"Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives!"
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, scheming brother John. The first of Scott's novels to address a purely English subject, Ivanhoe is set in a highly romanticized medieval world of tournaments and sieges, chivalry and adventure where dispossessed Saxons are pitted against their Norman overlords, and where the historical and fictional seamlessly merge.