The Romance of Tristan and Iseult trans. by Edward J. Gallagher (review)

The French medievalist Joseph Bédier is esteemed as an eminent scholar of the Arthurian myth of Tristan and Iseult, the tragic story of the accidental administration of a love potion to the knight Tristan and his uncle’s bride and their subsequent suffering and death. It proved to be a significant portion of Bédier’s life’s work to analyze its sources and extant expressions in works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and to unite its scattered fragments to compose his own version of the tale in novel form, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. Edward Gallagher, Professor of French Studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, has recently produced a new English translation of Bédier’s book from its original French. An uncommon combination of an academic and a creative writer, Bédier came from a colonial family and divided his childhood between Paris and Réunion Island near Madagascar. He returned in young adulthood to mainland Europe to attend college and later to teach, holding academic posts in Switzerland, Normandy and Paris. His scholarly output was abundant, comprising almost four dozen books and articles including studies of major French works such as The Song of Roland. Bédier’s Tristan retelling was published in 1900, almost exactly midway through his life. His writing was informed by the details of the tale that he had studied assiduously in his professorial career. The possible roots of the classic story of star-crossed lovers are found in sources as diverse as Celtic and Persian myths. However, Bédier was convinced of a French origin for an original text that he termed the “Ur-Tristan” which he felt would have been composed around 1140. Bédier based his hypothesis on the fact that there are four different surviving Tristan manuscripts of the era and he believed there was a single source text that informed all of them. The earliest of those four was by Béroul, a twelfth-century Norman poet, and the further iterations include writings by the Anglo-Norman Thomas of Britain from the mid-twelfth century, the German poet Eilhart von Oberg from the late twelfth century, and a second German, Gottfried von Strassburg, from the early thirteenth century. Bédier laid out the components of each of the books in painstaking philological detail in order to analyze both their common and idiosyncratic elements and to construct his own telling. He pulled particulars from all of the versions and additional period sources in order to manifest what he felt was the most thorough composite. His writing style, straightforward and economical yet melodious, captures the bygone tone of the centuries-old matter while retaining lucidity. It’s clear Bédier absorbed the best qualities of medieval writing through his extensive studies of it and that its energy and color found a congenial marriage with his own expressive modes, themselves tinted by lingering traces of late Romanticism.

In addition to his belief in a single source for the Tristan myth, Bédier was convinced that it was a story of absolutely core importance in the European mythic and literary tradition. It does have deep-rooted and ancient elements found in other legends and fairytales. The plot contains what the twentieth-century poet and scholar Robert Graves considered to be a pattern from the oldest archetypal stratum in the European psyche, the adulterous love triangle of one woman and two men, representing the moon goddess and the dual god of the summer and winter sun, a motif underlying the symbolism of alchemy and Tantra and found throughout art and literature. The pale hair of Iseult the Fair and the white hands of her later counterpart, the other Iseult whom Tristan rashly marries, link them to lunar symbology, and the great skills and nobility of King Mark and his protégé along with their age differences and the ultimate sacrifice of Tristan fit directly with solar imagery. Tristan is a culture hero on the order...