(fl. 2nd half of the 12th c.). Eight fragments totaling 3,146 octosyllabic lines, distributed among five manuscripts, are all that remain of Thomas’s Tristan, composed ca. 1175 for the nobility of Norman England. The author may have been a clerk at the court of Henry II Plantagenêt in London. The fragments of Thomas’s Tristan preserve essentially the last part of the story, from Tristan’s exile in Brittany to the lovers’ deaths. Line 3,134 of the epilogue, the adaptations by Brother Robert (Old Norse) and Gottfried von Strassburg (Middle High German), and the Oxford Folie, however, all indicate that Thomas had composed a complete version, one that followed the biographical structure and general movement of the original legend, though Thomas made numerous modifications to it.
Placing Arthur in the mythic past and situating the story in an England ruled over by King Marc, Thomas’s reworking is dominated by rationality; the poet tones down the fantastic elements and shows a certain logic in the ordering of events and in the behavior and motivation of the characters. It is possible to suppose that Thomas would have described the amur fine e veraie experienced by the protagonists when Tristan first came to Ireland (see l. 2,491), with the love potion only confirming that love. In keeping with the milieu for which he wrote, Thomas eliminated or reworked overly “realistic” episodes (harp and lyre, Iseut and the lepers, life in the forest of Morois), bringing the story into line with the new courtly ideals. A master hunter, Tristan (like his “pupil” Iseut) is also a musician and poet as well as an artist capable of creating the marvelous statues of the Hall of Images.
The principal contribution of Thomas, as scholar and moralist, is in his minute analysis of of love and the other mysteries of human nature. Characters reveal themselves through monologues, debates, and lyric laments; and their self-examination is analyzed through the narrator’s long interventions. The action is motivated less by exterior agents than by inner adventure, the wanderings of the protagonists’ consciences, which alone seems to interest Thomas. The paradox in Thomas’s version is thus the narration, within the story of a love seen as absolute and perfect, of an analysis of love that shows Tristan’s desire for change (novelerie) and his fundamental dissatisfaction. This analysis is coupled with reflections on jealousy and on Tristan’s obsession with taking the place of the Other (Iseut or Marc) and feeling himself the pleasure experienced (or not) by the Other. Iseut’s role is to express, in actions and lyric laments, her passion, tenderness, and pity for her lover’s plight. Thomas uses the technique of “gainsaying”: the quarrel between Iseut and Brangain allows the queen to reveal the positive side of fin’amor, which had been depicted by Brangain as folly and lechery. Characters like Cariado, Iseut of the White Hands, Tristan the Dwarf, and, undoubtedly, the faithful Kaherdin in the lost episodes, are there to fill out this “mirror” of the multiple faces of love.
The language available to Thomas was not yet as subtle and supple as his analyses. Words like desir, voleir, poeir, even raisun, whose meanings seem still too imprecise or overcharged, are significant less in themselves than through the systems of oppositions into which they fit. Repetitions bordering on redundancy, anaphora, antitheses, and rhetorical questions occur almost too frequently. Thomas, however, is capable of realistic depiction, as in the description of London, the doctors who treat Tristan, or the storm. The death scene is characterized by a rhythm wedded to the circularity of desire that conveys, in the echoing of certain rhyme pairs (confort/mort, amur/dulur, anguissus/desirus), the very essence of love.
Thomas makes good the ambitious program articulated in the epilogue: to complete a narrative (l’escrit) in which all lovers, whatever their manner of loving, can find pleasure, recall their own passion through the exemplary destiny of Tristan and Iseut, and perhaps escape—for that seems to be the moralist’s ultimate goal—the torments and deceits of passion.
