James F's Reviews > The Romance of Tristan and Iseult

This is the September (2024) reading for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads. I had seen this many times in used bookstores and so forth, but I never picked it up because I assumed it was just a translation of the poems of Béroul, Thomas, or Gottfried, all of which I read a quarter of a century ago. In fact, although it does incorporate a translation of the extant fragments of Béroul, it is much more than that. It is an attempt to reconstruct the content of Béroul's entire poem, or even the text which presumably lies behind both Béroul and Thomas, based on Thomas, Eilhardt, Gottfried, and various anonymous translations and allusions in other works, as well as a good deal of imagination.

After so many years, I can't really say how well Bédier imitates the style of Béroul, but I can say this was a good retelling of the story of Tristan and Iseult.