Ivanhoe (English) Add a review

Ivanhoe: A Romance ( EYE-vən-hoh) by Walter Scott is a historical novel published in three volumes, in December 1819, as one of the Waverley novels. The Waverley novels are considered seminal to the genre of historical fiction, and Ivanhoe became by far the best-known entry in the whole cycle of nearly thirty books.

Ivanhoe marked a shift away from Scott's prior practice of setting stories in Scotland during centuries closer to the one from which he wrote his books (1814–1831). Whereas earlier numbers in the Waverley series take place in the 16th and 17th centuries, Ivanhoe is set in the high-medieval past during the 1190s. Over time it became Scott's best-remembered and most beloved novel, with many adaptations in the twentieth century adapting the work.

Set in England in the Middle Ages, with colourful descriptions of a tournament, outlaws, a witch trial, and divisions between Jews and Christians, Normans and Saxons, the novel was credited by many, including Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, with inspiring increased interest in chivalric romance and medievalism. As John Henry Newman put it, Scott "had first turned men's minds in the direction of the Middle Ages". It was also credited with influencing contemporary popular perceptions of historical figures such as King Richard the Lionheart, Prince John, and Robin Hood.

C.S. Lewis writes, "It was known that Adam went naked before till he fell. After that, people pictured the whole past in terms of their own age. [...] Milton never doubted that [the common English dish] 'capon and white broth' would have been as familiar to Christ and the disciples as it was to himself. It is doubtful whether the sense of period is much older than the Waverley novels. It is hardly present in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published 1776."