[In the following excerpt, Schofield compares the versions of the Tristan legend written by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas and the Norman Béroul and offers a discussion of Thomas's version, including commentary on the poet's form and style.]

… It is appropriate that our study of the Tristram stories should follow directly that of the Breton lays, for in no legendary cycle is the influence of this form of Celtic material more manifest. Several of the most charming episodes in which the famous lovers appear are easily detachable from their surroundings and reveal a previous existence in the form of isolated lays. And, indeed, Marie de France records an incident in Tristram's life based on an earlier lay, the composition of which is ascribed to the hero himself. The good knight, after a year's exile from court, gives way to his longings and returns secretly to Cornwall, where he hides himself in the forest near Ysolt's abode. He carves a message on a piece of wood and puts it in the road where he knows she is to pass. In this he declares that he cannot live without her: it is with them as with the honeysuckle and the hazel, which, once intertwined, no one can separate without destroying both.

This lay, written down by Marie in England, was previously recorded in English under the name Gotelef (honeysuckle), and is perhaps connected with an Anglo-Saxon lyric, not attached to Tristram, The Lover's Message. England, indeed, can well claim the credit of preserving, if not of originating, the absorbing tale of Tristram's love. Not only have we positive statements that it was current among the English, and put by them into poetic form; we know also that it was written down in French by two Norman poets, one of whom we are pretty certain was born in England, while the other may have lived there. And it is on one or the other of these two versions that almost all the later forms are based. The two poets were of different dispositions and wrote in a different spirit. The Tristan of Thomas presents us with what has been termed the English, or Germanic, version of the story; that of Béroul, the French, or Breton. Thus all poems about our hero may suitably be treated in two groups. A characteristic difference between them consists in the fact that while the French group represents King Mark as reigning over Cornwall alone and as contemporary with Arthur, in the English Arthur has already passed away and Mark is king both of Cornwall and England.

Thomas's poem is but partially preserved in fragments (in Anglo-Norman handwriting) discovered in England, Germany, and Italy—some 3000 lines in all—only about one-sixth of the work, but sufficient to allow a just estimate of the author's style. The defect, however, is partly remedied by the existence of two early translations of the work. Its scope is easily determined from the faithful, if abridged, version made in Old Norse prose in 1226 by a friar Robert for King Hákon, that insatiable reader of French romance. Its style is more apparent in the translation by an admirable German poet, Gottfried von Strassburg, made early in the thirteenth century. Gottfried did not succeed in nearly 20,000 verses in bringing his work to an end. The last third of the story was added later by two other poets (Ulrich von Türheim and Heinrich von Freiberg), who, working independently of each other, utilised the French version, and record some incidents of which the source is lost. Nowhere is the story of Tristram so well preserved as in this composite German version. Thence Wagner got the inspiration for his noble music-drama on the theme. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, Thomas's version was also used as the basis of a Middle English poem, Sir Tristram, which was first edited, with extensive introduction and illustration, by Sir Walter Scott. Before 1200 an interesting short poem called La Folie Tristan was composed in England. The author represents the hero, dressed as a fool, recalling the experiences of his life, and by this device gives a fairly complete review of the episodes of the legend.

On the other hand, forming the so-called French group, we have a long fragment by the Norman Béroul; then, a lost poem, which was translated into German, c. 1180, by Eilhart von Oberg, closely resembling Béroul's account in the beginning but with a unique conclusion, especially valuable because the French original has disappeared; and finally, an immense prose romance, a conglomerate of all sorts of material factitiously joined together in the course of the thirteenth century. Crestien de Troyes and an author called La Chièvre also wrote episodic poems on Tristram, both of which are lost. Crestien's patronesses undoubtedly had a repugnance for compromise in love; and since Ysolt favoured her uxorious husband while adoring another, Crestien may not have presented her in a favourable light. It was from the French version, in the degenerate form of the prose romance, that Malory drew a large part of his famous work.

