The Talisman

The Talisman is one of the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott. Published in 1825 as the second of his Tales of the Crusaders, the first being The Betrothed, it is set during the Third Crusade and centres on the relationship between Richard I of England and Saladin.


(At the beginning of April 1824, two months before he completed Redgauntlet, Scott envisaged that it would be followed by a four-volume publication containing two tales, at least one of which would be based on the Crusades. He began composition of the first story, The Betrothed, in June, but it made slow progress and came to a halt in the second volume at some point in the autumn after criticisms by James Ballantyne. Scott then changed course and began work on the companion novel The Talisman, and the first two chapters and part of the third were set in type by the end of the year. January 1825 was full of distractions, but a decision to resume The Betrothed was made in mid-February 1825 and it was essentially complete by mid-March. The way was then clear for the main composition of The Talisman which proceeded briskly. Its first volume was completed in April and its second at the very end of May or beginning of June.


Five clearly identifiable sources have been located for leading elements in The Talisman. The disguised Saladin's account of the origin of the Kurds is taken from the Bibliotheque orientale by Barthélemy d'Herbelot (1777‒79). The character of Leopold of Austria and his tearing down of Richard's standard was prompted by the Anglo-Norman romance Richard Coer de Lyon. The attempted assassination of Richard is recounted in The History of the Crusades by Charles Mills (1820). Saladin's beheading of Amaury comes from The History of the Knights of Malta by the Abbé de Vertot (1728). And the talisman itself is the Lee Penny used to cure people and animals up to Scott's time and preserved at the Lee near Lanark in the Scottish Borders. Scott's sceptical attitude to the Crusades, and his presentation of Richard and Saladin, follow three historians: David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Mills. (wikipedia.org)