Ivanhoe

Lore & Background

He drew on antiquarian works by Joseph Strutt, histories by Robert Henry and Sharon Turner, and medieval sources including the Templar Rule and Chaucer. The figure of Locksley was influenced by Joseph Ritson's compilation of Robin Hood ballads. The novel follows Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a Saxon knight disinherited by his father for supporting King Richard the Lionheart. It opens with a pilgrim aiding Isaac of York, a Jewish moneylender, and includes a tournament at Ashby where Ivanhoe, masked as 'Desdichado', defeats the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert. The story involves capture at Torquilstone castle and a rescue by the Black Knight and Robin of Locksley.

Reader's Guide

Ivanhoe is considered seminal to historical fiction and became the best-known entry in the Waverley cycle of nearly thirty books. It shifted Scott's focus from 16th- and 17th-century Scotland to high-medieval England, influencing popular perceptions of figures like King Richard, Prince John, and Robin Hood. The novel was credited by Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and John Henry Newman with inspiring increased interest in chivalric romance and medievalism. C.S. Lewis noted that the Waverley novels helped create a sense of historical period absent in earlier works like Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Ivanhoe's depictions of tournaments, outlaws, witch trials, and religious and ethnic divisions left a lasting mark on literature and popular culture, with many twentieth-century adaptations.

Did You Know?

• Scott dictated most of Ivanhoe due to severe stomach pains, using John Ballantyne and William Laidlaw as amanuenses.
• C.S. Lewis argued that the Waverley novels introduced a sense of historical period largely absent before them.