SOURCE: Brockington, Mary. “Tristran and Amelius: False and True Repentance.” Modern Language Review 93, no. 2 (April 1998): 305-20.

[In the following essay, Brockington explicates a scene from the Tristan legend in which King Mark discovers the sleeping lovers in the forest, exploring the different approaches to the episode taken by Eilhart, Béroul, and Thomas.]

The scene in the Morrois forest, where the wronged husband, King Marc, sees Tristran and Yseut, the fugitive lovers, asleep, decides not to kill them, and retires silently, leaving tokens of his presence, is one of the most important in the whole Tristran tradition.¹ The verse redactors, particularly Beroul, present it in highly dramatic form, and it appears in manuscript and textile illustrations of the story. In terms of plot, it is pivotal; it closes one series of episodes (blood on the sheets, capture, escape) allowing Yseut's eventual return to Marc, and prepares the way for the next series (Tristran's exile, returns, and eventual death). The French prose redactor discarded it, as its softening of Marc's harsh attitude was inconsistent with his reworking, and instead has Marc discover Yseut alone and recapture her; yet he discarded Beroul's version with reluctance, retaining details for use in other scenes (appropriate or not).² The earlier form of the scene was not lost, however. An Italian who adapted the Prose version reincorporated a variant, probably derived from Thomas, at a different point in his Tavola Ritonda (Chapters 66-67), and the redactor of a late passage in the Suite du Merlin used Beroul's version in the story of Pelleas, Gawain, and Arcade, later to be adapted by Malory.³ In terms of narrative technique, too, the role of this scene is pivotal. That the sword symbolic of chastity should be deceptive represents an innovation in the history of the Separating Sword motif, an innovation that adds a third element to an already bivalent sexual symbol: henceforth the sword (in addition to representing concepts of military activity, authority, and punishment) can symbolize sexuality, chastity, and also adultery.⁴ The general sense of the episode is clear enough, but paradoxically the detailed interpretation of this crucial scene has proved contentious. Scholars have made numerous attempts to explain its meaning, but none has succeeded in resolving all the problems. In previous articles I have examined the sources of the scene's individual components;⁵ in this final part of the trilogy, I offer a further set of suggestions towards an understanding of the scene as a whole.

Chief among the difficulties raised by the discovery scene are not so much the nature of the tokens exchanged as first, the question why Marc should become convinced of the lovers' innocence, and secondly, the function of the scene in the whole narrative. Jean Marx called attention to the incongruity of the King's gesture in using his glove to shield Yseut's face from the sun, calling it ‘un raffinement de délicatesse un peu étonnant, malgré tout, chez un monarque qui, quelques mois avant, livrait sans scrupule la reine au bûcher, puis aux lépreux’.⁶ The last speech Marc had addressed to Tristran was unequivocal:

‘Trop par a ci veraie enseigne;
Provez estes’, ce dist li rois,
‘Vostre escondit n'i vaut un pois.
Certes, Tristran, demain, ce quit,
Soiez certains d'estre destruit.’

(l. 778)

He knows beyond all doubt that the lovers have been conducting an adulterous relationship. Is Beroul really trying to tell us that he now believes them to be innocent? The fugitives' clothing, and the sword that separates them, it is true, both proclaim that they have not had intercourse immediately before falling asleep, but otherwise their attitude suggests the exact opposite of a chaste relationship:

Oez com il se sont couchiez:
Desoz le col Tristran a mis
Son braz, et l'autre, ce m'est vis,
Li out par dedesus geté;
Estroitement l'ot acolé,
Et il la rot de ses braz çainte;
Lor amistié ne fu pas fainte.
Les bouches furent pres asises,
Et neporquant si ot devises
Que n'asenbloient pas ensenble.

