SOURCE: Blakeslee, Merritt R. “The Authorship of Thomas's Tristan.” Philological Quarterly 64, no. 4 (fall 1985): 555-72.

In the following essay, Blakeslee argues that the imitation of Wace's Roman de Brut evident throughout the twelfth-century Tristan attributed to Thomas supports the hypothesis of Thomas's sole authorship of that poem.

The question of dual authorship, so long a subject of controversy among scholars of Beroul's Tristran, has latterly been raised in regard to Thomas's Tristan. A recent article by Constance B. Bouchard has suggested that the manuscript fragments traditionally ascribed to Thomas of Britain and assumed to have been composed in the second half of the twelfth century are instead the work of an early thirteenth-century author who is not the Thomas or Tumas referred to in those fragments.¹ The study hypothesizes that the original Tristan, composed by Thomas (or perhaps by a pseudo-Thomas), was left unfinished and that a continuer was...