The appearance of this last personage in the Legend is one of the most curious and interesting points in it. Although on this, as on every one of such points, the widest diversity of opinion prevails, an impartial examination of the texts perhaps enables us to obtain some tolerably clear views on the subject--views which are helpful not merely with reference to the "Tristan-saga" itself, but with reference to the origins and character of the whole Legend.[54] There cannot, I think, be a doubt that the Tristram story originally was quite separate from that of Arthur. In the first place, Tristram has nothing whatever to do with that patriotic and national resistance to the Saxon invader which, though it died out in the later legend, was the centre, and indeed almost reached the circumference, of the earlier. In the second, except when he is directly brought to Arthur's court, all Tristram's connections are with Cornwall, Brittany, Ireland, not with that more integral and vaster part of _la bloie Bretagne_ which extends from Somerset and Dorset to the Lothians. When he appears abroad, it is as a Varangian at Constantinople, not in the train of Arthur fighting against Romans. Again, the religious part of the story, which is so important in the developed Arthurian Legend proper, is almost entirely absent from the Tristram-tale, and the subject which played the fourth part in mediaeval affections and interests with love, religion, and fighting--the chase--takes in the Tristram romances the place of religion itself. [Footnote 54: Editions: the French _Tristan_, edited long ago by F. Michel, but in need of completion; the English _Sir Tristrem_ in Scott's well-known issue, and re-edited (Heilbronn, 1882), with excellent taste as well as learning, by Dr Koelbing, who has also given the late Icelandic version, as well as for the Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1886) by Mr George P. McNeill; Gottfried of Strasburg's German (_v._ chap. vi.), ed. Bechstein (Leipzig, 1890). _Romania_, v. xv. (1886), contains several essays on the Tristram story.] [Sidenote: _His story almost certainly Celtic._]