We now return to Thomas, who may be said to represent the highest achievement of any English poet in the twelfth century. Gaston Paris, whose words always carry with them the weight of a great authority, has made an illuminating comparison between Thomas and his contemporary Crestien, as follows:

Genius of different kinds appeals to us in these two poets. The Frenchman endeavours especially to make his narrative interesting, amusing even, to please the society for which it is intended; he is “social,” truly worldly; he smiles at the adventures he relates, and skilfully lets it appear that he is not taken in by them; he strives to give to his style a constant elegance, a uniform polish, wherein sparkle here and there words pointed by wit; above all, he wishes to please, and thinks of his public more than of his subject. The Englishman feels with the heroes of his tale; his heart participates in their griefs and joys; he searches the hidden recesses of their souls; his style, embarrassed and often obscure when he narrates adventures that do not thoroughly interest him, becomes living and full of nuances when he tries to express the inner feelings, which alone touch him; he writes for himself, and for those who have the same emotional needs as he, much more than for a public sensitive above all to the talent of the narrator and indifferent to the subject of the narrative. It is unfortunate that we cannot compare the Tristan of Crestien and that of Thomas; we can at least imagine the difference which the two works would present: the poet of Champagne would show us gracefully poised on a brilliant stand, and carved by a skilled and delicate hand, the cup from which the two lovers drank the drink of love; the Anglo-Norman poet has emptied it, and we feel still trembling in his lines the frenzy that filled his heart.

Tristram was celebrated in early saga, before he was connected with Arthur, as a hero of extraordinary and varied accomplishment, as a warrior and hunter, as well as a lover. He is, moreover, the most famous of all the harpers of romance. Over and over again he is pictured at the royal court making melodious music, and therewith singing lays so full of tenderness and passion that the breasts of his auditors swelled with emotion. It was thus that he stimulated the affection of Ysolt, the beautiful princess of Ireland, to whom he journeyed overseas as a stranger for the healing of his wounds. Thus he won her favour when together they sat in the quiet bower of her palace, and he taught her so skilfully the mysteries of his art that soon her hands became proficient like his, and struck the chords with the same power to ravish the senses and fill with delight. So, in words that haunt the memory, Thomas describes Ysolt later in her loneliness singing to her harp the lay of Guiron and his lady, who suffered even more than she and Tristram from the evil contrivance of foes.

La dame chante doucement,
La vois acorde a l’estrument;
Les mains sont beles, li lais bons,
Douce la vois et bas li tons.

These words exhale the sweetest perfume of romance, under the influence of which we are prone to free ourselves from workaday principles of behaviour, and abandon the conventional standards of commonplace life. Were it but a passing or a frivolous passion that the two cherished, we should be shocked by the flagrant violation of domestic honour that it entailed. But we have a deep conviction of the inevitability of it all. The burden of Tristram's song when with Ysolt of the White Hands in Brittany sums up the whole tragedy of the true lovers' life:

Ysolt ma drue, Ysolt m’amie,
En vus ma mort, en vus ma vie.

Here, we feel, is an attachment over which the subjects had no control: from the magic beaker they drank down death together with rapturous love. As Thomas says:

Tristrans murut pur sue amur
E la bele Ysolt pur tendrur.

The story of Tristram and Ysolt is too well known to require a detailed analysis. But a few passages from Thomas's poem (in Miss Weston's felicitous translation of Gottfried's version) may be quoted here. The first pictures the lovers, banished from court and dwelling alone in a solitary retreat, where all nature ministers to their joy.

“In the dewy morning they gat them forth to the meadow where grass and flowers alike had been refreshed. The glade was their pleasure-ground—they wandered hither and thither, hearkening each other's speech, and waking the song of the birds by their footsteps. Then they turned them to where the cold clear spring rippled forth, and sat beside its stream, and watched its flow, till the sun grew high in the heavens, and they felt its heat. Then they betook them to the linden: its branches offered them a welcome shelter, the breezes were sweet and soft beneath its shade, and the couch at its feet was decked with the fairest grass and flowers.

