Tristan and Iseult

Legend

There are two main traditions of the Tristan legend. The early tradition comprised the French romances of two poets from the second half of the twelfth century, Thomas of Britain and Béroul. Later traditions come from the Prose Tristan (c. 1240), which was markedly different from the earlier tales written by Thomas and Béroul. The Prose Tristan became the common medieval tale of Tristan and Iseult that would provide the background for the writings of Sir Thomas Malory, the English author, who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur (c. 1469).

The story and character of Tristan vary from poet to poet. Even the spelling of his name varies a great deal, although "Tristan" is the most popular spelling. Most versions of the Tristan story follow the same general outline.

After defeating the Irish knight Morholt, Tristan goes to Ireland to bring back the fair Iseult for his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to marry. Along the way, they ingest a love potion which causes the pair to fall madly in love. In the courtly version, the potion's effects last a lifetime; in the common versions, the potion's effects wane after three years. In some versions, they ingest the potion accidentally; in others, the potion's maker instructs Iseult to share it with Mark, but she deliberately gives it to Tristan instead. Although Iseult marries Mark, she and Tristan are forced by the potion to seek one another as lovers. While the typical noble Arthurian character would be shamed by such an act, the love potion that controls them frees Tristan and Iseult from responsibility. The king's advisors repeatedly endeavour to have the pair tried for adultery, but the couple continually use trickery to preserve their façade of innocence. In Béroul's version, the love potion eventually wears off, and the two lovers are free to make their own choice whether to cease their adulterous relationship or continue.

As with the Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere love triangle, Tristan, King Mark, and Iseult all hold love for each other. Tristan honors, respects, and loves King Mark as his mentor and adopted father; Iseult is grateful that Mark is kind to her; and Mark loves Tristan as his son, Iseult as a wife. But every night, each has horrible dreams about the future. Tristan's uncle eventually learns of the affair and seeks to entrap his nephew and his bride. Also present is the endangerment of a fragile kingdom, the cessation of war between Ireland and Cornwall. Mark acquires what seems proof of their guilt and resolves to punish them: Tristan by hanging and Iseult by burning at the stake, later lodging her in a leper colony. Tristan escapes on his way to the gallows. He makes a miraculous leap from a chapel and rescues Iseult. The lovers escape into the forest of Morrois and take shelter there until discovered by Mark. They make peace with Mark after Tristan's agreement to return Iseult to Mark and leave the country. Tristan then travels to Brittany, where he marries (for her name and her beauty) Iseult of the White Hands, daughter of Hoel of Brittany and sister of Kahedin.

In the Prose Tristan and works derived from it, Tristan is mortally wounded by Mark, who treacherously strikes Tristan with a poisoned lance while the latter is playing a harp for Iseult. The poetic versions of the Tristan legend offer a very different account of the hero's death. According to Thomas' version, Tristan was wounded by a poison lance while attempting to rescue a young woman from six knights. Tristan sends his friend Kahedin to find Iseult, the only person who can heal him. Tristan tells Kahedin to sail back with white sails if he is bringing Iseult, and black sails if he is not. Iseult agrees to return to Tristan with Kahedin, but Tristan's jealous wife, Iseult of the White Hands, lies to Tristan about the colour of the sails. Tristan dies of grief, thinking that Iseult has betrayed him, and Iseult dies swooning over his corpse. Several versions of the Prose Tristan include the traditional account of Tristan's death found in the poetic versions.

In French sources, such as those carefully picked over and then given in English by the well-sourced and best-selling Belloc translation of 1903, it is stated that a thick bramble briar grows out of the Tristan's grave and grows so much that forms a bower and also roots itself into Iseult's grave. It was stated that King Mark tried to have the branches cut three separate times, and each time, the branches grew back and intertwined. Both behaviours of briars would have been very familiar to medieval people who worked on the land. Later tellings sweeten this aspect of the story, by having Tristan's grave grow a briar, but Iseult's grave grow a rose tree, which then intertwine with each other. Further tellings refine this aspect even more, with the two plants being said to have been hazel and honeysuckle.

