SOURCE: Baron, F. Xavier. “Visual Presentation in Béroul's Tristan.” Modern Language Quarterly 33, no. 2 (June 1972): 99-112.

In the essay below, Baron focuses on Béroul's development of visual elements in three key scenes—the Pine Tree, Flour Trick, and Forest Hut Discovery—and suggests that the poet is able to create irony through his use of Mark as the point-of- view character.

Béroul's twelfth-century Tristan has received considerable attention, but little has been said about its sophisticated narrative techniques and complex irony. The most brilliant of the recent studies, concerned almost exclusively with how the poem illustrates its twelfth-century Christian milieu, virtually ignore Béroul as craftsman and artist.¹ Earlier scholarship devoted itself either to the relationship of Le Roman de Tristan to other versions or to textual problems and questions of attribution. By implication this research has impugned the artistic merits of the poem, since investigations...