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The Arthur of the English Poets

By: Howard Maynadier | Book details

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TRISTRAM AND ISEULT

THE Tristram legend, the last of the chief stories of the romances to be closely connected with the Arthur story proper, is, with its overpowering passionate love, and its wild, sea-washed Celtic lands, the most poetical of them all. Unlike the other principal legends, it comes to us in three literary forms; it is the subject of three lais, and of metrical and prose romances both.

The earliest extant Tristram narrative is from the pen of an Anglo-Norman, or Norman, Béroul, who wrote early in the second half of the twelfth century.1 Only fragments of his poem exist. The lost Tristan of Chrétien de Troies, written shortly before 1160, is thought to have followed the same version of the

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1
For the date and the composition of the so-called Béroul fragments, see Ernest Muret, Le Roman de Tristan, Paris, 1903, pp. lxiii-lxxii. M. Muret thinks that the fragmentary poem preserved in MS. 2171 of the Bibliothéque Nationale was composed partly by Béroul, between 1165 and 1170, and partly by an anonymous jongleur (not unacquainted with Béroul, perhaps, though considerably younger), who composed the latter part of the poem in the last decade of the twelfth century. M. Muret is of the opinion that the authors may have got their knowledge of Great Britain from their sources or from hearsay; it is possible that neither of them was ever in England. A. Bossert , on the contrary, Tristan et Iseult, Paris, 1902, p. 173, thinks that if Béroul was not a native of Great Britain, he passed most of his life there. Cf. also W. H. Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer, New York and London, 1906, pp. 201 ff.

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