Review: Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I originally had to read the first half of this book for school some 2 decades ago and never got around to finishing the second half (my teenage self thought it was terrible)... but as it happens I'm also a masochist who regularly retries foods he doesn't like every year just to see if he still doesn't like them (read: how I learned to love mustard after 30 years of hating it. or Stockholm'd myself into doing so), so the same concept must apply to books, right?

Well, to quote a video essay I listened to on this... "it's a Romantic novel with great prose and terrible ideas about the Middle Ages." Maybe worth considering that the 3 other people I follow on goodreads who've read this book also rated it 2 stars.

Basically it's an interesting historical window into how people who lived two centuries ago were thinking about how to think about people living six centuries before them. Because when we think about all of the modern day ideas we have about the Middle Ages today (knights and jousts, chivalry, Robin Hood, the Black Knight, etc) we don't realize how much of these are really anachronistic reinventions from a Scottish guy...

who didn't live in the times himself and really was just trying to build a vision of a unified England and Scotland through the lens of England's own unification of Normans and Anglo-Saxons, which wasn't actually even a concern at the time Scott said it was (sorry that was a mouthful).

Anyway, the book itself hasn't really aged well. It's progressive for its time (see: treatment of the Jewess Rebecca) but also still unfortunately racist (see: treatment of the Jewess Rebecca. and others). It's overly concerned with historical matters that don't really matter much today. And of course the dialogue takes a while to get used to (not quite Shakespeare difficulty but it's trending in that direction).

So was it worth it? Let's just say I'm more interested in reading Scott's Waverley novels (on the Jacobite risings) that actually take place in Scotland now lol (curious how he treats a subject he's actually well versed in). But it probably helps that I literally ran into his monument in Edinburgh on accident a week after reading this and then was bombarded by all the "we <3 Walter Scott" quotes/propaganda in public transit there.