Ivanhoe

Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) is the novel that invented our image of the Middle Ages — the tournament, the outlaw of the greenwood, the disguised king, the besieged castle. Published in the last days of 1819 by the most famous writer in Europe, it became the model for the historical romance for a century and shaped how the English-speaking world has pictured knights and chivalry ever since.

England in the 1190s is a divided country: more than a hundred years after the Norman Conquest, Saxon and Norman remain two hostile peoples, King Richard the Lionheart is a captive abroad, and his brother Prince John schemes for the throne. Into this returns Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a disinherited Saxon knight, disowned by his father for loving the lady Rowena and following the Norman king to the Crusade. Around his homecoming Scott builds some of the most thrilling set pieces in English fiction — the great tournament at Ashby, the storming of the castle of Torquilstone, the appearance of Robin Hood, and the trial of the Jewish heroine Rebecca for sorcery, decided by combat against the Templar who desires her.

Beneath the pageantry, Ivanhoe is a book about a fractured nation seeking reconciliation, and about the courage and dignity of Rebecca and her father Isaac of York amid the savage prejudice of their age — a portrait so sympathetic that many readers have felt the wrong woman wins the hero. Both a rousing adventure and a work of unexpected conscience, it remains Scott's most beloved novel.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1820 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.