“There they sat side by side, those true lovers, and told each other tales of those who ere their time had suffered and died for love. They mourned the fate of the sad Queen Dido; of Phyllis of Thrace; and Biblis, whose heart brake for love. With such tales did they beguile the time. But when they would think of them no more, they turned them again to their grotto and took the harp, and each in their turn sang to it softly lays of love and longing; now Tristram would strike the harp while Isolt sang the words, then it would be the turn of Isolt to make music while Tristram's voice followed the notes. Full well might it be called the Love Grotto.”

Thither King Mark is led, even as Guingamor to his joyful meeting with his fairy mistress, by the hunt of the mysterious stag that lures him ever on in apparently fruitless pursuit. He is rewarded by seeing the queen, “more beautiful than a fairy,” for whom he could not but yearn. Stealthily the king nears the bower where he knows the lovers to be, and climbs to the little window high in the wall. A tenderly moving sight meets his eyes. There they lay, the entranced pair, on a crystal couch, a naked sword between them.

“He gazed on his heart's delight, Isolt, and deemed that never before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleeping, with a flush as of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart, a little heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by the spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A ray of sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so fair and so lovable as now. And when he saw how the sunlight fell upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, and so he took grass and leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith, and spake a blessing on his love, and commended her to God, and went his way, weeping.”

No doubt the “fair adventure” of the love-grotto was the subject of an independent lay, and the same is perhaps the case with the two following episodes in the hero's life. In each we detect a parallel to the general situation already noted in the Franklin's Tale, the indefinite boon granted rashly and fulfilled with sorrow.

To the court of Cornwall comes one day an Irish knight, a former lover of Ysolt, in the guise of a minstrel. After meat, the king bids him show his skill on the lute, and promises him whatever reward he shall ask. Thus requested, the knight begins at once. He sings the king's favourite lays, one after the other, and then craves his boon. When he names it, there is consternation at court, for in his arrogance he claims the queen. Rather than be forsworn, Mark hands over to him the fair Ysolt, and she must needs follow him to the seashore, where his boat lies ready to depart when the tide shall rise. Fortunately, before then news of the event reaches Tristram, who makes his way hastily to the haven-side. Harp in hand, he approaches the tent where the queen sits weeping bitterly. At the request of the knight he plays the lay of Dido to banish the lady's sorrow. He plays so sweetly that the notes enter Ysolt's heart, and her captor too listens eagerly. The water rises, but they heed not—so insinuating are the sounds. Finally, the tide runs so strong that they can only reach the boat on horseback, and Ysolt insists on being borne by the minstrel. Once in Tristram's arms she is, of course, free, and the traitorous Irish knight must return home, ashamed and sorrowful.

The second tale is permeated with the mysterious magic of the Otherworld. It tells how Tristram won from Duke Gilan of Wales his little dog Petit-Criu, “a fairy dog, that had been sent to the Duke from the land of Avalon, as love-token, by a fay.”

“No tongue could tell the marvel of it; ’twas of such wondrous fashion that no man might say of what colour it was. If one looked on the breast and saw nought else, one had said ’twas white as snow, yet its thighs were greener than clover, and its sides, one red as scarlet, the other more yellow than saffron. Its underparts were even as azure, while above ’twas mingled so that no one colour might be distinguished; ’twas neither green nor red, white nor black, yellow nor blue, and yet was there somewhat of all these therein; ’twas a fair purple brown. And if one saw this strange creature of Avalon against the lie of the hair there would be no man wise enough to tell its colour, so manifold and so changing were its hues.

“Around its neck was a golden chain, and therefrom hung a bell, which rang so sweet and clear that when it began to chime Tristram forgot his sadness and his sorrow, and the longing for Isolt that lay heavy on his heart. So sweet was the tone of the bell that no man heard it but he straightway forgot all that aforetime had troubled him. …

“Tristram stretched forth his hand and stroked the dog, and it seemed to him that he handled the softest silk, so fine and so smooth was the hair to his touch. And the dog neither growled nor barked nor showed any sign of ill-temper, however one might play with it; nor, as the tale goes, was it ever seen to eat or drink.