A few later stories even record that the lovers had a number of children. In some stories they produced a son and a daughter they named after themselves; these children survived their parents and had adventures of their own. In the romance Ysaie the Sad, the eponymous hero is the son of Tristan and Iseult; he becomes involved with the fairy-king Oberon and marries a girl named Martha, who bears him a son named Mark.

The Tristan Stone

Known as The Tristan Stone, or The Longstone (Cornish: Menhir, meaning long stone), is a 2.7 m tall granite pillar near Fowey in Cornwall. The stone has a mid-6th century two line inscription which has been interpreted as reading DRVSTANVS HIC IACIT CVNOMORI FILIVS "Drustan lies here, the son of Cunomorus". A now missing third line was described by the 16th century antiquarian John Leland as reading CVM DOMINA OUSILLA "with the lady Ousilla". Ousilla is a Latinisation of the Cornish female name Eselt, otherwise known as Isolde. The disappearance of this third line may be as a result of the stone being moved several times over the past three centuries.

Persian and Western

There are many theories present about the origins of Tristanian legend, but historians disagree over which is the most accurate. Some scholars suggest that the 11th century Persian story Vis and Rāmin must have been the model for the Tristan legend because the similarities are too great to be coincidental. The evidence for the Persian origin of Tristan and Iseult is very circumstantial and different theories have been suggested how this Persian story reached the West, some suggesting story-telling exchanges during the crusades in Syrian court and through minstrels who had free access to both Crusader and Saracen camps in the Holy Land.

There is a "Drustanus Stone" in Cornwall with an inscription referring to Drustan, but not all historians agree that the Drustan referred to is the archetype of Tristan. There are references to March ap Meichion ("Mark") and Trystan in the Welsh Triads, in some of the gnomic poetry, Mabinogion stories and in the 11th century hagiography of Illtud.

A character called Drystan appears as one of Arthur's advisers at the end of The Dream of Rhonabwy, an early 13th-century tale in the Welsh prose collection known as the Mabinogion, and Iseult is listed along with other great men and women of Arthur's court in another, much earlier Mabinogion tale, Culhwch and Olwen.

Analogues

Possible Irish antecedents to the Tristan legend have received much scholarly attention. An ill-fated triantán an ghrá or love triangle features into a number of Irish works, most notably in the text called Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne or The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne. In the story, the aging Fionn mac Cumhaill takes the young princess, Gráinne, to be his wife. At the betrothal ceremony, however, she falls in love with Diarmuid, one of Fionn's most trusted warriors. Gráinne gives a sleeping potion to all present but him, eventually convincing him to elope with her. The fugitive lovers are then pursued all over Ireland by the Fianna. Another Irish analogue is Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin, preserved in the 14th century Yellow Book of Lecan. In this tale, Cano is an exiled Scottish king who accepts the hospitality of King Marcan of Ui Maile. His young wife, Credd, drugs all present, and then convinces Cano to be her lover. They try to keep a tryst while at Marcan's court, but are frustrated by courtiers. Eventually Credd kills herself and Cano dies of grief. In the Ulster Cycle there is the text Clann Uisnigh or Deirdre of the Sorrows in which Naoise mac Usnech falls for Deirdre, who was imprisoned by King Conchobar mac Nessa due to a prophecy that Ulster would plunge into civil war due to men fighting for her beauty. Conchobar had pledged to marry Deirdre himself in time to avert war, and takes his revenge on Clann Uisnigh. The death of Naoise and his kin leads many Ulstermen to defect to Connacht, including Conchobar's stepfather and trusted ally Fergus mac Róich, eventually precipitating the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Some scholars believe Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe, as well as the story of Ariadne at Naxos might have also contributed to the development of the Tristan legend. The sequence in which Tristan and Iseult die and become interwoven trees also parallels Ovid's love story of Baucis and Philemon in which two lovers are transformed in death into two different trees sprouting from the same trunk. However this also occurs in the saga of Deidre of the Sorrows making the link more tenuous.

Association with King Arthur

In its early stages, the tale was probably unrelated to contemporary Arthurian literature, but the earliest surviving versions already incorporate references to Arthur and his court. The connection between Tristan and Iseult and the Arthurian legend was expanded over time, and sometime shortly after the completion of the Vulgate Cycle (or Lancelot-Grail Cycle) in the first quarter of the 13th century, two authors created the vast Prose Tristan, which fully establishes Tristan as a Knight of the Round Table who even participates in the Quest for the Holy Grail.

