timpo ivanhoe

Timpo - Ivanhoe Series of Mounted Knights, comprising: Brian De Bois GuilbertThe title of Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe, first published in 1819, refers to its main protagonist Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the very embodiment of bravery and chivalry. However, the novel's fragmented structure in which the narrator breaches from time to time from the story offers other possibilities than heroic identification with a single character and allows other major characters to emerge: Rowena, Ivanhoe's love interest, and, most importantly, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca. Opposing blond versus dark, the novel depicts Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca as fascinating and certainly far more complex characters than Ivanhoe and Rowena.Given the website's main interest, this text aims to offer an appreciation of Bois-Guilbert's character as performed by Ciarán Hinds. Before going into detail, I will briefly recall the novel and its reception. Scott's work had a widespread influence on nineteenth-century literature and Ivanhoe is an eminent text which inspired other writers as well as composers, among them Gioacchino Rossini and Sir Arthur Sullivan, who both composed operas based on Ivanhoe's story. In 1850, Thackeray published a satirical sequel to the novel, called Rebecca and Rowena. The devouring love of the Templar Bois-Guilbert for the Jewish Rebecca became a focus of attention in Heinrich Marschner's opera Der Templer und die Jüdin (The Templar and the Jewess, 1829) and in Otto Nicolai's recently rediscovered Il Templario (The Templar, 1840). Rebecca, abducted by the Templar, is the subject of Leo Cognet's painting Rebecca and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert
 Still today that couple and the novel's central villain figure continue to exert great fascination. Christopher Vogler's and Elmer Damasco's manga Ravenskull reimagines Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca as lovers who escape after Rebecca's trial and try to find a powerful talisman. Last but not least, Bois-Guilbert's famous sentence "Look your last upon the sun" appears on t-shirts of the Swedish heavy metal band Opeth.

It is not surprising that such a popular novel mixing up adventure, spectacle and romantic love has been, since the silent era, adapted eleven times for the cinema or for television. The most famous is probably Richard Thorpe's adaptation from 1952 starring Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe, Elisabeth Taylor as Rebecca, Joan Fontaine as Rowena and George Sanders as Bois- Guilbert. A Soviet film from 1983, other British and American film and television productions and the British mini series from 1997 with Ciarán Hinds as Bois-Guilbert confirm its ongoing appeal.

However, the novel cannot be read as simplistic entertainment. Dealing with ethnicity and inter-ethnic love, it points at the role of the Jew as the eternal Other for the English in a critical manner and gives - despite the recourse to stereotypes applied to Jews such as cowardice and avarice - Isaac and Rebecca important speeches. Set against the background of a beginning Jewish emancipation, Scott's novel is an early criticism of anti-Semitism in England before George Eliot's Daniel Deronda