SOURCE: Whitehead, Frederick. “The Early Tristan Poems.” In Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis, pp. 134-44. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

In the following excerpt, Whitehead contrasts versions of the Tristan legend by Eilhart and Béroul, claiming that Eilhart's German poem suffers in comparison because of its narrative abridgement and occasional psychological implausibility.

The Archetype

Nineteenth-century scholars agreed in regarding the [Tristan] poems of Eilhart and Béroul as essentially a single version (version commune or version des jongleurs) and in contrasting it with that of Thomas and his derivatives (version courtoise). Bédier, having demonstrated that the three poems and the Prose Tristan were derived from a common source,¹ showed that Eilhart and Béroul reproduced this archetype with great fidelity,² whereas Thomas made considerable changes. This was also the opinion of Gertrude Schoepperle.³ But Bédier believed⁴ that...