Courtly branch

The earliest representation of what scholars name the "courtly" version of the Tristan legend is in the work of Thomas of Britain, dating from 1173. Only ten fragments of his Tristan poem, representing six manuscripts, have ever been located: the manuscripts in Turin and Strassburg are now lost, leaving two in Oxford, one in Cambridge and one in Carlisle. In his text, Thomas names another trouvère who also sang of Tristan, though no manuscripts of this earlier version have been discovered. There is also a passage telling how Iseult wrote a short lai out of grief that sheds light on the development of an unrelated legend concerning the death of a prominent troubadour, as well as the composition of lais by noblewomen of the 12th century.

The next essential text for knowledge of the courtly branch of the Tristan legend is the abridged translation of Thomas made by Brother Robert at the request of King Haakon Haakonson of Norway in 1227. King Haakon had wanted to promote Angevin-Norman culture at his court, and so commissioned the translation of several French Arthurian works. The Nordic version presents a complete, direct narrative of the events in Thomas' Tristan, with the telling omission of his numerous interpretive diversions. It is the only complete representative of the courtly branch in its formative period. Preceding the work of Brother Robert chronologically is the Tristan and Isolt of Gottfried von Strassburg, written circa 1211-1215. The poem was Gottfried's only known work, and was left incomplete due to his death with the retelling reaching half-way through the main plot. The poem was later completed by authors such as Heinrich von Freiberg and Ulrich von Türheim, but with the "common" branch of the legend as the ideal source.

Common branch

The earliest representation of the "common branch" is Béroul's Le Roman de Tristan, the first part of which is generally dated between 1150 and 1170, and the latter part between 1181 and 1190. The branch is so named due to its representation of an earlier non-chivalric, non-courtly, tradition of story-telling, making it more reflective of the Dark Ages than of the refined High Middle Ages. In this respect, they are similar to Layamon's Brut and the Perlesvaus. As with Thomas' works, knowledge of Béroul's is limited. There were a few substantial fragments of his works discovered in the nineteenth century, and the rest was reconstructed from later versions. The more substantial illustration of the common branch is the German version by Eilhart von Oberge. Eilhart's version was popular, but pales in comparison with the later Gottfried.

Questions regarding a common source

The French medievalist Joseph Bédier thought all the Tristan legends could be traced to a single original poem, adapted by Thomas of Brittany into French from an original Cornish or Breton source. He dubbed this hypothetical original the "Ur-Tristan", and wrote his still-popular Romance of Tristan and Iseult as an attempt to reconstruct what this might have been like. In all likelihood, Common Branch versions reflect an earlier form of the story; accordingly, Bédier relied heavily on Eilhart, Béroul and Gottfried von Strassburg, and incorporated material from other versions to make a cohesive whole. Some scholars still consider Bédier's argument convincing. A new English translation of Bédier's Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900) by Edward J. Gallagher was published in 2013 by Hackett Publishing Company. A translation by Hilaire Belloc, first published in 1913, was republished in 2005.

French

Contemporary with Béroul and Thomas, the famous Marie de France presents a Tristan episode in one of her lais: "Chevrefoil". It concerns another of Tristan's clandestine returns to Cornwall in which the banished hero signals his presence to Iseult by means of an inscription on a branch of a hazelnut tree placed on the road she will travel. The title refers to the symbiosis of the honeysuckle and hazelnut tree which die when separated, as do Tristan and Iseult: "Ni moi sans vous, ni vous sans moi." ("Neither me without you, nor you without me.") This episode is reminiscent of one in the courtly branch when Tristan uses wood shavings put in a stream as signals to meet in the garden of Mark's palace.

There are also two 12th century Folies Tristan, Old French poems identified as the Berne and the Oxford versions, which relate Tristan's return to Marc's court under the guise of a madman. Besides their own importance as episodic additions to the Tristan story and masterpieces of narrative structure, these relatively short poems significantly contributed to restoring the missing parts of Béroul's and Thomas' incomplete texts.

