in character or accomplishments from his companion-in-arms, Lancelot. Like the latter, he spends his time largely in going from tournament to tournament whether in Cornwall or Logres — and, in all the situations of life, he displays the usual knightly qualities of courtesy and generosity, to say nothing of valor. Similarly, he excels in fencing and chess-playing and in the other accomplishments that were prized most highly in aristocratic circles of the thirteenth century. In one respect, doubtless, he resembles the actual members of those circles more closely than was the case with Lancelot: as a lover, his fidelity was not above reproach.15 Finally, like the other knights who were preeminent at Arthur's court, he is made a participant in the Grail quest,16 although his disqualifications for success in an enterprise to achieve which chastity was an indispensable condition, were even more obvious. than Lancelot's.

The prose Tristan follows the tradition of the primitive (lost) metrical romance 17 concerning its hero, and it derives from this tradition, of course, the primary conception of the adulterous passion of Tristan and Iseult, including even the parts that are played by the minor characters in the drama, Bringvain and Andret (Audret); but the individual episodes which our author inherited from his source are so lost in the flood of new and, for the most part, inferior inventions, that they hardly constitute any longer the most prominent element in the story. They occur naturally in those portions of the romance in which Cornwall is the scene

15

Cp., especially, his intrigue with Segurade's wife, Löseth, p. 25. In the romance Iseult, too, has other lovers, besides Tristan, viz. Palamedes and Kahedin, but she grants her favors only to Tristan. Löseth, pp. 283 ff.

16

17

Cp. Bédier's stemma in his edition of Thomas's Tristan, II, 309. He takes the primitive romance as the immediate source of the prose. It was formerly customary to assume that the prose Tristan was based on Chrétien's lost Tristan poem. Cp. G. Paris, Manuel, p. 101, Löseth, p. XXV, and G. Gröber, Grundriss, Band II, Abt. I, p. 1007. At a later period, however, Paris, as we have seen (p. 155, note 5, above), denied that Chrétien ever wrote a Tristan romance in any proper sense. On this question see loc. cit. above and Foerster's Chrétien Wörterbuch, Introduction, pp. 47 ff.

of action, and they cover more especially the period of the hero's youth up to the point where the narrative of the lovers is linked up with that of Lancelot and Guinevere.18 At this point these episodes are dropped and only resumed, when Tristan returns from Logres to Marc's court for a while 19 and again runs the gauntlet of detection in his continued amours with the queen. After this the influence of the source ceases, for in the prose romance even the death of the hero is differently managed, Tristan being here the victim of Marc's treachery, who, in a fit of jealousy, thrusts a poisoned spear through his nephew, as the latter was singing a lay to Iseult in her apartment. 20 The character of Marc, we may observe, is blackened throughout the prose romance. Here he is false and treacherous, a tyrant and a coward. The author's object, of course, in this degradation of the wronged husband was to lessen the opprobrium of his hero's adultery, but the tragic situation was, surely, much finer in the old story, where even the nephew committing the wrong could not dispute the essentially noble and generous character of the king and could plead no excuse for dishonoring him, save the force of a passion which was as irresistible as Fate.

It was not only, however, with respect to the character of Marc that our author exercises the usual privilege of the romancers in altering or modifying his originals. Thus the birth of the hero, as well as his death, is differently related in the prose romance,21 as compared with the Tristan poems. In the former, the hero's father, Meliadus, King of Leonois, is held captive by a fairy mistress in her tower, in the midst of a forest, and, through his captor's magical powers, loses all memory of his wife. This wife, however, who is pregnant, goes in search of him in this same forest, and, having learned there from Merlin, who is disguised as a forester, that she will never see her husband again,

22

22

Merlin here plays somewhat the same part towards the child,

Tristan, that he does towards young Arthur in Robert de Boron's Merlin. Our author is, of course, imitating Robert.

.

she gives birth to a son in the forest and dies, after having conferred the name of Tristan on the child, because of the sorrowful circumstances under which he was born. Two kinsmen of Meliadus, who now arrive on the scene, are about to kill the infant, in order that they, themselves, may get possession of the kingdom, but a damsel of the dead queen persuades them to renounce the project on the condition that she will hide the child so effectively that he will never be heard of again. Merlin, however, is the means of saving the child from this fate and of the liberation of Meliadus. Moreover, it is on his advice that Tristan is committed to the tutelage of Gouvernal.

