Just Finished Reading Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe

Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, which I just finished reading, is a historically-based fictional story in the setting of late twelfth-century England, during the reign of Richard II "Lionheart".  It centers around the social and political conflict there between noble descendants of the Norman invasion of 1066 and those nobles of native Saxon ancestry...and it delves into the precarious status of Jews in England at that time.  Various parties have returned from the Crusades in Palestine...among them King Richard (disguised as the Black Knight) and the Knights Templar, led by Sir Brian de-Bois Gilbert, a Norman nobleman.  Prince John, Richard's brother, is planning to usurp the throne of England in his absence, only to discover that he has escaped captivity in Europe and is now in England.  The "main" character of Wilfred of Ivanhoe is a young Saxon knight who had gone with King Richard in the Crusade and has returned.  His father Cedric has disowned him after discovering Wilfred's love for the Lady Rowena of high Saxon nobility, whom Cedric wants to wed to the head Saxon pretender to the throne.  And then there is the Jewish moneylender Isaac and his compassionate daughter Rebecca...along with the forest outlaws (generally benevolent in nature) thrown into the mix...and you have several different story lines going on at the same time.  There are tournaments to test the knights' swordplay, along with ambushes, captivities, and daring rescues...but remarkably there really isn't all that much of the title character of Ivanhoe.  One thing that surprised me upon reading this 1820 novel of Scott was his sympathetic focus on the plight of Jews in England and the way they were treated there...especially by the ruling classes.  On the other hand, from the convenient hindsight of our politically correct world in 2015, Isaac, with his miserly nature, was portrayed in a very negative, stereotypical fashion...

There is plenty of knightly, noble action that you might expect from an adventure yarn like Ivanhoe, but this book is also very heavy on dialogue and the discussion of social, historical, ethical, and religious ideas.  So on one level, you could read it for the surface story (which I understand has been adapted a number of times to the screen)...one another level, though, it levels some pretty serious charges at folks who like to loudly trumpet their religion over others without actually practicing it: in other words, religious hypocrites and bigots...