The great trouvère Chrétien de Troyes claims to have written a Tristan story, though no part of it has ever been found. He mentions this in the introduction to Cligès, a romance that many see as a kind of anti-Tristan with a happy ending. Some scholars speculate his Tristan was ill-received, prompting Chretien to write Cligès - a story with no Celtic antecedent - to make amends.

After Béroul and Thomas, the most important development in French Tristaniana is a complex grouping of texts known broadly as the Prose Tristan. Extremely popular in the 13th and 14th Century, the narratives of these lengthy versions vary in detail from manuscript to manuscript. Modern editions run twelve volumes for the long version, which includes Tristan's participation in the Quest for the Holy Grail, or five volumes for a shorter version without the Grail Quest. The Roman de Tristan en prose is a great work of art with fits of lyrical beauty. It also had a great influence on later medieval literature, and inspired parts of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, the Roman de Palamedes, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

English

The earliest complete source of the Tristan material in English was Sir Tristrem, a romance of some 3344 lines written circa 1300. It is preserved in the famous Auchinleck manuscript at the National Library of Scotland. The narrative largely follows the courtly tradition. As is true with many medieval English adaptations of French Arthuriana, the poem's artistic achievement can only be described as average, though some critics have tried to rehabilitate it, claiming it is a parody. Its first editor, Sir Walter Scott, provided a sixty line ending to the story, which has been printed with the romance in every subsequent edition.

The only other medieval handling of the Tristan legend in English is Sir Thomas Malory's The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones, a shortened "translation" of the French Prose Tristan in Le Morte d'Arthur. Since the Winchester Manuscript surfaced in 1934, there has been much scholarly debate whether the Tristan narrative, like all the episodes in Le Morte d'Arthur, was originally intended to be an independent piece or part of a larger work.

Nordic

The popularity of Brother Robert's version spawned a unique parody, Saga Af Tristram ok Ísodd, as well as the poem Tristrams kvæði. In the collection of Old Norse prose-translations of Marie de France's lais – called Strengleikar (Stringed Instruments) – two lais with Arthurian content have been preserved, one of them being the "Chevrefoil", translated as "Geitarlauf".

By the 19th century, scholars had found Tristan legends spread across the Nordic world, from Denmark to the Faroe Islands. These stories, however, diverged greatly from their medieval precursors. In one Danish ballad, for instance, Tristan and Iseult are made brother and sister. Other unlikely innovations occur in two popular Danish chapbooks of the late 18th century Tristans saga ok Inionu and En tragoedisk Historie om den ædle og tappre Tistrand, in which Iseult is made the princess of India. The popularity of these chapbooks inspired Icelandic poets Sigurður Breiðfjörð and Níels Jónsson to write rímur, long verse narratives, inspired by the Tristan legend.

Dutch

A 158 line fragment of a Dutch version (ca. 1250) of Thomas of Britain's Tristan exists. It is being kept in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Series nova 3968.

Welsh

A short Tristan narrative, perhaps related to the Béroul text, exists in six Welsh manuscripts dating from the late 16th to the mid 17th century.

Spanish

In the first third of the 14th century the famous Arcipreste de Hita wrote a version of the Tristan story. Carta enviada por Hiseo la Brunda a Tristán; Respuesta de Tristán was a unique 15th century romance written in the form of imaginary letters between the two lovers. Then there was a famous Spanish reworking of the French Prose Tristan, Libro del muy esforzado caballero Don Tristán de Leonís y de sus grandes hechos en armas first published in Valladolid in 1501, then republised in Seville in 1511, 1520, 1525, 1528, 1533 and 1534; additionally a second part, Tristan el Joven, was created which dealt with Tristan's son, Tristan of Leonis.

Czech

A 13th century verse romance exists in Czech, based on the German Tristan poems by Gottfried von Strassburg, Heinrich von Freiberg and Eilhart von Oberge. It is the only known verse representative of the Tristan story in a Slavic language.

Italian

The Tristan legend proved very popular in Italy; there were many cantari, or oral poems performed in the public square, either about him, or frequently referencing him:

There are also four differing versions of the Prose Tristan in medieval Italy, most named after their place of composition or library in which they are currently to be found:

Belarusian

The Belarusian prose Povest Trychane represents the furthest eastern advance of the legend, and, composed in the 1560s, is considered by some critics to be the last "medieval" Tristan or Arthurian text period.

