Ivanhoe/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The novel

  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: Averted, because Sir Walter Scott was begged by a personal friend (against his own original intention) to bring the beef-witted Athelstane back from the dead.
  • Die for Our Ship: Rowena. William Makepeace Thackeray's highly inaccurate description says it all:

"And must the Disinherited Knight ... sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena?"

Sir Walter Scott, in his 1830 Introduction recounted: "The character of the fair Jewess found so much favour in the eyes of some fair readers, that the writer was censured, because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena."

The 1952 film