Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain is not a locale that we normally associate with the Tristan legend, and yet Tristan and Iseult make their appearance in the cathedral there twice during the Middle Ages, at two different times and in two different media. In the cathedral museum can be found a marble column – one of three salvaged from the original Romanesque façade – containing sculpted images that one prominent art historian, Serafín Moralejo, has identified as Tristan (and possibly Iseult). These images predate the earliest extant Old French poems and testify to a very early penetration of the legend into Galicia. How and why these secular images came to be incorporated into the religious programme of the Romanesque façade of the cathedral is the subject of the first part of this essay.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the lovers make another appearance in the cathedral at Santiago, via the Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd (c. 1400). In that text, once Tristram leaves Cornwall, he departs for his homeland (Spain), becomes king and marries Ísodd the Dark. After incurring a mortal wound in combat in ‘Jakobsland’ (Galicia), he dies and is eventually buried with Ísodd the Fair in ‘the largest cathedral in the land’. The question of how and why Santiago de Compostela came to play such a significant role in the Icelandic version of the Tristan legend is explored in the second part of this essay.

Tristan and Iseult on the Romanesque Façade of the Cathedral

The column containing the images from the Tristan legend is from the twelfth-century Romanesque façade (c. 1105–10) that once graced the north portal of the cathedral. It depicts three scenes, the most evocative of which appears in the lower register. It shows a young man lying in a rudderless boat asleep or in a faint, grasping a notched sword in his right hand (Figures 1a, 1b). It was Serafín Moralejo who first proposed identifying the figure as Tristan.

“Transmutation” is the term used by the anonymous authors of two midfifteenth- century Burgundian prose romances to designate the process by which they transform two of Chrétien de Troyes's romances, Erec et Enide and Cligés. The author of the prose Cligés, noting his contemporaries’ willingness to pass their time reading and listening to romances and histories, proposes to better serve them by transposing – the verb is transmuer – Alixandre's and Cligés's adventures from Old French verse to Middle French prose. But transmutation is not just translation. The prose redactors appropriate Chrétien's texts and modify them to such an extent as virtually to reinvent the original romances. These are not simply the verse romances stripped of Chrétien's inimitable irony and humor, as earlier critics had claimed. While the prose texts respect the general outline of the original plot, the transformations affect every aspect: language, style, and content. Many of the changes can be attributed to “acculturation,” a process of updating whereby, according to Jane H. M. Taylor, “the socio-culturally unfamiliar is recast in familiar terms, so that the reader can understand systems and phenomena in a source text as corresponding to his own ideologies, preconceptions and behaviour patterns.”

[p. 65] However unworthy I am to apply my feeble intelligence to the current fashion of transposing the deeds of some nobles of old from verse to prose, nevertheless, knowing that my contemporaries are turning willingly to the good practice of reading and listening to romances and histories instead of indulging in pastimes, I shall venture to transpose the present account. Although I know my talent is insufficient to the task, I shall do this nonetheless in order to avoid sloth and in obedience to my most lofty and feared prince, praying that he and all others will excuse my ignorance and have patience with my coarse and plain language.

Here follows the story of the noble and valiant emperor Cligés, which is told in two short parts, namely: the first contains the deeds of noble Alixandre, father of Cligés, and the second contains the memorable adventures of said Cligés, son of Soredamors.

At the time the most noble and victorious King Arthur wore the crown of the kingdom of Great Britain, there reigned in Constantinople an emperor named Alixandre, who was a man of great prudence and possessed of fine qualities. His wife was a high lady of noble birth and royal lineage named Thantalis. So lovingly and in such harmony did they pass their time in this world that God granted the clever artisan Lady Nature permission to provide them with two sons: the first was called Alixandre, after his father, and the second, Alix. But Alixandre had already passed through all the stages of youth – childhood, boyhood, and adolescence – when Alix was procreated and come into the world.

Alixandre was well built in every respect, and upon reaching the age of reason, he developed to a lofty degree his noble and valorous spirit, demonstrating that he was descended from noble stock. He decided that he wished to pursue the noble exercise of arms and, seeing that in the Greek empire he could not very well engage in this noble trade, he told himself that he would depart and set out for the place where he might hear it said that arms were best practiced.

From Chrétien de Troyes to the court of Philip the Good: from verse to prose

In the late twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes composed several Arthurian romances of such quality and influence that he is considered the creator of that genre: Erec et Enide, Cligés, Le Chevalier de la charrrette (Lancelot), Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain), and Le Conte du Graal (Le Roman de Perceval). Like most writers of this period, Chrétien composed his romances in verse; his last work, Le Conte du Graal, which breaks off in the middle of an episode, was provided with four verse continuations, all of which date to the thirteenth century and were designed to bring closure to the tale. While authors continued to write in verse from the thirteenth century on, prose became more and more the medium of choice for narrative works, owing in part to the influence of the numerous chronicles and to the feeling that prose conveyed a greater sense of veracity than verse.

Chrétien’s romances survive in manuscripts prepared mostly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; his Chevalier de la charrette, rendered into prose, was adapted to fit into the enormously popular Lancelot, part of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. This five-part Cycle, written in the first part of the thirteenth century, also develops material about the Grail that Chrétien had included in his Conte du Graal. Part of Chrétien’s legacy was thus transformed early on in order to respond to the needs of a new public. His verse works coexisted with the increasingly popular prose romances. But by the fifteenth century, Chrétien’s Old French verse was no longer being copied, and because the language had evolved to the stage that linguists call Middle French, scholars have assumed that readers who were still interested in his romances must have found them difficult to decipher. Indeed, the evolution of the language is one of the reasons cited for the appearance in this late medieval period of prose transcriptions of some of Chrétien’s works. Recently, however, Maria Colombo Timelli has nuanced this judgment. Her research suggests that the authors of mid-fifteenth-century prose renditions – more focused on the work of converting verse to prose – did not perceive a significant difference between the language of their models and their own; this awareness emerged later, after the turn of the sixteenth century.