Its lineage goes back to the Tristano Veneto. Venice, at that time, controlled large parts of the Serbo-Croatian language area, engendering a more active literary and cultural life there than in most of the Balkans during this period. The manuscript of the Povest states that it was translated from a (lost) Serbian intermediary. Scholars assume that the legend must have journeyed from Venice, through its Balkan colonies, finally reaching a last outpost in this Slavic language.

Art

The Tristan story was very popular in several art media, from ivory mirror-cases to the 13th century Sicilian Tristan Quilt. Many of the manuscripts with literary versions are illuminated with miniatures.

Literature

In English, the Tristan story suffered the same fate as the Matter of Britain generally. After being mostly ignored for about three centuries, there was a renaissance of original Arthurian literature, mostly narrative verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tristan material in this revival included Alfred Tennyson's The Last Tournament, one of his Idylls of the King; Matthew Arnold's Tristram and Iseult; and Algernon Charles Swinburne's epic poem Tristram of Lyonesse. Thomas Hardy's The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse is a one-act play which was published in 1923 (the book includes an imaginary drawing of the castle at the period). (Rutland Boughton's opera The Queen of Cornwall (1924) was based on Thomas Hardy's play.)

After World War II, most Tristan texts were in the form of prose novels or short stories, although Bernard Cornwell includes a "historical" interpretation of the legend as a side story in The Warlord Chronicles. Novelist Thomas Berger retold the story of Tristan and Isolde in his 1978 interpretation of Arthurian legend, Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel. The story is also referenced in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake".

The Cornish writer Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch ("Q") started Castle Dor, a retelling of the Tristan and Iseult myth in modern circumstances with an innkeeper in the role of King Mark, his wife as Iseult and a Breton onion-seller as Tristan, the plot set in "Troy", his name for his home town of Fowey. The book was left unfinished at Quiller-Couch's death and was completed many years later, in 1962, by Daphne du Maurier. Rosalind Miles also wrote a trilogy about Tristan and Isolde. The first book is called The Queen of the Western Isle, second The Maid of the White Hands and third The Lady of the Sea, and Nancy McKenzie wrote a book Prince of Dreams: a tale of Tristan and Essylte as part of her Arthurian series.

Rosemary Sutcliff also wrote two early adult/children's novels based on the story of Tristan and Iseult. The first, Tristan and Iseult, is a retelling of the story for young adults and was first published in 1971. It received the Boston-Globe Horn Book Award in 1972, and was runner-up for the 1972 Carnegie Medal. It is set primarily in Cornwall in the southern peninsula of Britain. The story appears again as a chapter of her later Arthurian novel The Sword and the Circle (1981).

Diana L. Paxson's 1988 novel The White Raven tells the tale of Tristan and Iseult, called in her book "Drustan" and "Esseilte," from the perspective of Iseult's handmaiden Brangien ("Branwen"), who was mentioned in various of the medieval stories. In Bengali literature the story has been depicted by author Sunil Gangopadhyay in the novel Sonali Dukkho. Joseph Bédier’s Romance of Tristan and Iseult is quoted as a source by John Updike in the afterword to his novel Brazil about the lovers Tristão and Isabel.

In Harry Turtledove's alternate history Ruled Britannia, Christopher Marlowe (who lives longer in the novel's timeline than he did in our history) writes a play called Yseult and Tristan to compete with his friend William Shakespeare's immensely popular Hamlet. No details of the play are given.

Music

In the 19th century, Richard Wagner composed the opera Tristan und Isolde, now considered one of the most influential pieces of music of all time. In his work, Tristan is portrayed as a doomed romantic figure, while Isolde fulfils Wagner's quintessential feminine rôle as the redeeming woman.

Twentieth-century composers also used the legend (often with Wagnerian overtones) in their compositions. Olivier Messiaen built his Turangalila Symphony around the story. Hans Werner Henze's Tristan borrowed freely from the Wagnerian version as well as retellings of the legend.

