Tristan and Iseult

Summary

Tristan

THE STORY OF TRISTAN AND ISEULT seems to have been told for the first time in a single poem which no longer survives, written around the middle of the twelfth century. We know a little about it from the surviving fragments of other poems about Tristan, all of which relate the main episodes of the story in the same way, although individual details vary. In effect, modern scholars argue that there was once something like The History of the Kings of Britain for the Tristan legend, one key text from which all other reworkings were largely derived. What has come down to us are fragments of a version by Thomas, who wrote at the Plantagenet court in England some time after 1150; parts of a poem by Eilhart von Oberge, writing in Germany in about 1170, and a similar fragment by another Norman poet, Béroul, of about 1180. It was a theme which caught the imagination of the writers of that period, and it is possible that Chrétien de Troyes also wrote a version of it.

The central theme of these romances, the love of Tristan for Iseult, wife of his uncle, Mark, is found in Welsh literature, and scholars generally accept that the original Tristan was Drust, son of the Pictish king, Talorc, who ruled in Scotland about 780, and that the legends were later given a new setting in Cornwall. The so-called Tristan stone at Castledore refers to another character of similar name, and its only connection with the legend is that it may have suggested the new site of the stories; in Welsh legend, Essyllt's lover is always Tristan ‘son of Tallwch’ and the Cornish Drustanus’ father is named in the inscription as Cunomorus. The shape of the legend was drawn by Welsh writers from Irish sources: the central triangle of lord, wife and lover comes from the story of Diarmaid and Grainne, which has been added to an episode about Drust telling how, by defeating a hero in single combat, he rescued a foreign king from having to surrender his daughter as tribute.