Such is the broad historical backdrop to the novel. But the subtitle of Ivanhoe describes it as a “romance” not a “history,” and Scott certainly plays fast and loose with historical detail. The most striking image of the opening chapter, Gurth’s iron collar declaring him to be a serf of Cedric’s, is simply made up, and the novel’s most famous scene, the tournament at Ashby, has no historical foundation earlier than the fourteenth century. In his fascinated description of clothing, heraldry, and domestic interiors, Scott felt little qualm in borrowing from sources spanning a century or more, and this is to say nothing of his description of startled characters as “electrified,” perhaps the most notorious anachronism in English fiction. Indeed, for all its rich weave of Saxon and Norman vocabulary, the language spoken by the characters is entirely bogus, a pseudo-medieval patois Scott patched together from the Elizabethan canon of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. The stagy feel of the novel is due in large part to the characters’ tendency to declaim and sermonize as if before a large audience.
Critics have long taken Scott to task for this form of novelistic license, but from the very beginning of his text Scott assumes an ironic relation to historical writing. When Ivanhoe first appeared in 1819, Scott had not yet acknowledged authorship of any of his novels. To the titillated press, he was the “Great Unknown”: Scott’s attachment to his barely credible anonymity (almost everyone saw through it) is difficult to understand beyond his abiding passion, shared by so many of his characters, for feint and disguise. An instance of this appears in the form of the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe, in which Scott, writing under the name “Laurence Templeton,” defends himself in advance against the petty corrections of the “dry as dust” historians, and even provides a fictional source for his tale, an Anglo-Norman manuscript belonging to Sir Arthur Wardour, himself a character in one of Scott’s earlier novels. As far as literal historical truth in the novel is concerned, we should take Scott’s prefatory follies to heart, and take an expansive, “romantic” view.
But this is not to say we should not take the historical lessons of Ivanhoe seriously. Scott’s most acute critic, György Lukács, extends the argument of Scott’s preface to challenge all those readings of the novel that equate its historical pastiche with shallow theatricality or, in the common phrase of contempt invented for Scott, mere “tushery.” “Scott’s greatness,” declares Lukács in his seminal work The Historical Novel, “lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types… [his] way of presenting the totality of certain transitional stages of history” (p. 35). Scott’s choice of historical subject is never accidental, far less ornamental. Heroes such as Ivanhoe or Edward Waverley might think of themselves romantically, but they are not themselves romanticized. Both are examples, says Lukács, of Scott’s distinctly modern “middling” heroes, whose imaginations far outstrip their real achievements. After his flirtation with the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Waverley retreats to his safe English estate and the bland anonymity of an English gentleman. Ivanhoe likewise has his day of glory at Ashby, only to recede thereafter into pale ineffectuality. His behavior during the battle for Torquilstone—where, from his sickbed, he encourages Rebecca’s lurid commentary on the fighting—is particularly pathetic, like a rabid sports fan shouting at the television. Then, when his spirit finally revives for the showdown with Bois-Guilbert at Templestowe, Scott denies his hero the crowning chivalric deed he so desperately desires. Ivanhoe does not so much as scratch his Templar foe: Bois-Guilbert merely self-destructs.
For Lukács, Ivanhoe’s chivalric failures should not be confused with a literary failure by the novelist. Scott’s cool description of King Richard as “brilliant, but useless” could apply equally to Ivanhoe, and typifies the realism of his treatment of individual characters. It is this ironic detachment that appears “modern” to us when reading Ivanhoe. Scott reserves his romantic nostalgia not for people but for periods, for “the ruination of past social formations” (p. 55). In other words, Scott de-emphasizes his hero in Ivanhoe in order to bring into clearer focus his true subject: the transformation of medieval Saxon society as expressed in popular life, through its living participants. Scott’s famous detail-work-the clothes, the food, the scenery—is thus more than simply “color,” more than a mere screen of dubious authenticity: It is the raw material of a fully realized historical scene through which his thinking, feeling characters move, and though they rarely appear to us as real in the modern, psychologically detailed sense (Bois-Guilbert is the notable exception), they fulfill Scott’s purpose as vivid social beings, as genuine spirits of the age.
The novel opens amidst the ruins of one social formation, Saxon feudalism, and observes the embattled progress of its Anglo-Norman successor. Neither Cedric, with his fixation on Athelstane and Saxon restoration, nor the rapacious French barons and their scheming leader, Prince John, come off well. Front de-Boeuf, the blackest Norman villain, is both a serial rapist and a parricide, and the death-chant of his aged Saxon concubine, Urfried, is the most graphic indictment of Norman brutality in the novel (as well as its most unreadable scene: Scott’s melodramatic staging of the fall of Torquilstone has not aged well). With both the established Saxon and Norman orders subject to stringent critique, Scott reserves his considerable romantic sympathies for a third, marginal group, who live literally in the shadow of the greater Saxon-Norman struggle, in the arboreal gloom of Sherwood. Scott never fails to describe Sherwood—the quintessential English redoubt, the fabled greenwood of Shakespeare—with real poetry. It is a place, both symbolic and real, over which neither Saxon lord nor French knight can claim dominion: “The travellers had now reached the verge of the wooded country, and were about to plunge into its recesses, held dangerous at that time from the number of outlaws whom oppression and poverty had driven to despair, and who occupied the forests in such large bands as could easily bid defiance to the feeble police of the period” (p. 191). The chief outlaw is, of course, Robin Hood. Borrowed from folk legend, the merry men of Sherwood serve multiple trans-historical functions. Their stable self-government is designed to express a primordial English form of natural justice, while their undemonstrative decency and industry look forward to the bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century. Robin’s Sherwood is a primeval world, a fantasy of yeoman England that is the most romantic and least historical aspect of the novel. But in its idealization of Robin of Locksley, Ivanhoe adheres to, and in fact did much to sustain, the grand historical narrative of English liberalism, which traces its roots from the Magna Carta of 1215, to the creation of a uniquely British “mixed monarchy” in the bloodless revolution of 1688, to the Reform Bill of 1832. Robin Hood, so the story runs, is the reason England never needed a French Revolution. The outlaws of the greenwood will prevail over the course of the centuries, subtly subduing the hot blood of French tyranny and breeding the soul of English liberty in its stead. As such, the merry men’s disciplined performance during the attack on Torquilstone Castle speaks more to England’s recent triumph over the French on the field of Waterloo than to any realistic evocation of the rude Saxon-Norman struggles of the Middle Ages. The band of outlaws comports itself like a modern professional army. As Front-de-Boeuf tells his skeptical fellow Norman, Maurice de Bracy, when he shows contempt for the force advancing on Torquilstone, “Were they black Turks or Moors, Sir Templar… but these are English yeomen, over whom we shall have no advantage” (p. 243). Once Norman fanaticism has exhausted itself, Scott implies, it is these steady outlaws who will inherit England as its sensible and fair-minded middle class, and provide its sons as soldiers for her defense.