The castaway and the soothsayer: Traces of the Old Testament in the Prehistory of the Tristan en Prose

For the European Middle Ages, the Bible represented not only the foundation of spirituality, ethics, and theological truth but also a book of great literature, which fostered the development of specific exegetic strategies. The thirteenth-century French Roman de Tristan en Prose is amongst those texts in which the scriptural model can be glimpsed throughout the plot as well as in the interpretative reasoning it demands of its readers. The first section of this enormous romance, known as the prehistory or the genealogy, opens with the recounting of the story of Tristan’s ancestors: here especially, the author builds his intricate narration by intertwining the themes of Judaeo-Christian literature with pagan and lay ones. The aim of this article is to untie some of these narrative knots, to understand through a comparative approach how the scriptural matter provides the paradigms for this new style of writing founded on ‘delight and courtesy’ and how allegorical language and exegesis can help us in understanding the deeper reasons of this intertextual interplay.