Béroul

Béroul (also Berol ; around 1180) was an old French poet .

His name is associated with one of the first surviving adaptations of the Tristan and Isolde fabric.

The two oldest, but incomplete, novel-like versions of the material were probably created in the 1170s: that of the otherwise unknown courtly author Thomas d'Angleterre and that of the minstrel Béroul, who is also unknown as a person. (A Tristan novel, perhaps written by Chrétien de Troyes around 1160, is lost, the Tristan Isolde novella by Marie de France also dates from approx. 1170.) Both Thomas and Béroul obviously reverted to older, somewhat different texts.

Thomas wrote his work around 1172–75 for the English court. A total of eight fragments with a total of 3,000 verses from the last third of the plot are preserved in five manuscripts (Tristan's marriage to Isolde Weißhand, who is only considered to be a substitute, and several other adventures in Ts and his tragic end).

Béroul's novel, which was probably written around 1180, has survived in a single manuscript that contains almost 4,500 verses in the middle section (Tristan and Isolde's secret love at the court of King Marke, who is Tristan's uncle and Isolde's husband; the discovery of their relationship; Tristan's escape ; Isolde's condemnation and her rescue by Tristan; the two of them living together alone in a shed in the forest; their eventual return to the court; Isolde's resumption by Marke and Tristan's departure into exile).

We know the overall plot of Thomas's novel thanks to a complete Norse prose transmission from around 1225 and thanks to the unfinished Tristan by Gottfried von Strasbourg (around 1210). The content of Béroul's work, on the other hand, largely corresponds to the completely preserved Tristan von Eilhart von Oberg (approx. 1180) without being a direct transfer or adaptation .

In France, around 1230–35, an unknown author (or several authors?) Compiled the so-called Tristan en prose from various versions , a very extensive prose novel that was read into the 16th century. The work, which has been handed down in numerous manuscripts and slightly divergent versions, combines the Tristan fabric with other fabrics, especially the King Arthur fabric, and makes Tristan a knight of the round table who knows how to sing and poetry.

Incidentally, the Tristan Isolde material does not come from the Germanic world of legends, as one might believe as a German and Wagnerian, but from the Welsh-Scottish-British, i.e. H. the so-called matière de Bretagne, from which many subjects and motifs flowed into French literature in the second half of the 12th century.

Web links

Wikisource: Tristan (Béroul)  - Sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Béroul in the catalog of the German National Library
• Information on Béroul in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .