Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ivanhoe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Merits of Chivalry
Disguise and Discovery
Inheritance and Displacement
The Vulnerability and Power of Women
History vs. Romance
Summary
Analysis
With some difficulty, the Black Knight wrangles the harp back into tune, then asks the Cleric if he prefers a Southern French sirvente, a Northern French lai, or an English ballad. Protesting that he’s an Englishman through and through, the hermit opts for the last. And although the Black Knight is an amateur, his voice carries the mark of excellent instruction in the musical arts. He sings a song about a crusader returning from Palestine. This crusader stands beneath his lady’s window at twilight and tells her that he has returned bearing no treasure but his own weapons and intact honor. He tells her how his love for her inspired such brave fighting that foreign minstrels sing of her glory and her beauty, even though her knight remains anonymous. He begs her to open the gate and let him in and to reward him for his efforts.
The Black Knight’s love of singing—and his familiarity with the love-songs of France—again points toward King Richard, whose great-great grandfather was a famous southern French duke and poet and whose mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, patronized poets. If he is indeed the missing king, his familiarity with Saxon (incidentally, a historical fiction on the novel’s part as current understanding suggests that King Richard could not understand the language of the majority of his subjects) points to a much more positive attitude toward the native Saxons than his brother and his brother’s friends (like Sir Brian) have. The song he sings speaks of courtly love and chivalric value: in it, an unnamed knight (who may or may not represent Ivanhoe) returns from crusade penniless but with intact honor he offers as a gift to his beloved lady.
Themes
The Cleric listens with attention and appreciation, although he lightly criticizes the song for its chivalric—by implication Norman—theme of love and war. A Saxon song, he alleges, would see the knight returning to find that his sweetie had pragmatically given up on him rather than love him from afar. He takes the harp and sings a rousing song about a “Barefooted Friar” who entertains absent knights’ ladies and who receives rich hospitality, good food, and excellent wine wherever he goes. The Black Knight appreciates the song and teases the hermit about his own taste for “uncanonical pastimes.” The pair jovially exchange songs late into the night.
Although up to this point the Knight and the Cleric have been conversing in Saxon, the song betrays the Knight’s Norman identity. And as elsewhere, the book characterizes the Normans as excessively concerned with feelings, style, and aesthetics, while the Saxons are direct, practical, and manly. Although the Cleric seems to have many of the same vices as Prior Aymer, the book depicts him more positively since he has Saxon rather than Norman heritage and because he refuses to hide behind a veneer of holiness.
Themes
