Sir Walter Scott

Scottish novelist and poet, inventor of the historical novel, whose tales of medieval Scotland and England — including Ivanhoe — shaped Western historical fiction.

Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish novelist, poet, and historian who is generally credited with inventing the historical novel as a literary form. Born in Edinburgh in 1771, he first achieved fame as a poet — his narrative poems The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion made him the most popular poet in Britain before Byron arrived — before turning to fiction and transforming it utterly. His Waverley Novels, beginning in 1814, established the template for historical fiction that writers from Alexandre Dumas to George R. R. Martin have followed.

Ivanhoe, published in 1819, is perhaps his most widely read novel outside Scotland, a tale of knights, crusaders, and dispossessed Saxon nobles in medieval England, featuring the legendary Robin Hood as a secondary character. The book was a sensation on publication and did much to shape Victorian and later popular conceptions of the Middle Ages. It remains a rattling good yarn, combining romance, adventure, chivalry, and a surprisingly nuanced treatment of religious and ethnic conflict through its Jewish characters Rebecca and her father Isaac.

Scott’s influence on world literature is immense: he inspired the European Romantic movement, shaped the literary traditions of multiple nations, and established the conventions by which novelists use the past as a prism for exploring the present. He also nearly bankrupted himself in a publishing disaster and spent his final years writing furiously to pay off debts that were not legally his to bear — a display of personal honor that made him a national hero.