SOURCE: Vinaver, Eugène. Foreword to The Romance of Tristan and Isolt, translated by Norman B. Spector, pp. xi-xviii. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

In the following introduction to Spector's translation of the later prose Tristan and Isolt, Vinaver briefly touches on the origin and central themes of the legend, as well on differences from Béroul's version.

The love story of Tristan and Isolt was originally a “legend,” not in the sense in which we now use the term, but in the literal sense of “something to be read”—a written composition which one of its earliest adaptors, Béroul, claims to have found in that form:

… comme l'estoire dit, La ou Berox le vit escrit. 

It was, as far as we know, the work of a French poet of the second or third quarter of the twelfth century, no doubt incorporating a number of themes drawn...