“When the dog was borne away, Tristram's sorrow fell upon him as heavy as before, and to it was added the thought how he might by any means win Petit-Criu, the fairy dog, for his lady the queen, that thereby her sorrow and her longing might be lessened. Yet he could not see how this might be brought about either by craft or by prayer, for he knew well that Gilan would not have parted with it for his life. This desire and longing lay heavy on his heart, but he gave no outward sign of his thought.”

Now the Duke was in perpetual fear of a giant magician, Argan, and he promises Tristram whatever he may ask of him, if he will rid him of his terrible foe. This the hero accomplishes after a fierce fight, and then demands the fairy dog as his reward. The Duke pleads with him to take anything else, but when Tristram insists, he yields. “Alas! my lord Tristram,” he says, “if that be indeed thy will, I will keep faith with thee and do thy pleasure. Neither craft nor cunning am I minded to use. Though it be greatly against my will, yet what thou desirest, that shall be done.”

Tristram, overjoyed, sends the precious dog, hidden cunningly in a lute, to the queen, explaining how he had won it, at great peril to his life, for her sake. At first she had it ever with her, and it brought her great comfort. The bell's wonderful sweet chime made her forget her grief. But when she bethought herself that while she thus rejoiced her lover was in sorrow, she upbraided herself bitterly. The bell she tore from the dog's neck, and no longer had it power to sooth a downcast heart. Yet Ysolt was now the better pleased, for she would not be comforted when Tristram was sad.

Thomas wrote in simple, flowing, octosyllabic couplets, the usual metre of French romances. A much more complicated, and to our ears much less pleasing, metre characterises the Northern English poem Sir Tristram, which is based on his poem. This work was obviously written with hearers, not readers, especially in mind. It has all the marks of being prepared for recitation by a minstrel at a public gathering.

The opening stanza, which will serve to illustrate the metre, gives us some would-be indication of the source of the work.

I was a[t Erceldoun,]
With Thomas spoke I there;
There heard I read in roun (private),
Who Tristram got and bore;
Who was king with crown,
And who him fostered (of) yore,
And who was bold baron
As their elders were.
                                        By yere
Thomas tells in town
These adventures, as they were.

From this passage it would appear that one Thomas of Erceldoun was accustomed to tell in public the adventures of Sir Tristram, and that our author had the advantage of conversing with him in private on the same matter. This Thomas had a remarkable fictitious career. He was called “Rhymer,” and apparently justified the name. His personality is hazy; but there seems to be good evidence to attest his existence as an historical person living towards the close of the thirteenth century. In a very interesting ballad-romance, dating from about 1400, he is said to have gone, like Launfal, to dwell with the queen of fairyland, whose favour he had won. She, however, is said to have conducted him after a while back to this world, and before leaving him here to have granted him the gift of soothsaying, and told him much of future events. On this account be very soon was associated with Merlin, and for centuries a great deal of influential prophetical literature was current under his name. Indeed, it is said that the “Whole Prophecie” of Merlin, Thomas Rymour, and others, which was collected and issued as early as 1603, continued to be printed as a chap-book down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when few farm-houses in Scotland were without it. There is no evidence, however, that this Thomas had anything to do with the composition of Sir Tristram. It can never be proved, of course, that he did not write a poem on that hero; but it seems highly probable that he was connected with the particular poem before us only because of the identity of his name with that of the Anglo-Norman author of the original version, it being well understood that the popularity of the poem would be appreciably increased by reference to so distinguished an authority as the prophet of Erceldoun.

Robert of Brunne, in his chronicle written c. 1340, is thought to bear witness to the fact that Sir Tristram was attributed to Thomas of Erceldoun even in his time. In an important passage, in which he reproaches those who used such artificial metres and strange phraseology that the common people could hardly understand what they meant, he says:

I see in song, in sedgeyng tale,
Of Erceldoun and of Kendale,
None them say as they them wrought,
And in their saying it seemeth nought.

Thereupon follows directly a plain reference to the English poem, which is apparently contrasted with the work of the original author Thomas (neither of Erceldoun nor of Kendale), though this is not the inference usually drawn from the passage:

That mayst thou hear in Sir Tristrem,
Over gests it has the (e)steem,
Over all that is or was.
If men it said as made Thomas;
But I hear it no man so say,
That of some couplet some is away;
So their fair saying herebeforn,
So their travail near forlorn.
They say it for pride and nobley,
That none were such as they;
And all that they would overwhere,
All that ilk will now forfare.
They said in so quaint English,
That many a one wots not what it is.

The last lines may be taken to refer to the Sir Tristram we are discussing, which is certainly written in a very complicated metre, and so succinctly that it but ill reproduces the couplets of the earlier version. It would have required a great poet to move quite unhampered by the clogs of rhyme that this peculiar stanza imposed. Not satisfied, however, with these restrictions, the English writer laboured for alliterative effects. No one, then, will be surprised to learn that frequently he sacrificed the sense of the story, to say nothing of the general impression, to his enforced display of clever artifice. The whole story, moreover, he cut down so recklessly that it is at times almost unintelligible. Gottfried took nearly 20,000 lines to reproduce about two-thirds of Thomas's poem. The English minstrel disposed of the whole in about 3500. In contrast to the “quaint English” and elaborate stanza in which the story is obscured and disfigured, Robert places Thomas's irreproachable version in couplets. And rightly so. The Anglo-Norman poem, simple and clear, reveals in the author a very high degree of poetic power. Truly, Robert had reason to say that “over all gests” the story of Tristram was worthy to be esteemed “if men it said as Thomas made it.” But such a remark would in truth have been unwarranted if it applied to the English poem. The author was a clever rhymer, and some passages of his work have much vigour, but had not the adventures of Tristram been well known before, from French narratives current in England, this poem would not have sufficed to spread his fame.

We have no other English treatment of the Tristram story until we come to Malory's redaction of one version of the late French prose romance. Here is a hotch-potch of miscellaneous adventures, many of which have nothing to do with the central theme and serve only to prolong the tale. Echoes of classical antiquity, reminiscences of the Bible, bits of popular tradition, independent works of different cycles are to be discovered in the vast accumulation. But above all it is noticeable how the costuming has changed. The manners and dress of the heroes and heroines are those of the late days of chivalry. Tristram is a vastly different personage from what he was even in the time of Thomas. He is now a conventional knighterrant, who spends his time going about from one tourney to another, ever on the lookout for adventure. In the earlier stories, Arthur and his knights have practically no part to play. Now, one at least of them surely appears on every page, and no uninformed reader would for a moment suspect that Tristram was a hero once quite independent of Arthur, and that his thoroughgoing connection with the Round Table is to be found only in late compilations, which departed far too freely from trustworthy tradition, in order to gratify the taste of an uncritical Continental audience whose appetite for familiar adventures appears to have been insatiate.

Inasmuch as Malory drew almost one-third of his Morte Darthur (mostly to be found in the eighth, ninth, and tenth books) from the French prose Tristan, a word concerning his method may be in place here. There is so great diversity in the various manuscripts of a prose romance that it is well-nigh impossible to state just what process was followed in any particular instance. But in general it may be said that from a common archetype scribes developed divergent versions, each of which, being repeatedly copied, was differently altered by different sorts of men to answer different purposes. There appears to have been a “vulgate,” and an “enlarged” Tristan, the former going under the name of a supposed “Luces de Gast,” the latter under that of an equally fictitious “Hélie de Boron.” It was from some manuscript of the vulgate version that Malory drew his story. Here, more than anywhere else, save only in the Quest of the Holy Grail, he abstains from “reducing.”

