HISTORICAL AND LITERARY KNIGHTS

 Historical and literary knights

Knighthood emerged in medieval Europe around the 9th and 10th centuries as a response to the need for heavily armed cavalry to defend territories, particularly against Viking, Magyar, and Saracen invasions. Knights became central to the feudal system, swearing fealty to lords in exchange for land (fiefs) and protection. Training began in boyhood, with noble-born children serving as pages before becoming squires in their teenage years. By around 21, if deemed worthy, they were knighted in a formal ceremony, often with religious blessings.

THEMES & TOPICS - WAR IN SCOTT'S NOVELS

Just some reflections on how war and fighting are seen in Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

Scott has a Romantic idea of war: he presents it as heroic, shaped by the code of romances. According to him the battlefield is a place where every man can practise and show his bravery, his loyalty, his desire to sacrifice himself for other human beings or for a cause. War is the field of the hero and the rebel dissatisfied with society and its unjust rules. War is considered an idealized moment, men fight for some right reasons and for their ideals. 

Scott doesn’t describe the atrocities of killing, he distances the violence of a conflict transforming war into a source of imaginative pleasure, he undercovers the horrors of war with the idea of  future glory. Connected to this conception of war there is the cult of the individual, typical of the Romantic age: a rebel, a hero who fights to defend people unjustly accused, who fights to restore the just lists, against society .

WAVERLEY & IVANHOE: TWO ROMANTIC HEROES

WAVERLEY (1814)

PLOT

•       Edward Waverley is educated in an English Jacobite aristocratic family.

•       He is sent to Scotland to join the Hanoverian army of king George II.

•       He visits a Jacobite family friend, whose daughter, Rose, falls in love with him.

•       He , instead, is attracted by Flora Mac Ivor, the sister of the chief of the      rebels, Fergus.

•       Edward betrays his mates and joins the rebels.

•       He is finally forgiven by the king and marries Rose.

•       Fergus is killed and Flora retires into a convent.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Waverley is set during the period of the Jacobite uprisings: it starts in the late summer of 1744 and ends many months after the battle of Culloden (1746) when the Jacobites were defeated and their cause was virtually destroyed.