Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

This one has been on my shelf for a long time. How it got there in the first place is a bit strange. Like a lot of titles, I’m sure I picked it up on a whim -- either at a long-ago-forgotten library used book sale or from the dark recesses of some musty old bookshop -- but the whim that possessed me came straight out of my childhood. It had nothing to do with Walter Scott or his Waverly novels (an interesting concept, if I understand it correctly, in which Waverly refers not just to character and place names, but to the tendency of the protagonist to “waver” from one moral position to another in service to the unfolding drama), but instead to a game called Dungeons and Dragons. I played it a lot as a preteen and early teenager, and my best friend at the time named one of his primary characters Ivanhoe, ostensibly after Scott’s work, although I’m a thousand percent sure he never read the novel.

We’ll, now, forty years later, I have. And I found it to be a long and sometimes convoluted tale, with Ivanhoe, or more properly Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, cloaked in a false and mysterious identity for most of the novel. Wikipedia provides a nice summary of the novel’s setting:

Ivanhoe is the story of one of the remaining Anglo-Saxon noble families at a time when the nobility in England was overwhelmingly Norman. It follows the Saxon protagonist, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favour with his father for his allegiance to the Norman king Richard the Lionheart. The story is set in 1194, after the failure of the Third Crusade, when many of the Crusaders were still returning to their homes in Europe. King Richard, who had been captured by Leopold of Austria on his return journey to England, was believed to still be in captivity.

I frankly wasn’t really interested in any of that. What primarily captured my attention were two other characters, Issac of York and his daughter Rebecca -- both Jews in the decidedly Christian landscape of the novel. They are presented, openly and without irony, not just as foreigners, but in many ways as utter aliens, creatures with motivations and powers that transcend the Christian universe that governs everyone else.

Case in point, late in the novel Rebecca is tried (and convicted) of witchcraft. Her specific crime? Beguiling one of the antagonists, a Templar knight named Brian de Bois-Guilbert, “making” him fall in love with her. 

“There is a spell on me, by Heaven!” said Bois-Guilbert. “I almost think yon besotted skeleton spoke truth, and that the reluctance with which I part from thee hath something in it more than is natural. -- Fair creature!” he said, approaching near her, but with great respect, “so young, so beautiful, so fearless of death! and yet doomed to die, and with infamy and agony. Who would not weep for thee? The tear, that has been a stranger to these eyelids for twenty years, moistens them as I gaze on thee.”

A quick aside, the language here reminds me strongly of a scene in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, when Athos seeks to comfort the love-stricken heart of his much younger friend D’Artagnan.

D’Artagnan concealed his face in the bosom of Athos, and sobbed aloud.

“Weep,” said Athos, “weep, heart full of love, youth, and life! Alas, would I could weep like you!”

And he drew away his friend, as affectionate as a father, as consoling as a priest, noble as a man who has suffered much.

Possessing a somewhat grizzled old heart myself, I’ve always loved that sentiment and that phraseology. Alas, would I could weep like you!

But what Bois-Guilbert says next is even more interesting to this discussion.

“But it must be; nothing may now save thy life. Thou and I are but the blind instruments of some irresistible fatality, that hurries us along, like goodly vessels driving before the storm, which are dashed against each other, and so perish. Forgive me, then, and let us part at least as friends part. I have assailed thy resolution in vain, and mine own is fixed as the adamantine decrees of fate.”

Fate. It’s a powerful force in the story that is Ivanhoe, but up until now it has largely been presented as a force to be shaped by the Christian will of the actors, not something that shapes them and their actions as Bois-Guilbert seems to confess here. As Rebecca, to her credit, helpfully, and willfully, points out.

“Thus,” said Rebecca, “do men throw on fate the issue of their own wild passions. But I do forgive thee, Bois-Guilbert, though the author of my early death. There are noble things which cross over they powerful mind; but it is the garden of the sluggard, and the weeds have rushed up and conspired to choke the fair and wholesome blossom.”

In many ways, Rebecca is the most interesting character in the novel. As a Jew, she is forced to live outside this society, with her interactions feared and misunderstood by all who encounter her. But in that position, she has the authorial distance to comment most accurately on everything that is happening. If I ever find time to read Ivanhoe again, it is Rebecca’s voice that I’m going to spend most of my efforts listening for.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.