Films

The story has also been adapted into film many times. The earliest is probably the 1909 French film Tristan et Yseult, an early, silent version of the story. This was followed by another French film of the same name two years later, which offered a unique addition to the story. Here, it is Tristan's jealous slave Rosen who tricks the lovers into drinking the love potion, then denounces them to Mark. Mark has pity on the two lovers, but they commit double suicide anyway. A third silent French version appeared in 1920, and follows the legend fairly closely.

One of the most celebrated and controversial Tristan films was 1943's L'Éternel Retour (The Eternal Return), directed by Jean Delannoy (screenplay by Jean Cocteau). It is a contemporary retelling of the story with a man named Patrice in the Tristan role fetching a wife for his friend Marke. However, an evil dwarf tricks them into drinking a love potion, and the familiar plot ensues. The film was made in France during the Vichy regime, and elements in the movie reflect Nazi ideology, with the beautiful, blonde hero and heroine and the ugly, Semitic dwarf. Not only are the dwarfs visually different, they are given a larger role than in most interpretations of the legend; their conniving rains havoc on the lovers, much like the Jews of Nazi stereotypes.

The 1970 Spanish film Tristana is only tangentially related to the Tristan story. The Tristan role is assumed by the female character Tristana, who is forced to care for her aging uncle, Don Lope, though she wishes to marry Horacio. This was followed by the avant-garde French film Tristan et Iseult in 1972 and the Irish Lovespell, featuring Nicholas Clay as Tristan and Kate Mulgrew as Iseult; coincidentally, Clay went on to play Lancelot in John Boorman's epic Excalibur. The popular German film Fire and Sword premiered in 1981; it was very accurate to the story, though it cut the Iseult of Brittany subplot.

Legendary French director François Truffaut adapted the subject to modern times for his 1981 film La Femme d'à côté (The Woman Next Door), while 1988's In the Shadow of the Raven transported the characters to medieval Iceland. Here, Trausti and Isolde are warriors from rival tribes who come into conflict when Trausti kills the leader of Isolde's tribe, but a local bishop makes peace and arranges their marriage. Bollywood director Subhash Ghai transfers the story to modern India and the United States in his 1997 musical Pardes. The Indian American Kishorilal (Amrish Puri) raises his orphaned nephew Arjun (Shahrukh Khan). Eventually, Pardes sends Arjun back to India to lure the beautiful Ganga (Mahima Chaudhary) as a bride for his selfish, shallow son Rajiv (Apoorva Agnihotri). Arjun falls for Ganga, and struggles to remain loyal to his cousin and beloved uncle. The film features the Bollywood hit "I Love My India". The 2002 French animated film Tristan et Iseut is a bowdlerized version of the traditional tale aimed at a family audience.

The most recent Tristan film is 2006's Tristan & Isolde, produced by Tony Scott and Ridley Scott, written by Dean Georgaris, directed by Kevin Reynolds, and starring James Franco and Sophia Myles. In this version, Tristan is a Cornish warrior who was raised by Lord Marke after his parents were killed at a young age. In a fight with the Irish, Tristan defeats Morholt, the Irish King's second, but is poisoned in the process. The poison dulls all his senses and his companions believe him dead. He is sent off in a boat meant to cremate a dead body. Isolde, dismayed over her unwilling betrothal to Morholt, leaves her home and finds Tristan on the Irish coast. She tells Tristan that she is called Bragnae, which is the name of her maidservant. Isolde takes care of him and hides him from her father. They spend long days together and come to care for each other. Eventually they confess their feelings for one another and consummate their love. Tristan's boat is discovered and Isolde's father begins a search for a Cornish warrior in Ireland. Isolde helps Tristan escape but cannot leave with him. Tristan returns to England and learns of a tournament between the Cornish tribes for the hand of the Irish princess named Isolde. He agrees to participate to win the princess as Marke's wife. After winning the tournament and discovering that the princess is the woman who had rescued him, Tristan is devastated but decides to bury his feelings because her marriage to Marke would end decades of bloodshed. Eventually Tristan cannot stand to be apart from Isolde any longer and they start their adulterous relationship. Later they are found out but Marke frees them after hearing their story. Tristan, however, returns to defend Marke against a rebellion. He dies a hero with Isolde at his side.