None of the line items that are included in the following outline are meant to be links.
The outline itself represents the material that is to be covered in the upcoming book known by the above title (available after June 2031).

Foreword by Candice Trismegistus

1. Introduction to Tristan and Isolde, Tragic Lovers in Logres
2. Sir Tristan, Tragic Lover in Logres
1. Introduction to Sir Tristan, Tragic Lover in Logres
2. Meaning, Origin, Existence, and Comparison: Tristan’s Name, Other Tristans, and Other Tragic Lovers
1. Introduction to Meaning, Origin, Existence, and Comparison: Tristan’s Name, Other Tristans, and Other Tragic Lovers
1. The name Tristan
1. — borne by one of the most celebrated tragic lovers in the literary tradition of Western Christendom —
2. carries within its several forms the accumulated sediment of linguistic change, cultural transmission, and mythological resonance
2. To trace its etymology is to trace a path from the Pictish inscriptions of early mediaeval Scotland
1. southward through Brythonic Wales
2. and thence into the French-speaking courts of the twelfth century,
3. where the tale received its most enduring literary elaborations
3. Yet the name did not belong solely to the fictional hero:
1. it was borne by historical persons,
2. by dwarf-knights in subsidiary romances,
3. by rulers of distant lands,
4. and by the son whom legend assigned to the lovers themselves
4. Beyond these nominal cognates, the figure of Tristan as a young man doomed by an impossible love
1. — caught between desire and loyalty, between life and death —
2. participates in a far older and more universal pattern of tragic eros, whose antecedents may be traced
3. through “Celtic”, Classical, Semitic, and Persian traditions,
4. and whose echoes persist into the plays of Shakespeare and beyond
5. This section addresses, in turn,
1. the meaning and origin of the name in its several forms;
2. the attested or legendary existence of other persons bearing it;
3. and the comparative mythological and literary tradition of tragic lovers to whom Tristan may usefully be likened
2. Meaning and Origin of Tristan’s Name
1. Introduction to Meaning and Origin of Tristan’s Name
1. The question of what Tristan’s name means, and whence it derives, has occupied scholars of “Celtic” philology, Arthurian studies, and Romance literature for well over a century
2. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the name occurs in several distinct but related forms across different linguistic traditions
• — Welsh, Pictish, Latin, Old French, Middle English
• — and that the mediaeval French romancers,
• sensitive to the tragic burden of the tale they were transmitting,
• may have consciously or unconsciously inflected the name with associations it did not originally carry
3. The dominant scholarly consensus holds that all forms derive ultimately from a Brythonic root connected to the Pictish onomastic tradition,
4. though the precise phonological pathway from the earliest attested forms to the familiar “Tristan” of the romances remains a matter of debate
2. Tristan(s)
1. The form Tristan
• — the spelling most familiar to modern readers from Tristan en Prose, Tristan of Béroul, and Italian and German derivatives of French tradition —
• is itself a Gallicised adaptation of an earlier Brythonic form
2. Its adoption into Old French brought with it,
• whether by design or happy accident,
• an auditory echo of the French adjective triste (sad, sorrowful),
• a resonance that French-speaking poets were swift to exploit
3. In Tristan en Prose and in numerous lyric allusions,
• the hero’s name is explicitly glossed as signifying sadness,
• and his birth amid his mother’s death-agony is offered as etymological justification
4. This is, of course, a piece of folk etymology
• — a nomen omen of the kind beloved of mediaeval writers —
• but it has proven extraordinarily durable, colouring all subsequent reception of the figure
5. The form Tristan in its French guise carries, therefore, a double semantic charge:
• the archaic Pictish resonance of tumult and strife,
• and courtly French resonance of melancholy and tragic predestination
3. Tristram
1. Tristram is the principal English form of the name,
• employed by Sir Thomas Malory in his Morte Darthur
• and by later English writers
• from the ballad tradition
• through to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
• and beyond
2. The substitution of the terminal -am for -an
• reflects a tendency observable in Middle English adaptation of French names,
• analogous to the English form Bertram for French Bertrand
3. Malory’s Sir Tristram de Lyones