(l. 1816)

Beroul has gone out of his way to describe such a close embrace that it is hard to see where the Separating Sword could have fitted in, and the similarity to the conventional lovers' pose as portrayed by Chrétien de Troyes is striking: ‘Boche a boche antre braz gisoient, ¦ Come cil qui mout s'antramoient’ (Erec, ll. 2477-78; trans. p. 33) and

Ensi jurent tote la nuit,
Li uns lez l'autre, bouche a bouche,
Juisqu'al main que li jors aproche.
Tant li fist la nuit de solas
Que bouche a boche, bras a bras,
Dormirent tant qu'il ajorna

(Perceval, l. 2064; trans. p. 402)

The behaviour of Tristran and Yseut is clearly intended to be ambiguous, if not utterly compromising, and it is hard to credit even Marc with such gullibility. As for the function of the scene, commentators have been puzzled by what Gertrude Schoepperle harshly condemned as its ‘grotesque inconsequence’.⁷ In the Thomas-based versions Marc is moved by his discovery to recall the lovers to court.⁸ In Beroul, the King returns covertly to his apartments and, in Schoepperle's words, ‘seems to forget the incident immediately and completely. The redactor fails signally to utilize it for the subsequent narrative’.⁹ Eilhart's version is similar to Beroul's, though he does make his King refer to the discovery when the fugitives ask for reconciliation.¹⁰ Beroul, however, is above all a skilled and careful narrator. His material is not thrown together. It is an artistically organized construction, with (as far as can be judged from the extant fragment) a minimum of narrative loose ends, and serious anomalies are given thoughtful attention by a poet who kept the requirements of his later episodes in mind. For instance, for Husdent to function as a love-token (as he does in Eilhart's version, and he has no other narrative function in either poem), he must be given to Yseut before the return to court; therefore he must be with the lovers in the Morrois, but he cannot realistically leave Lancien with them; therefore he must escape later and be taught to keep silence so as not to betray the lovers. Similarly, the whole ambiguous oath episode is totally implausible, considered from the rational point of view (an important ceremony sited across a bog, and a queen—a queen on trial—whose escort crosses safely but leaves her to fend for herself, so that she feels forced to mount, of all creatures, a leper). Beroul distracts his audience's attention from this improbable story-line by the sheer exuberance of his elaborate descriptions and salacious comedy. In both episodes, narrative necessity has been not merely accommodated, narrative weakness not merely disguised; they have been used positively to create respectively an emotive and a comic triumph. It is inconceivable that the same author should have expended so much effort on the discovery scene if it had no function in his plot. If that function is not apparent to us, perhaps it is we who are at fault, not Beroul, and we should look at his work in some different way.

The many previous interpretations have been of varying plausibility. Jean Markale, for instance, adducing the personal nature of a knight's equipment, suggested that Marc removes his nephew's sword so that Tristran will be forced to give back Yseut in order to redeem his weapon: that the gesture represents ‘une invitation à échanger la reine’.¹¹ This fanciful hypothesis merits little consideration. Beroul portrays Marc as credulous, but not as a complete nincompoop. Nowhere in the whole Tristran tradition is its hero portrayed as capable of such baseness, nor is any other character made to think him so capable. Also flawed is Alain Corbellari's attempt to relate the three tokens of Marc's presence (sword, glove, and ring) to Dumézil's three functions.¹² Such a schema is of course possible only if all three tokens are original to the Tristran plot, but the exchange of rings is unique to Beroul and almost certainly introduced by him, much too late in the chain of transmission for this interpretation to be valid.

The interpretation that has found most general acceptance is that of Jean Marx, who relates the tokens to ceremonies of feudal investiture, and sees the episode as Marc reasserting his rightful authority over his wife and his vassal.¹³ This careful study has much to commend it, and the significances Marx attaches to the tokens may have influenced the original author's selection, particularly in the case of the gloves (curious objects to choose just as a sun-shade). It does not, however, address either of the main problems (Marc's excessive gullibility, and his failure to act upon his discovery of the lovers' apparent innocence). More important still, Marc's presentation and removal of the tokens surely operates in the wrong direction, not convincingly explained away by the concept of saisine. I shall discuss this point more fully later.

