Description
‘The love of battle is the food upon which we live – the dust of the melee is the breath of our nostrils! we live not – we wish not to live – longer than while we are victorious and renowned.’
More than a century after the Norman Conquest, England remains a colony of foreign warlords. Prince John plots to seize his brother's crown and the mysterious outlaw Robin Hood haunts the ancient greenwood.
Banished from England for seeking to marry against his father's wishes, Ivanhoe joins Richard the Lionheart on a crusade in the Holy Land. On his return, his passionate desire is to be reunited with the beautiful but forbidden lady Rowena, but he soon finds himself playing a more dangerous game as he is drawn into a bitter power struggle between the noble King Richard and his evil and scheming brother John.
Set in a highly romanticized medieval world of tournaments and sieges, chivalry and adventure, Ivanhoe fashioned a myth of cultural identity and has shaped the popular imagination ever since