SOURCE: “A Survey of Tristan Scholarship After 1911,” in Tristan and Isolt: A Study of the Sources of the Romance, Vol. II. Reprint. Burt Franklin, 1960, pp. 565-587.

In the following essay, Loomis comments on the critical reception Gertrude Schoepperle's 1913 study of the Tristan legend received, and discusses the origin, development, and transmission of the legend.

Reviews

The reviews of Miss Schoepperle's Tristan and Isolt were, broadly speaking, highly favorable. Her critique of Bédier's reconstruction of the poème primitif in his edition of Thomas's Tristan on the basis of its assumed logical structure and consistency was generally accepted. So, too, was her rejection of his thesis that Béroul, Thomas, Eilhart, the Folie, and the Prose Romance were all derived from a French poem of the early twelfth century, created at one stroke by a single author of genius. Her array of parallels between the surviving Tristan texts...