novels set in England, had a tremendous impact on the revival of Victorian interest in the Middle Ages, and this fascination with the age of knights and chivalry has lasted into the third millennium. With Ivanhoe, Scott also cemented the Robin Hood myth. The legend of Robin Hood had appeared in various forms as early as the fourteenth century, but the version detailed in Ivanhoe, which depicts Robin Hood as a high-minded Saxon fighting oppressive Norman lords, is the most universally known. Robin Hood movies—the most notable is The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), featuring Errol Flynn as the hooded hero—have proven to be an evergreen commodity for the film industry.
William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair (1848), wrote a satirical sequel to Ivanhoe. Mocking the nineteenth-century fascination with the Middle Ages, Rebecca and Rowena (1850) takes issue with Ivanhoe’s “icy, faultless, prim” wife, a complaint about Rowena that was by no means uniquely his. Thackeray’s short novel reveals the faults of Ivanhoe’s bride and remarries him to Rebecca, the character most critics call the more interesting figure.
Ivanhoe was dramatized as early as 1819, when stage productions went up in both London and New York. Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini composed his opera Ivanhoe, never widely performed, during the following decade. Sir Arthur Sullivan, best known for his comic operetta collaborations with W. S. Gilbert, chose Ivanhoe as the subject of his one serious opera in 1891. Silent movie versions of Ivanhoe appeared by two different film companies in 1913.
Richard Thorpe’s classic MGM film Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1952) stars the amazingly photogenic Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine as Rebecca and Rowena, respectively, with a suitably chivalrous Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe. George Sanders gives a convincing portrayal of the tormented Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and Guy Rolfe mesmerizes as the slimy Prince John. Attractive cinematography on location in England and high production values make the film an enjoyable adventure. Miklos Rozsa’s marvelous score lends excitement to the well-staged action scenes. A television series starring James Bond actor Roger Moore appeared in 1958, with numerous other versions emerging in its wake.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
JANE AUSTEN
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair.—He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.
—from a letter to Anna Austen (September 28, 1814)
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
The champion novelist of the day has again exhibited himself on a new arena,—in Ivanhoe, or the Jew of York,—equipped in the trappings of the feudal times, and in the chivalric character of an accomplished young Saxon of the woods. Though not perfectly historical in giving such a pompous picture of chivalric society at so early a period, (as it rather resembles Francis I, than Richard), yet, as it serves to represent characters of untamed life, judiciously mingled with those of ‘high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,’ the union of two different periods of society may be admissible in a romance. With this, and the single exception of the want of a real story, we do not recollect perusing any work of Walter Scott’s that has afforded us more pleasure than the present. The exquisite description, and dramatic power of character, are sufficient to redeem greater faults than are perceptible in the novels of this original author.
—February 1820
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
[I hold Scott] for a man of very extraordinary powers; and when I say that I have read the far greater part of his novels twice, and several three times over, with undiminished pleasure and interest; and that, in my reprobation of The Bride of Lammermoor (with the exception, however, of the almost Shakspearian old witch-wives at the funeral) and of the Ivanhoe, I mean to imply the grounds of my admiration of the others, and the permanent nature of the interest which they excite. In a word, I am far from thinking that Old Mortality or Guy Mannering would have been less admired in the age of Sterne, Fielding, and Richardson, than they are in the present times; but only that Sterne, &c., would not have had the same immediate popularity in the present day as in their own less stimulated and, therefore, less languid reading world....
Scott’s great merit, and, at the same time, his felicity, and the true solution of the long-sustained interest novel after novel excited, lie in the nature of the subject; not merely, or even chiefly, because the struggle between the Stuarts and the Presbyterians and sectaries, is still in lively memory, and the passions of the adherency to the former, if not the adherency itself, extant in our own fathers’ or grandfathers’ times; nor yet (though this is of great weight) because the language, manners, &c., introduced are sufficiently different from our own for poignancy, and yet sufficiently near and similar for sympathy; nor yet because, for the same reason, the author, speaking, reflecting, and descanting in his own person, remains still (to adopt a painter’s phrase) in sufficient keeping with his subject matter, while his characters can both talk and feel interesting to us as men, without recourse to antiquarian interest, and nevertheless without moral anachronism (in all which points the Ivanhoe is so woefully the contrary, for what Englishman cares for Saxon or Norman, both brutal invaders, more than for Chinese and Cochin-Chinese?)—yet great as all these causes are, the essential wisdom and happiness of the subject consists in this,—that the contest between the loyalists and their opponents can never be obsolete, for it is the contest between the two great moving principles of social humanity; religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and the admiration for permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth, as the offspring of reason—in short, the mighty instincts of progression and free agency, on the other.
—from a letter to Thomas Allsop (April 8, 1820)
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Sir Walter Scott had not all those aids of which his successors and imitators may take advantage. The historical romance was as much a distinct species of prose narrative fiction as the historical play was of dramatic poetry. He, however, had sufficient tact to detect at once the way in which it should be conducted, and continued to work upon the same principle, notwithstanding the warnings and oppositions of critics not submissive to the authority of contemporary genius, nor finding their canon of rules in the nature of the productions themselves, but reasoning from analogy, if not deciding on the grounds of hereditary prejudices.
—from an unsigned review printed in Fr
aser’s Magazine (February 1832)
WALTER BAGEHOT
Many exceptions have been taken to the detail of mediaeval life as it is described to us in Ivanhoe, but one merit will always remain to it, and will be enough to secure to it immense popularity. It describes the middle ages as we should have wished them to have been. We do not mean that the delineation satisfies those accomplished admirers of the old church system who fancy that they have found among the prelates and barons of the fourteenth century a close approximation to the theocracy which they would recommend for our adoption. On the contrary, the theological merits of the middle ages are not prominent in Scott’s delineation. ‘Dogma’ was not his way: a cheerful man of the world is not anxious for a precise definition of peculiar doctrines. The charm of Ivanhoe is addressed to a simpler sort of imagination,—to that kind of boyish fancy which idolises mediaeval society as the ‘fighting time.’ Every boy has heard of tournaments, and has a firm persuasion that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A martial society, where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large lances, in peace for pleasure, and in war for business, seems the very ideal of perfection to a bold and simply fanciful boy. Ivanhoe spreads before him the full landscape of such a realm, with Richard Coeur-de-Lion, a black horse, and the passage of arms at Ashby. Of course he admires it, and thinks there was never such a writer, and will never more be such a world. And a mature critic will share his admiration, at least to the extent of admitting that nowhere else have the elements of a martial romance been so gorgeously accumulated without becoming oppressive; their fanciful charm been so powerfully delineated, and yet so constantly relieved by touches of vigorous sagacity.
