Northrop Frye's Uncollected Prose by Frye Northrop;Denham Robert D;

Author:Frye, Northrop;Denham, Robert D; [Denham, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000, LIT004080
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

23. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

Frye owned two editions of Ivanhoe: London: Dent, 1970, which he annotated, and Boston: Aldine, 1832, which was published along with The Talisman and Castle Dangerous. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the 1904 edition, published by the American Book Co. and edited by Francis Hovey Stoddard. Numbers in parentheses, which are Frye’s, are to the Dent edition. Ivanhoe was first published in 1819.

References to Ivanhoe in Frye’s published works:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 2, 25, 28, 29, 143, 172, 215–16, 218, 225–6, 228–9, 313

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 58, 59, 72, 87, 88–9, 106

Anatomy of Criticism, 101; CW 22: 93

Begins with Gurth and Wamba discussing language, a subject returned to at the end. Norman-Saxon relations said to be those of an army of occupation and a resentful revolutionary population: historically dubious, but the point is that the Waverley situation is reappearing: outlawed society that can’t bring off an armed rebellion, but can infiltrate and eventually take over the oppressing society. Gurth and Wamba are near a circle of stones “dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition” [6]. Gurth is the son of “Beowulph.” Wamba is the jester figure that runs all through comedy, but has the fidelity of the fool in Lear. Gurth is a swineherd, a more highly regarded occupation than now: pigmeat gets quite a play in this book, what with the Jews.

Cedric is the usual fanatical separatist, actually just an insular, wogs-begin-at-Calais Englishman, though in a position where he gets more sympathy from the reader. He’s a “franklin” or free Englishman, with his own servants: Athelstane, a good-natured glutton, is his candidate for the king of England, and he wants to marry him to Rowena, the blonde doll who is the technical heroine of this story. So he disowns and disinherits his son Ivanhoe, who has gone off to the Crusade with Richard I. Cedric’s dog is called Balder. Well, a worldly Prior and Brian de Bois-Guilbert turn up at Cedric’s demanding hospitality, and enter the stranger least likely to succeed, the disguised Ivanhoe. Isaac the Jew comes in later, I forget why. “Magnificence there was, with some rude attempt at taste; but of comfort there was little, and, being unknown, it was unmissed” [55]. Ivanhoe is disguised as a palmer; gets up early next morning and takes off the Jew, who’s about to be kidnapped by Front-de-Boeuf, also Gurth (by revealing his name in a whisper: convention of impenetrable disguise).

Ivanhoe is a good example of the way romance glosses over historical facts, but it also makes clear that they are being glossed over. That is, Isaac is stuck in Front-de-Boeuf’s dungeon and threatened with hideous tortures, and Rebecca is condemned at a so-called trial, actually a rationalized lynching as a sorceress. They both get rescued by a good-natured novelist, whose readers wouldn’t have tolerated anything else, but historically Jews were tortured and burned for witchcraft on no evidence. Scott emphasizes this (a)

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