Will edited Ivanhoe be a knight to remember?

Published on Sunday 19 February 2012 00:53

A NEW version of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, cut to less than half its length in a bid to make the wordy classic more accessible to modern readers, will be published in the summer.

Scottish publisher Luath Press, has taken on author David Purdie’s edited version of the medieval epic of jousting knights and courtly passion. It hopes to launch the book at Abbotsford, the Borders home of Scott, in June.

“Ivanhoe will ride again,” Purdie said. “It’s quite a risk for them. All kinds of screechings have come from the upper storeys of the ivory tower, but much support from elsewhere. I hope people who start with my version will move on to the real Scott.”

Scotland on Sunday revealed last month how Purdie, chairman of the century-old Sir Walter Scott Club, worked for 18 months to cut Scott’s prose from 180,000 words to a readable 80,000.

It met a bristling reaction from some academics. But after worldwide press coverage Luath is to publish both a print and e-book version.

Gavin MacDougall, director of Luath Press, said: “We are giving it a very modern cover, with a photograph of a jousting re-enactment, for the modern reader. I think it will attract a lot of interest.”

Scott was an international phenomenon in the 19th century, with Edinburgh’s train station named after his Waverley novels, but he dropped out of popularity in the 20th. He is regarded as the father of the historical novel, but hard going for contemporary readers, using medieval-style language in Ivanhoe.

Luath recently published new translations of three novels set in Scotland by the 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne, author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. They are also in a style meant to appeal to a modern readership.

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B K

Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 08:44 AM

Scott was no novelist, ha was a lawyer and an exceptionally long winded boring one. He wrote books with weak plots and as much interest as a Victorian legal textbook.

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busbyfth

Sunday, February 26, 2012 at 04:39 PM

In other words it is to be dummed down for the folk with short attention spans - let the potential readers stick to playing Bubbles on their iphones.

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