• — the full designation used in Morte —
• identifies the knight with the kingdom of Lyonesse,
• a sunken land off the Cornish coast,
• adding a further layer of tragic geography to the name
4. The form Tristram carries none of the French etymological folk-glossing of sadness;
• it sits more squarely in an English chivalric tradition
• in which the hero’s defining characteristic is martial excellence
• rather than the pathetic irresistibility of love
4. Trystran(s)/Tristran(s)
1. Tristran (sometimes Trystran) represents an intermediate or archaic French form,
• employed notably by Thomas of Britain in his Anglo-Norman Tristran (c AD 1150–1175),
• the most courtly and psychologically refined of the early French versions
2. Thomas is careful throughout
• to render the name with the -an termination,
• and several manuscripts preserve Tristran as the normative spelling
3. This form stands closest to the Welsh Drystan in its phonological structure
• and is therefore of especial interest to those tracing the name’s transmission
• from Brythonic originals into the Franco-Norman literary milieu
4. Trystran (with the initial y)
• appears in certain Welsh-influenced texts
• and may reflect a scribal attempt to preserve or simulate the Welsh colouring of the name
5. Drych/(Dwrst Dwnhaeadn)/(Drustwrn Hayam)
1. These cryptic forms relate to Tristan’s representation in early Welsh tradition,
• wherein the figure appears in Triads (Trioedd Ynys Prydein)
• under the name Drystan fab Tallwch
2. The bynames Dwrst Dwnhaeadn and Drustwrn Hayam
• are found in marginal and interpolated material
• associated with the Welsh Arthurian tradition
3. Drych (Welsh: “mirror” or “image, reflection”)
• may function as a descriptive epithet rather than a variant name proper,
• suggesting the hero as a reflection or image of some ideal type
4. Dwrst Dwnhaeadn appears to contain the element Dwrst/Dwrst (a Welshified form of the Pictish Drust) alongside Dwnhaeadn,
• which may relate to Welsh dwfn (deep) and haearn (iron),
• yielding something approximating "deep-iron" or "iron-voiced"
5. Drustwrn Hayam similarly compounds the Pictish root with Welsh nominal elements
• — gwrn (oven, furnace) and haearn (iron) —
• a martial and smithcraft epithet consonant with the hero's warrior identity
6. These forms, however fragmentary and uncertain their transmission,
• testify to the depth of Tristan’s roots in the Welsh and sub-Roman Brythonic world
• before the name was reshaped by Continental romance
6. Drust(an)(us)/Drostan/Drystan/Drest/(riot, tumult)
1. The etymological bedrock of all forms of the name is the Pictish Drust or Drest,
• a name well attested in early Pictish king-lists
• and in ogham inscriptions from northern Britain and Ireland
2. Several Pictish kings bore this name:
• notably Drust mac Erp (fl. c. 5th century), who ruled for one hundred years according to the Pictish Chronicle
• — a legendary figure whose exploits may have contributed to the Tristan legend —
• and Drust mac Talorcan (fl. 8th century)
3. The Latin form Drustanus appears on the famous Tristan Stone (Men Scryfa or Longstone) near Fowey in Cornwall:
• DRUSTANVS HIC IACIT CVNOMORI FILIVS
• — "Drustanus lies here, son of Cunomorus" —
• the inscription that connects the legendary hero to a historical or quasi-historical Cornish king,
• generally identified with King Mark (Latin Cunomorus, Welsh Cynfawr)
4. The name Drostan appears in Pictish and early Gaelic sources, notably in connexion with the Columban monastic tradition in Scotland
5. Drystan is the standard Welsh form, appearing in the Triads and in early Welsh poetry
6. The root meaning is most plausibly the Brythonic/Pictish drus-t- related to the Welsh noun trwst (noise, tumult, din, uproar),
• cognate with Old Irish trost (noise)
• and ultimately deriving from a Proto-Celtic root *trus-to- expressive of violent sound or commotion
7. This etymology — "riot", "tumult", "clamour" — befits a warrior-hero
• whose deeds in battle were sung by bards,
• and stands in pointed ironic contrast to the courtly tradition
• that reinterpreted the name as signifying melancholy
3. Existence of Other Tristans
1. Introduction to Existence of Other Tristans
1. The name Tristan — in its several forms — was not confined exclusively to the legendary hero of the romance cycle
2. It appears in documents, inscriptions, narrative interpolations, and independent tales
• attaching to figures who may in some cases be reflections, doublets, or distant relatives of the titular hero,
• and in others represent entirely independent persons who chanced to bear the same illustrious name
