HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H0067 8/15/00 "HARDY AND THOMAS OF BRITAIN" ======================================================= From: "Patrick Roper" Subject: Hardy and Thomas of Britain Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 16:37:07 +0100 On the title page of The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923), TH quotes two lines of Medieval French from Gottfried von Strassburg's "Tristan und Isolde" (1210): Isot ma drue, Isot m'amie En vos ma mort, en vos ma vie! This means (my translation) "Iseult my joy and my delight, in you my death, in you my life". ('Drue' is almost untranslatable, having a huge range of meanings, some overtly sexual, others nothing to do with sex. 'Amie' is similar). Gottfried (who wrote most of his material in medieval German) did, I think, get these lines from Thomas of Britain's 12th century version of Tristan, now largely lost. Can anyone suggest where TH might have located the lines? (The German version would, I think, have been available thanks to Wagner, and Joseph Bedier had published a reconstruction called "Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas" between 1902 and 1905, but I do not know whether TH could read French or German). It also strikes me that TH might have been particularly attracted to something written by a man with a name like 'Thomas of Britain', despite the fact that he wrote in French. Patrick Roper ========== Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 11:09:35 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Re: Hardy and Thomas of Britain An interesting question Patrick, and I'm afraid I don't have the answer, especially as I am not near a good library at present. However, on looking at what I have on my own bookshelves I can't find these lines anywhere in Bedier, even in the passages he specifically attributes to Thomas and Gottfried. A quick glance at Mallory turned up a blank as well. Hardy did study French in school and took evening lessons in that language in London. I imagine he would have had a competant reading knowledge of it at least. On a totally different, but related, note, those of us who were fortunate enough to take the Cornwall trip during the recent Conference experienced an unforgettable treat. Seeing those places frequented by Thomas and Emma Hardy, and listening to the wonderfully presented readings from the prose and poems about their meeting and romance was both delightful and moving. On James Gibson's advice I am now rereading _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ after many years, and having been to Lyonnesse certainly does bring the novel much more vividly to life. Betty Cortus ========== Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 23:29:07 +0100 From: Birgit Plietzsch Subject: Re: Hardy and Thomas of Britain I can't answer your question as to where exactly Hardy found the lines you quote. With regard to languages it seems to me that Hardy could read French and had at least some knowledge of German. Both _The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy_ (p. 92) and _The Life and Work_ (pp. 466-67) contain identical quotations in French which Hardy took from Marcel Proust's _A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs_. When I was looking at letters Hardy received from German translators in the Dorset County Museum I found that on one of them, which was written in German, he had penciled English translations of individual words as if testing his language skills. Birgit Plietzsch ========== Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 21:38:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Keith Wilson Subject: Re: Hardy and Thomas of Britain Samuel Hynes, ed., _The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy_ Vol V, p. 363 fairly extensively annotates this epigraph, which was variously identified by Hardy. In the holograph (Dorset County Museum), Hardy himself identifies his source as "Bedier (after Gottfried of Strassburg)"; in the first edition as "Gottfried von Strassburg"; in the second and subsequent editions as "(?) THE MONK THOMAS, circa 1200 A.D." Hynes believes all of these to "refer to a single work, _Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, Poeme de XIIe Siecle_, by Joseph Bedier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1902, 1905)". According to Hynes, Bedier quoted the couplet in two places, in neither form exactly the same as Hardy's quotation. This suggests to Hynes that Hardy "got the couplet from some intermediate source, perhaps his friend Edmund Gosse." ----- Keith Wilson Department of English, University of Ottawa 70 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5 Telephone/Voice-Mail: (613) 562 5770; Fax: (613) 562-5990 e-mail: kgwilson@aix1.uottawa.ca ==========