Tristan and Isolde: the forbidden passion of medieval romance

No love story marked the European Middle Ages as deeply as that of Tristan and Isolde. The core of the legend probably has Celtic roots, but the oldest literary versions we possess are in French and date from the second half of the twelfth century. Since then the tale of the knight who loves the wife of his uncle and king has been retold in almost every language of Europe.

The plot of the legend

Tristan, nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, is sent to Ireland to ask for the hand of Isolde the Fair on his uncle's behalf. On the voyage home the two drink by mistake the enchanted draught that Isolde's mother had intended for the bride and groom, entrusting it to the maid Brangaine. From that moment they are bound by an irresistible passion, which forces them to deceive the king and the court.

After deceptions, flights into the forest and returns, Tristan is exiled and in Brittany marries another woman, Isolde of the White Hands, without being able to forget the first. Mortally wounded, he sends for Isolde the Fair: the ship is to hoist a white sail if she is aboard, a black one if not. The jealous wife lies about the colour, Tristan dies, and his beloved arrives too late, only to die beside him.

Béroul, Thomas and Gottfried

The two oldest French versions have reached us in fragments. Béroul's, in verse, is closer to popular taste and dwells on the lovers' cunning and their enemies' cruelty; that of Thomas, probably composed in an Anglo-Norman setting, analyses feelings with psychological subtlety and preserves the splendid ending of the sail. The exact date of both is debated.

Around 1210 the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg took up Thomas in a great unfinished poem that makes the protagonists' love a kind of secular religion. Marie de France also devoted a short lai, Chevrefoil, to a secret meeting of the lovers, who are compared to the hazel and the honeysuckle that die if they are separated. Finally, in the thirteenth century, a vast prose Tristan was born.

A love against the rules

The story challenges the values of feudal society. Tristan betrays his lord and kinsman, Isolde her husband and king, yet the narrative takes their side. The draught makes it possible to present passion as an external and fatal force for which the lovers are not wholly responsible. Chrétien de Troyes, in his romance Cligès, argued against this model with a story that many critics read as an anti-Tristan.

Dante places Tristan in the second circle of Hell, among the lustful, alongside Paris, Helen, Cleopatra and other famous lovers overwhelmed by passion. His name appears in the fifth canto shortly before the meeting with Francesca da Rimini, whose own story springs from the reading of another Arthurian romance, that of Lancelot and Guinevere. The Florentine poet knew this literature well, for it was widely read in Italy.

In the nineteenth century Richard Wagner turned the legend into a music drama, first performed in Munich in 1865, which exalted its bond between love, night and death. Yet the medieval fragments already contain everything that would make the story famous: love as destiny, secrecy, conflict with the law and a union that only death makes final.