Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Benes, Carrie

Keywords

Tristan and Isolde, Translations, Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Area of Concentration

Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Abstract

This thesis examines three medieval versions of the Tristan and Isolde story: Brother Robert’s 1226 Old Norse Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, the French prose Tristan (c. 1230–5), and the Tavola Ritonda (Italy, early to mid-fourteenth century). My study of these texts focuses on the way in which medieval authors approached translation as its own creative process, for example changing a narrative to make a story more suitable for new audiences in different cultural and political environments. Tristrams saga demonstrates the Norse appropriation of Angevin court culture carried out by King Håkon IV Håkonsson in support of a changing political system; the French prose Tristan shows how later forms of the Tristan narrative were affected by changes in French law, politics, and literary convention; and the Tavola Ritonda reinterprets elements of both the prose Tristan and the twelfth-century verse versions for the entertainment of its new Italian audience. I study each of these translations in its own context to understand the wider implications of changes to narrative form and function, and, in doing so, argue that these texts are far more original than scholars have previously recognized.

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