SOURCE: “The Tryst beneath the Tree: An Episode in the Tristan Legend,” in Romance Philology, Vol. 9, No. 3, February, 1956, pp. 269-84.

In the following essay, Newstead traces the literary history of the “tryst episode” of the Tristan legend, finding that it originated in three Celtic stories before it developed in various forms in Welsh, Breton, and French tales.

The modern reader, schooled to appreciate the legend of Tristan and Isolt as a tale of tragic and overwhelming passion, may be startled to realize that the episode most familiar to the medieval public was no moment of exalted romance but rather a scene of audaciously successful deception. The lovers, meeting secretly beneath a tree, discover King Mark hidden in the branches above them and evade the trap by a series of lies improvised to deceive him. No episode in the matière de Bretagne is more often represented in medieval...