unification of the story of Tristan and his ancestors with that of King Arthur, the Grail
quest, and the loss of Arthur’s and Tristan’s worlds.
In a smooth and effective prose, the Prose Tristan presents in a single text nearly all
modes of literary discourse: lyric insertions, love monologues, letters, descriptions,
political discourses. It perfects the art of dialogue and debate and skillfully exploits the
most diversified techniques for organizing romance narratives.
Its authors, the Pseudo-Luce del Gast and the Pseudo-Hélie de Boron, reformulating
and integrating into their story the episodes inherited from Béroul and Thomas
d’Angleterre, refashioned the love story on that of Lancelot and Guenevere, making
Tristan a knight-errant seeking adventure, a member of the Round Table, a Grail knight.
The “sad” knight becomes above all a knight in search of love’s “joy,” experienced fully
if briefly only in the Arthurian world. However, the tradition of the poetic versions, and
the power of the theme of love and death, posed an obstacle to this radical transformation
of Tristan and his destiny. The most evident sign of this resistance is the systematic
degradation of King Mark, who ends by slaying his nephew. The interest of the Prose
Tristan resides in this tension, between a myth of fatal passion and the sentimentalism
and chivalric idealism of the Prose Lancelot, between the hero’s desire to stay in
Cornwall with Iseut and the need he feels to live in the Arthurian world to achieve glory.
The lovers underestimate these tensions, which nonetheless reshape the narrative and
explain the hero’s lengthy sojourns in Arthur’s kingdom. But the secondary characters,
such as Kaherdin, Palamedes, and Dinadan, underscore through their words and actions
the vanity of knight-errantry and of chivalric deeds, the absurdity of the Arthurian world
and its customs, and the tragic misunderstandings of passion.
Revised and expanded as late as the 15th century, translated and assimilated into such
compilations as the Italian Tavola Ritonda, the Spanish and Portuguese Demandas (or
Questes del saint Graal), the Compilation of Rusticien of Pisa, Malory’s Morte Darthur,
and other works, and preserved in manuscripts that are often richly decorated, the Prose
Tristan was immensely popular into the 15th century and beyond. Until the rediscovery
of the poetic texts in the 19th century, the story of the love of Tristan and Iseut was
known only through its prose versions.
Emmanuèle Baumgartner
[See also: BÉROUL; PROSE ROMANCE (ARTHURIAN); THOMAS
D’ANGLETERRE; VULGATE CYCLE]
Curtis, Renée L., ed. Le roman de Tristan en prose. 3 vols. Munich: Hueber, 1963 (Vol. 1); Leiden:
Brill, 1976 (Vol. 2); Cambridge: Brewer, 1985 (Vol. 3).
Ménard, Philippe, et al., eds. Le roman de Tristan en prose. Geneva, Droz, 1987-. (5 vols. to date).
Baumgartner, Emmanuèle. Le Tristan et prose: essai d’interpré-tation d’un roman médiéval.
Geneva: Droz, 1975.
——. La harpe et l’épée: tradition et renouvellement dans le “Tristan” en prose. Paris: Société
d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1990.
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