• Text size
  • Send this article to a friend
  • Print this article

knights getting shorter

Ivanhoe has suffered cutbacks.

The novel by Sir Walter Scott has been hacked from 179,000 words to 80,000. Scott's writing style has been retained – verily, lest there be convulsions mongst professors of Scottish literature – but tens of thousands of commas and semi-colons have been laid waste; the punctuation has been brought up to date; this is me using semi-colons to show what old Walter wrote like but lacking the richness of language.