I’ve read the novel as a young boy, in translation. I remember the chivalric, medieval story - the tournir, Ivanhoe’s courtship of Rowena, her kidnapping by Normans, the bitter exploitation of Saxons.

So when I came across the 1997 BBC production of Ivanhoe, it seemed dusty, old and obsolete.

But I watched anyway.

Normans were brutal. Saxons suffered unimaginable exploitation. And yet, the leading evil Norman was played by someone recognizable. It took me a while to make the connection: Bois-Guilbert was played by a then-young Irish actor, Ciarán Hinds.

That really irked me.

Bois-Guilbert betrays King Richard, and schemes with other Norman knights to kidnap Princess Rowena.

And yet, as I continued, it became clear how much I had misunderstood the story.

The subject, and the narrative, is actually one of how Bois-Guilbert redeems himself. It is a coming together - a melting of two identities, Saxon and Norman.

As it unwinds, Walter Scott starts looking at the Norman knights as individuals.

De Bracy, another Norman knight, ends up protecting Rowena. De Bracy yields allegiance to the rightful King. Front-de-Beuf dies in fire, unyielding.

Bois-Guilbert, himself, falls for Rebecca, the Jewish girl. While she rebuffs him, he sticks up for her till the end.

Rather than a story of an irredeemable divide, Ivanhoe is about how England was made - of Normans and Saxons together.

Which, come to think of it, is so very different from the stories we’re spinning about ourselves today. We see ourselves not as one people, Americans… So much to learn from Sir Walter Scott, who wrote Ivanhoe 200 years ago.

Of course, Walter Scott would have been very familiar with tribal divide. He lived in Edinburgh, and came of age right after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. From wiki:

Scott is fascinated by striking moments of transition between stages in societies. […] This is clear, for example, in Waverley, as the hero is captivated by the romantic allure of the Jacobite cause embodied in Bonnie Prince Charlie and his followers before accepting that the time for such enthusiasms has passed and accepting the more rational, humdrum reality of Hanoverian Britain. Another example appears in 15th-century Europe in the yielding of the old chivalric world view of Charles, Duke of Burgundy to the Machiavellian pragmatism of Louis XI.

And it occurred to me there was another Walter Scott novel I had read in translation, and missed all the nuances… It was Quentin Durward, which, again, I had read only in the chivalric, romantic key.

As a young man, living in a very ethnically homogeneous Bucharest, I think I was not primed to understand all these social movements Walter Scott lived through, and wrote about.

But they seem very relevant to our lived experience today.