Ivanhoe

I fin­ished read­ing Ivan­hoe the oth­er day. It was good, sur­pris­ing­ly so. I end­ed up lik­ing the main vil­lain more than any oth­er char­ac­ter.

That struck me as strange, when I real­ized that Bri­an de Bois-Guil­bert was in deep shit and I felt bad for the poor guy. Most of the char­ac­ters in Ivan­hoe move about anony­mous­ly in the book while not being very anony­mous at all to the read­er. It is pret­ty obvi­ous that the hood­ed Palmer in the open­ing chap­ters is Wil­fred of Ivan­hoe him­self [though he is not named as such for a hun­dred-plus pages and in very dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances]. Richard Lion­heart, Fri­ar Tuck and Robin Hood are all present as well, though they go by pseu­do­nyms as well.

Bri­an de Bois-Guil­bert on the oth­er hand is him­self and always him­self. I think I liked him best because I feel that he would fit right in 2004. This is because he is such an indi­vid­ual. The rest of the folks all seem shal­low and stereo­typ­i­cal in com­par­i­son.

The book seems incred­i­bly anti-Semit­ic, which took me aback for a long while. It is most def­i­nite­ly Eng­lish and I think Sir Wal­ter Scott pur­pose­ful­ly wrote it con­cern­ing the antag­o­nism-becom­ing-friend­ship of the Nor­mans and Sax­ons as a sort of flat­tery toward the Crown. That is just sup­po­si­tion though. I’m too lazy to research it. Despite being writ­ten with thys and thines and var­i­ous oth­er quite rusty turns of phrase, I tru­ly enjoyed the man­ner in which it was writ­ten. It is quite the humor­ous nov­el. I’m going to cook din­ner now.