Tristan and Iseult are a fictional pair of lovers who
dominated the Western European medieval imagination.
The story of their adulterous love even became
part of the King Arthur story cycle.
Tristan (also rendered as Tristam or Tristram) is
the favored nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, and
he is sent to accompany the king’s new bride, the
Irish princess Iseult (also rendered as Iseut, Isolt,
Isolde, Ysolt, etc.), on her boat ride to her new husband
in Cornwall. On the voyage, Tristan and
Iseult mistakenly drink a love potion that was intended
for her and King Mark; consequently, they
fall passionately in love. Once they arrive at court,
they continue to conduct their affair in secret.King
Mark loves both his nephew and his wife, so when
some of his knights and courtiers tell him they suspect
Tristan and Iseult, he initially refuses to believe
them. Finally, the king finds out about their
affair, and the pair are sent off in exile, where they
continue to meet.
In several versions of the story, Tristan marries
a princess of Brittany named Iseult of the White
Hands; even though he performs the marriage in
an attempt to forget his one love, he is still so obsessed
with Iseult that he marries the princess only
because she has the same name. Tristan is mortally
wounded, and he sends word to Queen Iseult to
come to him. Iseult sets out to meet her lover and
heal him, but she arrives after his death, and she
dies of grief. The two are buried side by side.
The origins of the Tristan and Iseult story may be
Celtic; the place- and character names derive from
Cornish and Welsh, and references to King Mark
and Tristan appear in Welsh bards’ story collections
of the 11th century. But two 12th-century French
romances are the earliest surviving sources. One is
by a poet called Béroul, and the other is by a man
who calls himself Thomas à Angleterre (Thomas of
England). Both versions are unfinished, but an Old
Norse translation of Thomas’s version is complete.
A French prose version of the story dates from the
mid-13th century, and this is the version that incorporates
Tristan into the world of King Arthur
and the quest for the HOLY GRAIL. This extremely
popular version was translated into Italian, Spanish,
and even Russian and Polish, spreading the
Arthurian tales into Southern and Eastern Europe.
German medieval literature, however, not only
produced the earliest complete version of Tristan
and Iseult (1170–90), but also one of the great
works of medieval literature, the Tristan of GOTTFRIED
VON STRASSBURG (1200). Gottfried’s poem is
incomplete, but it is masterful in its exploration of
the characters’ psychological states. Gottfried uses
the fatal love potion as a metaphor for “love at first
sight.” Even though he focuses on the joy that their
love brings them, Gottfried does not neglect the
pain and betrayal that the affair causes every character
involved. This version of the Tristan and
Iseult legend was enormously popular and influential,
inspiring Richard Wagner’s great 19thcentury
opera Tristan und Isolde.
The Tristan and Iseult story inspired other writers
not usually associated with the Arthurian cycle.
MARIE DE FRANCE wrote a lai, or short song, called
“Chevrefoil” (“Honeysuckle”) about Tristan and
Iseult, arranging one of their rendezvous in the
woods. Other short works or fragments from longer
ones depict episodes based on the famous lovers.
Several surviving short poems in French describe
incidents in which Tristan pretends madness or disguises
himself as a wandering minstrel or beggar in
order to visit Iseult while he is in exile. The story was
so popular that it even appeared in the tapestries
and textiles that decorated medieval castles.
Part of the appeal of the Tristan and Iseult legend
stems from its time period and the culture that
produced it; Tristan is the knight as courtly lover,
while Iseult combines fidelity to her lover with resourcefulness
in meeting him. The overwhelming
power of their attraction to each other, as well as
the painful consequences of their love, overrides
any moral or ethical problem that their affair poses
to readers, and their troubled passion has set the
tone for literary depictions of romantic love for
most of Western world literature.
Critical Analysis
The earliest French versions of the Tristan and
Iseult story differ in tone and emphasis.Medievalists
have called the Béroul version the “common
version” because it takes a commonsensical and action-
oriented approach to the narrative.When it
focuses on the lovers’ duplicity, it seems to regard
their cleverness as admirable rather than despicable.
When Iseult pleads her innocence before King
Marc and King Arthur, she and Tristan plot for
him to disguise himself as a leper and help carry
her across a marshy brook. Thus, when she swears
that the only men who have been between her
thighs are her husband and the leper who carried
her over the marsh, she technically tells the truth.
Finally, the Béroul version contains earthy moments
that are both humorous and disturbing.
When King Mark tries to punish Iseult and Tristan
the first time, he initially plans to burn them
alive.When a leper proposes that a better punishment
would be to give Iseult to the leper colony,
Béroul spares no detail in describing why this
would be worse than death:
No lady in the world could tolerate
A single day of relations with us!
Our ragged clothes stick to our bodies; . . .
When she sees our squalid hovels
And shares our dishes
And has to sleep with us,
And when, instead of your fine food, sir,
She has only the scraps and crumbs
That are given to us at the gates. . . .
Marc agrees this is a fate worse than death and
hands Iseult to the lepers.
Thomas à Angleterre’s narrative does not focus
on the main characters’ trickery and action as
much as it does on their psychological states and
the effects the adulterous relationship has on other
characters. This version, called the “courtly” version,
is not simply more refined but more concerned
with how the two main characters’ passion
has consequences for themselves and others. Tristan
chooses to marry Iseult of the White Hands in
Brittany because he imagines that marriage will
offer him a release from physical frustration since
he is separated from Queen Iseult. Yet as Thomas
describes his thought process, this is not a simple
problem that can be solved by substituting one
woman for another:
When they cannot have their desire
Or what they love most,
They do what is in their power to do;
Out of desperation they will do something
Which often increases their pain twofold,
And, seeking to be free,
They yet cannot break the bond.
Instead of finding peace within his marriage,
Tristan feels little attraction toward his wife and
guilt for betraying his true love and causing Iseult of
the White Hands to feel rejected and bitter. Iseult,
on the other hand, does not enjoy any pleasure with
her husband, Marc, because he is not Tristan. To
contradict the old saying, all cats are not gray in
the dark, and probably the greatest innovation in
the Tristan and Iseult story is the insistence that individuals
cannot be commanded to love because of
social institutions or codes of loyalty. Love becomes
a wild force that threatens the social order: Tristan
loses his standing in court and the protection of
his closest kinsman, Iseult loses her husband’s trust,
and King Mark loses respect from his court because
of his lenient dealings with the pair.Yet the doomed
lovers are portrayed sympathetically in all versions
of the story, and their struggle between social obligations
and individual desires continues to inspire
the Western imagination.
See also ABÉLARD AND HÉLOÏSE; MEDIEVAL ROMANCE.
English Versions of Tristan and Iseult
Béroul. The Romance of Tristan and the Tale of Tristan’s
Madness. Translated by Alan S. Fedrick. New
York: Penguin, 1978.
Early French Tristan Poems. 2 vols. Edited by Norris J.
Lacy. Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1998.
The Romance of Tristan: The Thirteenth-Century Old
French “Prose Tristan.” Translated by Renee L.Curtis.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Works about Tristan and Iseult
Eisner, Sigmund. The Tristan Legend: A Study in
Sources. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1969.
Grimbert, Joan Tasker, ed. Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook.
New York: Garland, 1995.
Lacy,Norris J. and Geoffrey Ashe with Debra N.Mancoff.
The Arthurian Handbook. New York: Garland,
1997.
Varvaro, Alberto. Beroul’s Romance of Tristran. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1972.