Joseph Bédier - O Romance de Tristão e Isolda

The story of Tristan and Isolde — those strange immortals of love who build their tragedy under the fatal spell of a feeling imposed by Celtic magic, a passion against which custom and law are powerless — appeared as an alternative to Wagner’s sublime slowness: swift, thrilling, and guided by all the knowledge that makes the efficiency of tales passed down through oral tradition. The legend of Tristan and Isolde achieved editorial success and was confirmed as the ultimate symbol of love, in its unsurpassable intensity — a love that King Denis of Portugal still dared to challenge in verse: “the much-in-love Tristan I well know did not love Isolde as much as I love you.” 

Joseph Bédier [Paris, January 28, 1864 – Le Grand-Serre, August 29, 1938] had managed to captivate the general public with a story of wild innocence, written in prose that evoked for the French reader the storytelling tradition known from Perrault. And in 1938, when a sudden and fatal cerebral stroke struck him in his retreat in Grand-Serre, in the Drôme, the newspapers reported the death of… that author… who, yes, wrote important things about the Middle Ages, but who was above all the reviver of the romance of Tristan and Isolde — already celebrating its hundredth edition.

- Anibal Fernandes