Ivanhoe
- Written By Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe
- Sir Walter Scott
$19.99
Disinherited, disguised, and heading straight for the throne.
A century after the Norman Conquest, England remains split down the middle. Saxon lords answer to new Norman masters, King Richard rots in a foreign prison, and his brother John tightens his grip on a throne that isn’t his to hold. Into this divided kingdom rides a knight home from the Crusades — disowned by his own father, in love with a woman promised to another, and determined to reclaim what is his.
In disguise, he enters the Ashby jousting tournament, and his victory reignites the country’s old rivalries. A Templar’s obsession, a Jewish physician’s daughter accused of witchcraft, an outlaw band moving through Sherwood’s shadows — the grievances multiply faster than anyone can contain them, and a fortress under siege becomes the proving ground for what England will become. Loyalties get tested, disguises fall away, and a hero built for one world discovers he must fight for another.
Sir Walter Scott built his historical novel from the ground up, folding real conflict and invented lives into a single narrative of medieval England. Robin Hood’s transformation into a noble outlaw begins on these pages. So does a long literary conversation about who belongs to a nation, and who a nation is willing to protect.
“Thus do men throw on fate the issue of their own wild passions.”
About the Author
- Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771. After training as a lawyer at the University of Edinburgh, he began writing while practicing as a legal advocate. He found early fame as a poet — The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake — before shifting to prose fiction with Waverley in 1814, published anonymously under the byline “Author of Waverley,” a name he kept for over a decade of bestselling novels.
Ivanhoe, published in 1819, marked Scott’s turn from Scottish history to medieval England, and it became one of the defining works of his career. Scott researched armor, custom, and law with the same rigor he brought to invented dialogue, building a fictional framework sturdy enough to carry real historical weight, a method later novelists from Alexandre Dumas to Leo Tolstoy would draw on directly.
Financial ruin followed success. When his publishing house collapsed in 1826, Scott spent his final years writing at a punishing pace to settle debts that were not fully his own. He died at Abbotsford in 1832, having given the historical novel its shape and given literature its most durable Robin Hood image.