Alberto Vàrvaro, commenting on Marx's views in a sensitive study of the episode, asserts:

The juridical element takes a subordinate place in [Beroul's] poetic treatment and that the human and affective aspects of the tale are for him considerably more important than the social aspects. It might well be true that in the minds of the narrator and his audience, attuned to the customs of their time, the sword, the glove and the rings did have some feudal significance. But first and foremost they are emblems of a human relationship.

He sees the exchange of rings and the placing of the gloves as signs of affection and tenderness, and the exchange of swords as a gesture of friendship, concluding: ‘The act of exchanging rings and swords is a symbol in Beroul, but not (or not only) of a feudal relationship: it is chiefly the sad and moving symbol of an indissolubility of bonds, of a tragic and unresolvable emotional situation.’¹⁴ Perceptive and appealing though this interpretation is, it still does not answer the basic problems of improbability and inconsequence.

Various other possible interpretations of the tokens also seem to lead up a blind alley. The gloves might be thought to represent a challenge, as a glove does when Tristran fights the Morholt, and also in the Anglo-Norman version of Amicus et Amelius, which is roughly contemporary with Beroul,¹⁵ though this suggestion would carry more weight if the gloves were left on Tristran's face, not on Yseut's. In support of it is the fact that a sword also can represent a kind of challenge: in Beowulf (ll. 1142-44), the son of Hunlaf rouses Hengest to action with the ‘accustomed remedy’, a sword placed across Hengest's knees. Such an interpretation, however, accords ill with both Marc's declared non-hostile intent and Tristran's reaction. The knight would no doubt have felt obliged to accept a challenge, rather than flee in terror as he does.

Conversely, the giving up of a sword is a well-established act of surrender, offered for instance by Owein to Gwalchmai (‘The Lady of the Fountain’, p. 172), but still in use in the twentieth century: in the Second World War, fought as it was with the most modern of weapons, the British and Japanese commanders in turn used a sword as a token of their submission. More pertinently, in the episode in a late part of the Suite du Merlin mentioned earlier, the love-lorn Pelleas discovers that Gawain has betrayed his trust, and leaves his sword, in a gesture remodelled from Beroul, as an indication that he has discovered the sleeping couple and had them in his power. Malory's Pelleas similarly resists the urge to act dishonourably himself by killing the couple in their sleep, but leaves his sword in a more threatening gesture ‘overthwarte bothe their throtis’. In both cases the discovery is one of guilt, not of apparent innocence, and Pelleas is inhibited from taking vengeance only by his own courtoisie. He has no further need for his sword, as he intends to take to his bed and die of grief, so his gesture in leaving it behind can be seen to include an aspect of surrender; he is admitting defeat and withdrawing from the battle for his mistress's affection. That the sword functions simultaneously as a phallic symbol adds a further dimension to its significance, which may well also be a factor in the Tristran, and explains why the sword is the only one of Beroul's three tokens that has been retained for use in the Pelleas story. This interpretation would explain Marc's failure to follow up his discovery, but he can hardly be surrendering his marital sexual rights to Tristran if he believes that the fugitives are living a life of innocent chastity, and Tristran and Yseut certainly do not interpret his gestures in this way. Since any attempt to explain the scene based on an analysis of the individual tokens seems unable to answer the two main problems (Marc's excessive gullibility and the lack of a clear function for the scene), a different approach is called for. Let us examine the scene as a whole, from the point of view of Beroul the master-narrator.

