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  • Constructing a Medieval Genealogy:Roland the Father of Tristan in Castleford's Chronicle
  • Caroline D. Eckhardt and Bryan A. Meer

The predominant narrative "fact" about the knight Tristan, from the twelfth-century French poems of Béroul, Thomas, and Marie de France to Wagner's opera and beyond, is his love for Iseult, wife of his uncle King Mark: their tragic tale has become one of medieval literature's lasting contributions to the storehouse of European legend. The deaths of the two lovers, in particular, have long aroused a remarkable and perhaps morbid fascination, which Denis de Rougemont associates with a fundamental death-wish embedded deep within the Western imagination (34-42). In the early thirteenth century, the prologue to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan declares that the lovers' death is bread to the living, "und ist ir tot der lebenden brot" (line 240), a formulation that risks parody of the Eucharist; while in the Renaissance epic Orlando Innamorato, Boiardo epitomizes this fascination when he describes the lovers' last moments as sweet and joyful, "dolce et felice" (II.xxvi.2), because they died together in the same instant, entwined in each other's arms, hand in hand and heart to heart. The Liebestod music from Wagner's opera (1859), in a very different medium and century, testifies to the persistent appeal of the motif, and even Matthew Arnold's revisionist poem "Tristram and Iseult" (1852) dwells upon the same dramatic entanglement of love and death.

For all its force, however, this concept of Tristan is not the only one to be found in medieval texts. The purpose of this paper is, first, to [End Page 1085] point out the presence of a rather different Tristan in a little-known work called Castleford's Chronicle and, second, to consider its genealogical implications. Written in the fourteenth century in a northern English dialect, Castleford's Chronicle is a massive, sprawling verse narrative in twelve books. Like many other medieval chronicles, it offers a multi-layered blend of fact and fiction, commonplaces and curiosities, memory and prophecy. Surviving in a single manuscript copy, it was not printed as a whole until 1996; thus its thousands of lines of Middle English verse have only recently become fully available to scholars.1 Along with much material that is routine, this text includes a number of surprises, one of which is discussed here.

In nearly 40,000 lines of octosyllabic couplets the chronicle recounts what is, in general, the traditional medieval construction of the history of Britain, a cultural narrative told many times in Latin, French, and English, and sometimes in Welsh and other tongues. This widely distributed narrative sometimes begins with an origination-episode in which the island's first inhabitants are a group of sisters who murder their husbands and are expelled from their home in ancient Syria. There follows—or the accounts that omit the sisters begin with—the legend of the "Trojan descent," which asserts that Aeneas's descendant Brutus was the founder of civilization in Britain in the aftermath of the fall of Troy. As it continues, this history or story commingles the careers of fictional heroes such as Arthur and Lear with the reigns of the actual rulers of Britain, ending, in different versions, at various points before and after the Norman Conquest.

The manuscript of Castleford's Chronicle ends with events of the year 1327, when Edward II has been removed from England's throne and imprisoned, but before he is murdered. In this text the only notice of Tristan occurs in Book IX, in a brief but puzzling passage that follows a description of Irish demands for tribute during the Saxon period:

Now, quiles Adulf diademe bare,Cessede þe strife fore euermar.oru Rolande son, a knight, Tristreme,.at trauailde for Kyng Mark, his heme,Northumbre broght of sorow and site,Of seruage to be claimede quite.

(28,788-93)

(At this time, while Adulf bore the diadem, the strife permanently ceased through Roland's son—a knight, Tristan, who worked on behalf of his uncle King Mark [and] brought Northumbria out of its sorrow and anguish, to be released [lit., quit-claimed] from servitude.) [End Page 1086...

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