Ivanhoe is the story of one of the remaining Saxon noble families at a time when the nobility in England was overwhelmingly Norman. It follows the Saxon protagonist, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favour with his father for his allegiance to the Norman king, Richard I. 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. The other introduction is from the publisher (of the 1893 edition) describing the writing of the novel. It is much shorter, and has some interesting points. An important one is that Rob Roy is not about Rob Roy. Sir Walter Scott in fact resisted the title for that very reason, but he was a popular enough figure that as soon as he was in the story, it was what everyone wanted to know about. King Richard, who had been captured by Leopold of Austria on his return journey to England, was believed to still be in captivity. Another issue for me was that all the good characters were passive and it was the baddies who took action. When Rashleigh departs to go into business with Frank’s father, Frank becomes Diana’s tutor. Their association develops into deep affection on both sides, a mutual attraction marred only by the fact that Diana is a Catholic and Frank a Presbyterian.

Francis is a Young Dreamer - unlike his evil cousin Rashleigh, who only wants to fleece Francis' side of the family of their vast fortune. Francis' rather naive mission - should he choose to accept it, and show his Dad he's not a bum - is to find out why the family's fortune is vanishing. This book is best read under the slight influence of usquebaugh, but keep your dirk planted upright in the table near to hand, in case any lowlanders decide to make free with their mouths. Those bloody bastards don’t understand: “Honour is what no man can give you, and none can take away. Honour is a man's gift to himself.” And don’t let anyone...ever... step on yer tartan.

Lowlands του αυστηρού προτεσταντισμού, της στενής σχέσης με την Αγγλία, της σύγχρονης ισχυρής κεντρικής διακυβέρνησης και της εξωστρέφειας και στα Highlands του καθολικισμού, της ανεξαρτησίας και των παραδοσιακών σχέσεων εξουσίας είναι κάτι παραπάνω από εμφανής και η διαμάχη για τον βρετανικό θρόνο κάνει την έκρηξη αναπόφευκτη. Μέσα σε όλα αυτά ο ήρωας μας προσπαθεί να λύσει τις δικές του υποθέσεις με τη βοήθεια του θρυλικού παράνομου των Highlands Rob Roy MacGregor. Αυτή η πορεία στο άγριο και ρομαντικό τοπίο των Highlands και η γνωριμία με τον ασυνήθιστο τρόπο ζωής της περιοχής που απειλείται αποτελεί το καλύτερο κομμάτι αυτού του βιβλίου και το συμπληρώνει ιδανικά, οδηγώντας την ιστορία στις πιο συναρπαστικές και παθιασμένες διαδρομές και στη πολύ συγκινητική κατάληξη.

if they … penetrated to the inner meaning of history … did so, too often, by overlooking the human content. The men of the past entered their story only indirectly, as the agents or victims of “progress”: they seldom appeared directly, in their own right, in their own social context, as the legitimate owners of their own autonomous centuries. [30] Como no podía ser de otra manera, sobresalen dos personajes femeninos que son el sostén de toda la lucha entre estos caballeros, me refiero a la bella Rebecca, hija de un comerciante judío, Isaac de York y hermosa Rowena, una hermosa sajona adoptada por Cedric. El contrapunto entre estas dos damas es brillantemente llevado a cabo por Scott, más puntualmente en el último capítulo. While this book may not appeal to some, as it is definitely dated, it was written in 1819, and its syntax and construction aren't what modern readers will be used to, that won't bother most I'd think. I read this book first when I was 13 or 14. I stumbled across it in a grandparent's house one summer, and it captured my interest. The book is a historical fiction and an action adventure of it's day and while it may not move as today's action adventures do, there is so much more than that here. The depth of the prose blows away what we might call "action adventure" today. There is high adventure here that should please adventure lovers and the romantics among us. (When "Sir Desdichado" challenged the entire field at the joust I was hooked!) Scott was also the first great writer to be interested in the common people as well as the great. His “low life” characters were often the most real and best drawn, not least because he was able to use Scots idiom and dialogue in a dramatic way. This interest had been appreciated by many commentators, eg the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs in “ The Historical Novel”. The Waverley Novels are a long series of novels by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). For nearly a century, they were among the most popular and widely read novels in Europe.

