Le Roman de Tristan poème du XIIe siècle by Béroul

5 The works by Thomas and Gottfried, on the other hand, have been categorized as “courtly” or “lyric” because theseĪuthors describe at length the refinements of the royal court, they pen elaborate allegorical passages, and, most especially, they go to extraordinary lengths in analyzing the psychological Narrative style, written as if “to be heard” they contain scenes of robust and, at times, violent action, and they include episodes replete with raucous humor and overt sexual The versions by Béroul and Eilhart are deemed “common” or, as one critic has perhaps more aptly called them, “epic,” because they are characterized by a more direct Thomas inspired, wrote accounts of the life and loves of the celebrated couple that are usually labeled as belonging to the “courtly” tradition. 3 This literary dyad recounts what most scholars describe as the “common” version of the legend. The version of the legend by the Norman writer Béroul is generally viewed as the source for Eilhart’s

These four writers of the High Middle Ages are most often discussed in pairs. Years of the thirteenth, written by a quartet of authors whose names are quite well known: Béroul, Eilhart von Oberg, Thomas of Britain, and Gottfried von Strassburg. To some found in the earliest versions of the lovers’ story in Norman French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle High German that appeared in the second half of the twelfth century and the early

What can most reasonably be concluded is that these Persian, Irish, and Welsh stories stand, not as certifiable sources, but as analogues, for they do contain scenes, names, and motifs similar Did their story come to Western Europe in the Persian tale of Vis and Ramen? Are the origins of their adulterous love affair to be traced to two Irish stories: The Wooing ofĮmer and The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Grainne? Can their avatars be identified as the Welsh paramours Drystan and Essyllt? 1

Literary scholars have spent more than a century studying and attempting to understand and explain the origin and the development of the medieval legend of the ill-fated lovers Tristan and

Le Roman de Tristan poème du XIIe siècle by Béroul