The stories told by Beroul, Eilhart, and Thomas, superficially so similar, are sharply differentiated by each author's approach: so much is obvious, but the differences of style extend beyond expression to narrative technique, and give valuable clues to each author's conception of his story. Thomas seems to have indicated his characters' thoughts and emotions by means of lengthy, refined explorations of the issues involved. Accordingly (at least as represented by Gottfried's adaptation), Marc's deception results from a cynical plan carefully thought out by the lovers beforehand. Eilhart's terse, vigorous style relied heavily on interaction between narrator and audience (the role of the performer and the nature of the expected audience in these orally based works should not be neglected). His work is characterized by a vein of humour that is sardonic, often coarse and salacious, and sometimes expressed in mock-serious terms. In the discovery scene we can imagine the exaggeratedly innocent facial expression, the knowing winks, the pregnant pauses and mock-modest hesitations with which the narrator assured his barrack-room listeners that each night in the forest Tristran and Yseut did no more than talk before sleeping. The skill with which Eilhart builds up to his climax is better conveyed in this instance by Danielle Buschinger's verse rendering than by J. W. Thomas's English prose:

lorsqu'ils s'étaient couchés
et avaient parlé ensemble
jusqu'à ce que cela leur parût assez,
il tirait son épée du fourreau
et la posait entre elle et lui;
le héros ne voulait y renoncer
pour rien au monde:
chaque fois qu'ils devaient dormir,
l'épée était entre eux.
C'était une étrange preuve d'esprit guerrier.

(l. 4583)

Properly performed, the timing of these lines, with the responsive sniggers culminating in a guffaw at the ‘fremder manneß sin’ (the ‘strange custom for a man’) would do credit to any music-hall stand-up comic. Eilhart does not mean that he does not understand the meaning of the Separating Sword symbol inherited from his source: he means that he understands it only too well, but considers it inappropriate, incongruous, indeed unbelievable in the circumstances. He knows, as well as Marc does, that Tristran and Yseut are lovers. He presents the sword motif as a dirty joke.

Beroul's technique is less polarized than those of either Eilhart or Thomas, but just as distinctive. His sword is as deceptive in its effect as Thomas's, and as inappropriate in its intent as Eilhart's, but its accidental presence is viewed as an act of Providence. Like Eilhart, he gives his audience action, not analysis. Like Thomas, though, he is interested in conveying emotion, but he does so chiefly by indirect narrative means, not by discursive monologues; he uses associations of ideas to implant suggestions in the minds of his characters and his audience. Parallelism of structure is important to Beroul: his narrative contains a number of doublets, and often one has a positive aspect, one a negative, such as the two visits to the hermit Ogrin. As a good conteur, he knows a wide variety of stories and component motifs, drawing on them at will but adapting them to suit his own narrative purposes. What is more, he expects his audience to know these stories too, at least in outline. The comic effect of Marc's deception by Yseut's ambiguous oath is emphasized by Beroul's importation of King Arthur to oversee the ceremony and lecture Marc on his behaviour. The ironic effect of this scene is considerably enhanced if the audience sees Arthur simultaneously as the type of justice and chivalry, and also as the great cuckold. Dual symbolism, irony, and ambiguity of this kind characterize Beroul's work, but are most effective if, as in the ambiguous oath episode, understanding of the bivalent role can be assumed, and does not have to be explained in heavy-handed detail.¹⁶ Finally, Beroul has a sharp eye for inconsistencies and anomalies, distracting attention from implausible details in his narrative where he cannot avoid them, but in either case making constructive use of the necessity. …

Notes

1. Except in direct quotations, I have standardized on the forms Marc, Tristran, Yseut, Morholt, and Beroul throughout this article, although a wide variety of spellings is found in the texts. Use of the name Beroul is simply a convenient shorthand, implying nothing more dogmatic about authorship than ‘the person who first put together this particular episode as it is preserved in the version now known as Beroul's’. For a number of recent editions of Beroul's text, and details of other texts cited, see the list at the end of the article: references in this article are to Ewert's edition.

2. In Beroul, Marc is too courtly to kill Tristran when he has him at his mercy; in the Prose the positions are reversed, and it is a sign of courtliness in Tristran that he refuses to take advantage of the uncourtly Marc when he stands over the King, sword raised ready to strike. Later, the lovers are discovered in bed together (in words that echo Beroul, lines 1807-10, 1995-2000) ‘en braies et en chemise’. The clothing is here quite inappropriate (this is the discovery for which they are condemned to death), yet nothing more is made of it; text, ii, 118, §514 and ii, 142, §543; translation, pp. 129 and 154.