Space fails us to note the romancer's numerous alterations of his source some of them even more audacious than the one which I have just cited. We can only remark that he is especially fond of changing the traditional order of incidents and of giving the old motifs new connections in the story. For example, the incident of the evening rendezvous at which Tristan and Iseult, having detected Marc in the tree above them, give their conversation such a turn as to deceive him, is postponed to a later point in the narrative, 23 and the motif of the tell-tale blood-stains from Tristan's wound on the bed-clothing of his mistress is no longer connected with Iseult of Cornwall, but with the wife of Segurade.** Moreover, the rationalizing tendency is even stronger in this romance than in the Lancelot. Consequently, the fairy-tale voyages of the hero in the poetical tradition are stripped of their marvellous quality and even the philtre becomes virtually superfluous in the development of the lovers' passion.25

Among the noteworthy additions to the story are to be numbered many new episodes and many new characters. The latter are drawn mainly from the Vulgate cycle - especially, the Lancelot and the Queste e. g. Lancelot, Hector, Perceval, Galahad who here, however, is thoroughly secularized and does not differ in any essential from the other knights Sagremor, etc. Nevertheless, two of the new characters, who fill rôles of considerable importance in the romance viz. Lamorat, Perceval's brother,

and Palamedes were invented by its author. The second of these characters sprang, doubtless, in the first instance from that of the lying seneschal in the old poem, who endeavored to deprive Tristan of his credit for the slaying of the dragon near Dublin, but our author, though still representing him as a lover of Iseult's, has converted him into a model of generosity and courtesy, even towards his successful rival (Tristan), so that he is one of the most sympathetic figures in the romance. The creation of Lamorat was, doubtless, due to the writer's desire to interweave his hero's story more closely with that of Perceval.

In the way of incident the most original additions are the series of episodes at the beginning of the romance that make up the history of Tristan's ancestors. Like Lancelot, Tristan here. is represented as of the lineage of King David and Joseph of Arimathea.26 Especially striking in this preliminary narrative is the story of the hero's grandmother, Chelinde, with its strange medley of motifs, drawn from widely separated sources 27 Athis and Prophilias (the mediaeval romance of ideal friendship), the legend of Oedipus (the great tragic tale of incest), some fairytale of a giant who proposes riddles to his captives with life as the stake, the oriental conte of the much-married princess. It is the last-named element, in particular, that constitutes the backbone of Chelinde's weirdly scandalous history, and we have here in its earliest preserved form the tale which Boccaccio 28 has im

26

On the subject of Lancelot's ancestry see Bruce, RR, IX, 250 ff. The name of Tristan's grandfather, Sadoc, here represented as a greatnephew of Joseph of Arimathea's - is, as I have pointed out, Historia Meriadoci and De Ortu Waluuanii, p. XXIIf., note 1 (Göttingen and Baltimore, 1913), taken from the genealogy of Christ, St. Matthew, I, 14. The author confounds Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary, with Joseph of Arimathea, as happens elsewhere, also, in the romances. For an analysis of the story of Chelinde and a discussion of its sources cp., especially, Bruce, "A Boccaccio Analogue in the Old French Prose Tristan," RR, I, 384ff. (1910).

27

28

Decameron, II, 7. The heroine is here named Alatiel. The Tristan and Boccaccio, as I have shown in the article just cited, go back to a common source of oriental origin.

mortalized by his inimitable vivacity and cynical humor, concerning the daughter of the Sultan of Babylon who is betrothed to a pagan monarch, but on the voyage to his country, where the wedding is to be celebrated, through a series of misadventures, falls successively into the possession of a number of different men, with cach of whom she is compelled to cohabit. According to the Tristan, she never reaches her original destination, but in Bocaccio she finally turns up there, after having passed through the hands of nine lovers, one after the other, and is able to satisfy her credulous husband with respect to the delay in her arrival by the assertion that she had been spending the time in a nunnery.

Genuine mediaeval traits of these Chelinde episodes are the following, viz. that some of the heroine's lovers get their names from the Latin Bible 29 and that St. Augustine, the missionary, here takes the place of Tiresias in the Oedipus legend as the prophet who discloses the terrible truth with regard to the incestuous union of the mother (Chelinde) and her son (Apollo).0

It is not always easy to establish what portions of the Tristan, as it is preserved in our MSS., belonged to the romance in its original form. There is no question, however, that from the beginning its author aimed at enhancing the appeal of his work by interweaving the fortunes of his hero and heroine with those of the specifically Arthurian characters from whom they had hitherto stood apart. The first connection of this nature which he creates is the one with Lancelot and Guinevere, when Iseult of Cornwall, at the time of her lover's marriage to Iseult of Brittany, wrote in despair to Guinevere, asking her advice (p. 46), and received a consolatory answer. Naturally, Lancelot, the ideal exemplar of the amour courtois, disapproved of this act of infidelity on the

29

Sadoc, as we have just seen, from St. Matthew, 1, 14; his brother, Nabusardan (Nabuzardan) from IV Liber Regum, XXV, 8, 11, 20 (Nebuchadnezzar's captain of the guard) and elsewhere in the Old Testament. Cp. Bruce, MLN, XXXIII, 136 (1918). Gonosor, name of the king of Ireland in the story (Löseth, p. 13), is, probably, also, a mere corruption of Nabugodonosor, the name of Nebuchadnezzar in the Latin Bible.

30 Löseth, pp. 111.