Might Malory have used the Middle English metrical romance Sir Tristrem along-side the French Prose Tristan in composing his ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’? There are some episodes in the early part of Malory's book where details unaccounted for in the French source could have been influenced by Sir Tristrem; while larger-scale concerns shared by the two English texts are absent from the French.

Malory's use of English metrical romances to supplement his French prose sources in compiling the Morte Darthur is well documented. The most striking example, of course, is his reworking of the anonymous alliterative Morte Arthure in ‘The Noble Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius’, but the case for his use of the stanzaic Middle English Le Morte Arthur alongside the French prose texts in the last two books of his Arthurian compilation is equally convincing. Less attention has been paid to the possibility that Malory may have drawn upon the Middle English verse romance known as Sir Tristrem in ‘The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’, his adaptation of the French Prose Tristan, and it is the evidence for this that I propose to examine.

Sir Walter Scott, the first editor of the metrical Tristan romance that survives in a unique but incomplete fourteenth-century copy in the Auchinleck MS (National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1), gave the text its modern name, Sir Tristrem.