3. Sommer, pp. 33-34; Malory, i, 170; for commentary on both episodes, see F. Whitehead, ‘On Certain Episodes in the Fourth Book of Malory's “Morte Darthur”’, Medium Aevum, 2 (1933), 199-216 (especially p. 205) and Malory, iii, 1361-62.

4. I have in preparation a study of the origin and development of the Separating Sword motif (Thompson T 351).

5. ‘The Separating Sword in the Tristran Romances: Possible Celtic Analogues Re-Examined’, MLR, [Modern Language Review,] 91 (1996), 281-300, and ‘Discovery in the Morrois: Antecedents and Analogues’, MLR 93 (1998), 1-15.

6. ‘La surprise des amants par Marc’, in Jean Marx, Nouvelles recherches sur la littérature arthurienne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1965), pp. 288-97 (p. 294), first published as ‘Observations sur un épisode de la légende de Tristan’, in Recueil de travaux offert à M. Clovis Brunel, 2 vols (Paris: Société de l'École des Chartes, 1955), ii, 265-73.

7. Tristan and Isolt: A Study of the Sources of the Romance, 2 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Baer, 1913; 2nd edn, New York: Franklin, 1960), i, 262.

8. Saga, trans. by Schach, p. 104. Gottfried, trans. by Hatto, p. 274. Sir Tristrem, ll. 2562-69.

9. Beroul, ll. 2055-62; Schoepperle, Tristan and Isolt I, 262.

10. Trans. by J. W. Thomas, p. 102.

11. La femme celte: mythe et sociologie (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 298. Markale's other suggestion, that ‘Mark ne peut pas tuer Tristan parce qu'une des particularités de Tristan était “que quiconque lui tirait du sang mourait, que quiconque à qui il tirait du sang mourait aussi”. Par conséquent, Mark, s'il avait frappé Tristan, même pendant le sommeil de celui-ci, apparemment en toute sécurité, était quand même voué à la mort’ is equally flawed. There is no justification for reading this motif back from the Welsh Ystorya Trystan into the twelfth-century continental poems, even if we assume that the sixteenth-century manuscript version of the Ystorya records a long-established tradition, which is by no means certain.

12. ‘La légende tristanienne et la mythologie indo-européenne: à propos du Gant de verre de Philippe Walter’, Vox Romanica, 52 (1993), 133-46 (pp. 137-41). It is unfortunate that Corbellari does not appear to know Jean Batany's work on the ‘ganz de voirre’ in his article, ‘Le manuscrit de Béroul: un texte difficile et un univers mental qui nous dérange’, in La légende de Tristan au Moyen Age, ed. by Danielle Buschinger (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1982), pp. 35-48; it would have been instructive to see his comments.

13. See n. 6 above.

14. Beroul's ‘Romance of Tristran’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 115-16, trans. by John C. Barnes from Il ‘Roman de Tristran’ di Béroul (Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1963). For the presentation of a sword as a gesture of friendship, see Roland, laisse 48, but compare laisses 49-50, where a helmet and jewels are similarly presented; all three gestures are gifts given for their material value rather than their significance as abstract symbols.

15. Saga, trans. by Schach, p. 41; Gottfried, trans. by Hatto, p. 128; Amys e Amillyoun, ed. by Fukui, ll. 385-88, trans. by Weiss, p. 165.

16. This presumably implies a post-Chrétien date for that part of the Beroul text, if not for the whole, but for evidence of an irreverent view of Arthur in early Welsh material, see Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Culhwch ac Olwen, the Triads, Saints' Lives’, in The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. by Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 73-95 (pp. 81-84), and Rachel Bromwich, ‘The Tristan of the Welsh’, in The Arthur of the Welsh, pp. 209-28 (pp. 214-15).