We claim the immortal legend of Tristram and Ysolt as peculiarly ours, not only because it was formed in its present shape in England, being a possession of our composite race before and after the Conquest, but also because it is localised in Britain; and, as is well known, all nations cling to the traditions of the country in which they have settled, even though to come into power they had to dispossess those to whom these traditions rightly belonged. Mark was a king of Cornwall, and that, it seems, in history, before he became the legendary husband of Ysolt. His castle was at Tintagel on the Cornish coast. Tristram, originally a Pictish or Scandinavian hero, was probably born in Anglesey and lived in Wales. One Ysolt was a princess of Ireland, the other of Brittany. In these neighbouring lands the action passes almost exclusively, and the hero traverses the dangerous waters between with as much equanimity as any Norse viking whose home was on the sea. The people among whom the Tristram story grew up were as familiar with ocean as with land pathways.

The saga certainly originated in heathen times, when Christianity had not softened the minds of men; in a barbarous epoch when people lived a rough, uncivilised life in rude simplicity; in a time when chivalrous warfare was undreamed of, when heroes fought on foot, using as weapons arrows speeded by the cross-bow, or javelins thrown by hand. If we stop to think of it, the manners and customs of the court of the Cornish king are seen to be often barbarous and savage. No Christian sentiments govern the hearts of the characters. Might is right; cunning is praiseworthy; passions are unbridled, and impulses unrestrained. The primordial instincts of men and women are seen unveiled.

Tristram and Ysolt are the most illustrious lovers of British, perhaps of any romance. Wherein do they differ typically from those of other lands? In this, that the whole of their lives moves about the pivot of their mutual devotion. With them both love is a persistent, uncontrollable, supreme passion. It is the end that justifies every means, the cause of an uninterrupted ecstasy that renders death at any moment as welcome as life. The heroines of classical story never moved their lovers to the same overmastering passion, never controlled their destinies by the same mysterious charm. In the grave chansons de geste love was little welcome: women played no dominant rôle in the careers of the stern warriors of Charlemagne, ever engaged in manly conflict for communal gain. In the North, on the other hand, there is in tensity and passion in abundance. There the women share the greatest joys of the men; they stimulate, incite, enter into the struggle themselves. Yet theirs was self-sacrifice that asked no return, devotion that demanded no favour. Life was too real for music, time too precious for reverie. Men were not men, they felt, who waited on luxurious ease. With Guthrun blood is thicker than any amorous philtre. Without a scruple she deceives her husband to get revenge for her brother's death, but not to indulge a guilty love. The prototypes of the Northern heroines are the strong, impetuous, warlike goddesses of Valhalla, clad in birnie, and pointing with flashing spear to the scene of strife; those of the Celtic lady-loves are the exquisitely beautiful, richly attired, marvellously subtle queens of a joyour Otherworld, who fascinate and soothe.

It is not possible here to trace the history of the Tristram legend either in internal growth or in dissemination. It is well to remember, however, that there was no one in the Middle Ages in Western Europe who did not know it in some form. All the great mediæval poets and those of the Renaissance evince their profound appreciation of its charm. In our own time, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne in England, Wagner in Germany, and others in many places, have reawakened it to power.

We may leave the hero with the presentation of one aspect of his character that Malory exalted. It will indicate another reason why he was beloved in England, and show how the stories of Arthur affected the conceptions of the nobility.

And so Tristram learned to be a harper passing all other, that there was none such called in no country, and so in harping and on instruments of music he applied him in his youth for to learn. And after, as he growed in might and strength, he laboured ever in hunting and hawking, so that never gentleman more that ever we heard tell of. And as the book saith, he began good measures of blowing of beasts of venery and beasts of chase, and all manner of vermains; and all these terms we have yet of hawking and hunting. And therefore the book of venery, of hawking and hunting, is called the book of Sir Tristram. Wherefore, as me seemeth, all gentlemen that bear old arms ought of right to honour Sir Tristram for the goodly terms that gentlemen have and use, and shall to the day of doom, that thereby in a manner all men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and from a yeoman a villain. For he that gentle is will draw unto him gentle taches, and to follow the custom of noble gentlemen.