Ivanhoe (review)

275 Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe (Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels 8), Graham Tulloch, ed., Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xvi, 588; R.R.P. £32.00; ISBN 0748605738. Although in no literal sense a product of the Middle Ages, Walter Sc Ivanhoe has much to offer, on at least two fronts, for medievalists. First, i i s of the greatest interest to the growing number of scholars concerned with nineteenth-century medievalism. Though nominally centred on the year 1194, the exact midpoint between the reigns of Ethelred the Unready and Richard II, Scott's novel is a magnificently insouciant pastiche of periods, personages, and locales, where Richard Coeur de Lion and Prince John rub shoulders with Norman barons and priors, mysterious Grand Masters and Preceptors of the Templars, alienated Saxon aristocrats and peasants, Jewish financiers, and the m e n of Sherwood Forest. A s to settings, the leafy boughs of the forest alternate with hermit cells, leaky Saxon halls, Norman castles and their dungeons, and tilting yards, with their splendid if anachronistic pageantry. The mythological beings that find themselves desperately invoked by characters caught up in the story's numerous crises range all the w a y from the Near East to the Slavonic and Scandinavian North-west. Through the hustle and bustle of the action, with its jousting, ambushes, siege, sorcery trial, and other adventures, the reader comes to sense Scott's vision of a perhaps exaggeratedly divided community that will one day evolve into an organic whole. The reconciliation will encompass not merely Saxon and N o r m a n but also other more stigmatised ethnicities, notably the Jews. The strangely divided romantic interest of the ending hints as much. Also perhaps foreshadowed, anticipating Thomas Carlyle, is the advent of a true Hero to guide the broad masses; in the society imaginatively reconstructed by Scott that full heroism remains unrealised, since Richard Coeur de Lion lacks singleness of purpose and Ivanhoe is constrained by the limitations of his master. All this clearly chimes in with political concerns in Scott's o w n era. As Graham Tulloch, the editor of the volume, observes, 'The idealised relationship between King Richard and Robin Hood's "yeomen" stands in stark and significant contrast to the kind of society Scott discerned in the Britain of 1819' (p. 407). Secondly, the novel is of potential interest to medievalists 276 Reviews researching the various possible processes of text production, in that, like the poetry of Scott's contemporary Lord Byron, it offers a remarkable instance of Jerome McGann's concept of the socialised text. The author, while far from operating in a full collaboration, enlists support from a wide variety of associates. H e canvasses his friends and acquaintances for ideas, donnees, and quotations, dictates a substantial portion of the narration to an amanuensis, has the remaining portion transcribed from his holograph (so as to preserve anonymity), and delegates to his publisher's reader the task of standardising punctuation and ensuring 'elegant variation', much as one might nowadays ask a secretary to put a document into correct format. So closely knit are these functions that, as Tulloch shows through minute analysis, all parties must have concurred in a 'rule of thumb' understanding of what their roles were in the emerging production. Accordingly, it becomes difficult if not impossible to decide precisely w h o was responsible for m a n y features of the text, particularly the accidentals. Even with so significant a stylistic component as the verba dicendi there is considerable room for uncertainty. Though in its essential content and character the novel is ultimately Scott's, it is therefore decidedly a mediated product. The new edition of Ivanhoe under review here offers an excellent opportunity to investigate these and other aspects of the novel. The volume comprises a general introduction, the text, an essay on the text (covering genesis, composition, later editions, and the text established for this edition), a list of emendations, a note on hyphens, a historical note, a detailed commentary, and a glossary. Through painstaking research the editor has reconstructed a reasonable approximation to Scott's intended text, which lies at some indeterminate point between...