1771-1832 · Scottish novelist and poet, author of Waverley and Ivanhoe
About Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was an Edinburgh lawyer, ballad collector and poet (The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake) who turned to prose with Waverley (1814) and published his novels anonymously as by the Author of Waverley. He was made a baronet in 1820 and acknowledged his authorship publicly in 1827. Ivanhoe was the first of his novels set wholly in England and in the Middle Ages.
“when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles”
“Chivalry!—why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection—the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant”
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.