Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/269

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Sneyd, cannot now be traced. All these represent, with some overlapping, the latter part of the poem alone; of by far the greater part M. Bedier has only been able to make a conjec- tural restoration, by the aid of the extant translations. Here we are fortunate ; we have not only the English Sir Tristrem and the Scandinavian Tristan-Saga, but also the fine Tristan of Gottfried von Strasbourg, which, left unfinished, by a happy chance carries us precisely to the point where the original fragments begin.

M. Bedier devotes the first volume of his work to this reconstruction ; in the second he enquires into the sources from which Thomas has drawn his poem. This second volume, written with an intimate knowledge of the subject, the fruit of many years' study, and with a grace and charm of style worthy of the best traditions of French scholarship, will have most interest for the general reader, while at the same time it raises questions of extreme importance for the critic. In M. Bedier's opinion all the extant versions of the Tristan legend, the work of Thomas and his translators, the poems of Beroul and Eilhart von Oberge, the two versions of the Folie Tristan, and the prose Romance, derive ultimately from one and the same source. That source was a poem superior alike in psychology and construction to any of its derivatives. The name of the author of this poetical chef d'oeuvre has perished, but M. Bedier suggests that he probably lived in the first years of the Norman Conquest.

The theory is very fascinating and very tempting to our amour propre. The late M. Gaston Paris, who finally accepted this view, was decidedly of opinion that this Y^o\.o-Tristan was English ; but we must own that the comparative analysis of the incidents does not appear to us to point in this direction. We do not think M. Bedier has attached sufficient weight to the reference to Breri. He admits that Breri is identical with the Bleheris twice referred to in the Perceval as authority for stories connected with Gawain. Now in each case the story is a short episodic recital, not in any sense an elaborate poem. If Breri was the authoritative source for the Tristan legend, and Thomas distinctly says he was, then that legend was not

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