. Composed ca. 1230, the Prose Tristan, with all its successive versions in numerous manuscripts and 15th-century printed editions, is nothing less than a summa of the Matter of Britain. A highly developed technique of compilation in effect led to the progressive unification of the story of Tristan and his ancestors with that of King Arthur, the Grail quest, and the loss of Arthur’s and Tristan’s worlds.
In a smooth and effective prose, the Prose Tristan presents in a single text nearly all modes of literary discourse: lyric insertions, love monologues, letters, descriptions, political discourses. It perfects the art of dialogue and debate and skillfully exploits the most diversified techniques for organizing romance narratives.
Its authors, the Pseudo-Luce del Gast and the Pseudo-Hélie de Boron, reformulating and integrating into their story the episodes inherited from Béroul and Thomas d’Angleterre, refashioned the love story on that of Lancelot and Guenevere, making Tristan a knight-errant seeking adventure, a member of the Round Table, a Grail knight. The “sad” knight becomes above all a knight in search of love’s “joy,” experienced fully if briefly only in the Arthurian world. However, the tradition of the poetic versions, and the power of the theme of love and death, posed an obstacle to this radical transformation of Tristan and his destiny. The most evident sign of this resistance is the systematic degradation of King Mark, who ends by slaying his nephew. The interest of the Prose Tristan resides in this tension, between a myth of fatal passion and the sentimentalism and chivalric idealism of the Prose Lancelot, between the hero’s desire to stay in Cornwall with Iseut and the need he feels to live in the Arthurian world to achieve glory. The lovers underestimate these tensions, which nonetheless reshape the narrative and explain the hero’s lengthy sojourns in Arthur’s kingdom. But the secondary characters, such as Kaherdin, Palamedes, and Dinadan, underscore through their words and actions the vanity of knight-errantry and of chivalric deeds, the absurdity of the Arthurian world and its customs, and the tragic misunderstandings of passion.
Revised and expanded as late as the 15th century, translated and assimilated into such compilations as the Italian Tavola Ritonda, the Spanish and Portuguese Demandas (or Questes del saint Graal), the Compilation of Rusticien of Pisa, Malory’s Morte Darthur, and other works, and preserved in manuscripts that are often richly decorated, the Prose Tristan was immensely popular into the 15th century and beyond. Until the rediscovery of the poetic texts in the 19th century, the story of the love of Tristan and Iseut was known only through its prose versions.
