Walter Scott

Ivanhoe A Romance Walter Scott

Ivanhoe A Romance by Walter Scott is first and foremost an adventure novel. Its popularity and longevity have secured it a place as one of the great historical romances of all time. The main goal of the novel is to entertain and excite its readers with a tale of heroism set in the high Middle Ages, and any symbolic or thematic purpose Walter Scott might have is decidedly secondary to that goal. Still, Scott was too intelligent an author to have written a mindless book. In addition to evoking the atmosphere of a vanished era, Ivanhoe's adventure story makes some critical points about an important time in English history, the moment when King Richard the Lion-Hearted returned to England after four years spent fighting in the Crusades and languishing in Austrian and German prisons. The novel's main historical emphasis focuses on the tension between the Saxons and the Normans, the two peoples who inhabited England.