The virtues of this novel are immediately apparent. Scott’s descriptions of the book’s settings – whether a London counting house, a musty library, an underground church, downtown Glasgow, an isolated loch, a smokey tavern, etc – are simply masterful; and, I would say, some of the best descriptive writing I have ever read. Only Dostoyevsky and George Eliot are on the same level. The characters are also masterfully developed, with each character having a quirk or a quality that makes them vivid and three-dimensional. The love interest, Diana Vernon, is one of the great female characters in English literature – a beautiful intellectual with a mysterious past and a penchant for secret plotting, and a skilled horsewoman to boot. Scott’s tone gives this book a moral depth that is rare in literature. Even the death of the book’s most obnoxious character is treated as a mini-tragedy. De todas los sucesos que ocupan la novela, el mejor es la toma del castillo normando de Frente de buey llevado a cabo por los sajones en una sangrienta lucha para rescatar a la bella Rowena. Now, full disclosure: I'm certain there are two factors that influenced my enjoyment of the novel toward the positive. Thus, the Scott cinema canon, which had been fairly eclectic in the early years of film, soon narrowed to just three principal source works: Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, and Quentin Durward. The small number of recent Scott films had continued this trend: most were made in post-Soviet Russia, and one, Rob Roy (USA, 1995), is only tangentially based on the original novel. [13] Significantly, too, only Rob Roy had been a favourite with theatre-goers before the advent of cinema: there were some 970 stage adaptations of the novel produced in the century between 1817 and 1917, nearly four times as many as Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward combined. [14] So why did one great Scotch romance and a couple of minor medieval romances assume such prominence in the cinema? The following section of this essay will consider some of the surviving film versions of these three novels, with particular attention to cinematic representations of Scotland. I guess there were certainly some ideas and messages he intended to pass on to his contemporary readers (maybe along the line of "conciliation is better than fighting") and wanted them to draw some parallels between the "then" and the "now" for sure.

He is an archetype of the knight in shining armour. Scott hung lots of literary attributes on him (courage, nobility, honesty, courtesy, etc), but nothing that would make him stand closer to the reader – he is hardly ever present in the book and when he is, he is distant and inhuman. follows them, and, when Morris and MacVittie depart, Frank confronts Rashleigh and demands an explanation of his behavior. As their argument grows more heated, swords are drawn, but the duel is broken up by Rob Roy, who cries shame at them because they are men of the same blood. Rob Roy considers both men his friends. Frank also learns that his father’s funds were mixed up with a Jacobite uprising in which Sir Hildebrand was one of the plotters. He suspects that Rashleigh robbed Morris based on information supplied by Rob Roy.Looking at the novels in this way, a discernible conjectural model of a pilgrim’s progress could be described. An Englishman or Lowland Scot wandered into the Highlands, or an equivalent, from civilised to barbarian society and became involved with passionate partisans, often Jacobites for example in Waverley, Rob Roy and Redguantlet. The “heroes” ( Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy) were essentially dull, insipid, amiable young men who were disinterested, passive observers of the historical forces in conflict. Activity therefore depended upon other sources of energy - “dark heroes” (Rob Roy in Rob Roy) - whose intentions were good but mistaken. These contrasting pairs represented passion against reason, romantic emotion against sober judgement, the “passionate Scot versus prudent Briton”. Often the passive heroes became involved with the forces of barbaric society but they retained personal links with both sides and eventually put heroic ideas behind them and returned to civil society. Scott is often seen as an ultra- romantic novelist but this was a misreading. David Daiches said “Scott’s best and characteristic novels might with justice be called anti-romantic. They attempt to show that heroic action is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful”. Daiches argued that Scott’s real interest as a novelist was “in the ways in which the past impinged on the present and in the effects of that impact on human character, in the relations between tradition and progress”. These themes were best realised in the novels dealing with the Scotland of the not too distant past of the C17th and C18th, ie Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Redgauntlet and Chronicles of the Canongate. He first portrayed peasant characters sympathetically and realistically and equally justly portrayed merchants, soldiers, and even kings. On the other hand there is Isac of York, representing all the repulsive clichés medieval Christian society attributed to Jews, but possibly WS and his contemporaries did so as well. The sanctimonious behaviour of the “good Christians” is also there: they are feeling repulsed and behave condescendingly to Jews.