Joseph Bédier
1864–1938
Biography
Joseph Bédier was a French writer and historian of medieval France, born in Paris in 1864. His father was a lawyer of Breton origin, and Bédier spent his childhood on the island of Réunion. He taught medieval French literature at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland around 1890 and then at the Collège de France in Paris. He was elected to the Académie française in 1920 and died in 1938.
His scholarship reshaped the study of medieval French narrative. Modern thinking on the fabliaux, the short comic verse tales, and on the chansons de geste, the heroic epics, rests in large part on two of his studies. He also edited La chanson de Roland and revived interest in several other important old French texts.
His most widely read work, and the one on this site, is his retelling of Tristan and Iseult, published in 1900. Drawing on the medieval French versions of the story, he gave it a single continuous form that has been read and translated widely since. Hilaire Belloc translated it into English, and that version, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, is the one readers find in this catalogue.
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Books
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
by Joseph Bédier (translated by Hilaire Belloc)
Joseph Bédier's French retelling of the legend of Tristan, the knight, and Iseult, the queen, bound by a potion. Hilaire Belloc's translation keeps the old tale's direct and sorrowful voice.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.