3. The following catalogue surveys the principal candidates,
• ranging from the literary to the documentary,
• and considers in each case the degree to which they may be related to or identified with the hero of the Tristan and Isolde legend
2. Tristans
1. A knight whose name figures in three of the lists of knights
2. May or may not be the same as the titular Tristan
3. In the Arthurian tradition,
• several independent lists of the knights of the Round Table are preserved across different texts and traditions,
• and in three of these catalogues a knight named Tristan
• — or a phonological variant thereof —
• is enumerated without further identification or narrative elaboration
4. The question of whether this listed knight is to be equated with the titular Tristan of the romance cycle,
• or whether the name here attaches to a distinct and otherwise unnarrated figure,
• cannot be resolved with certainty on the basis of the surviving evidence
5. The lists in question likely reflect the gradual absorption of originally independent hero-figures into the capacious Arthurian fellowship;
• the process by which a renowned name from a parallel tradition
• is assimilated to the roster of Arthur's court is well attested
• in the case of other heroes (Perceval, Gawain, Lancelot)
6. It is entirely conceivable that a distinct warrior named Tristan once circulated in early Welsh tradition,
• was listed alongside other heroes in pre-romance catalogues,
• and was subsequently identified — or conflated —
• with the Cornish/Pictish tragic lover as the romance tradition consolidated itself in Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries AD
3. Trist(r)an the Dwarf
1. In Thomas of Britain’s Tristran
• — the most psychologically and linguistically sophisticated of the early French versions of the legend,
• composed c AD 1150–1175 in an Anglo-Norman milieu
• — there appears a remarkable episode involving a figure known as Tristran the Dwarf (or Tristan le Nain in other versions)
2. This character is described as a nobleman,
• specifically a knight of the Marches of Brittany on the Biscay side,
• which is to say the border territories of Brittany adjacent to the Bay of Biscay in the south,
• a region of some strategic and romantic significance in Arthurian geography
3. He is not a figure of comedy or grotesquerie after the fashion of many dwarfs in mediaeval romance, but rather a man of standing and genuine feeling
4. His paramour has been abducted by Estult li Orgillus — "Estult the Proud" — a villain whose pride and violence represent the anti-chivalric forces that prey upon the defenceless
5. The Dwarf, unable to recover her by his own strength, appeals to the titular Tristran for aid, invoking their shared name as a bond of obligation:
• they are, in some sense, namesakes
• and therefore bound by a quasi-fraternal solidarity
6. This invocation of nominal kinship is a striking device, suggesting that the name Tristran carries with it a code of honour and a specific chivalric identity
7. The protagonist, in accordance with this code, undertakes the task of rescue
8. The outcome, however, is tragic:
• the Dwarf knight is killed in the ensuing battle,
• slain in combat with Estult and Estult's six brothers
• — a sevenfold antagonism that underscores the hopelessness of his situation
• and the cruel arbitrariness of fate
9. His death, like that of the titular Tristan, follows from a love that could not be adequately defended against the violence of a hostile world
4. Tristan the Stranger — Ruler of Jakobsland
1. In later and more peripheral branches of the Tristan tradition
2. — particularly in some of the Scandinavian and Northern German retellings —
3. a figure identified as Tristan the Stranger appears as a ruler of a land referred to as Jakobsland,
• a toponym that has not been satisfactorily identified with any historically attested territory
• and which may be a Germanicised or Scandinavian rendering of a more familiar Arthurian or quasi-Arthurian place-name
4. Tristan the Stranger is a figure of uncertain function within the larger narrative economy of these texts:
• he may represent a doublet of the hero,
• a distant relation,
• or a ruler whose realm stands in some allegorical or geographical relation to the central love story
5. His epithet "the Stranger" (li Estrange in French-influenced versions) is significant, for estrangeness
• — foreignness, displacement, the condition of being out of place —
• is a defining characteristic of the titular Tristan, who moves between Cornwall, Ireland, Brittany, and Armorica without ever finding a permanent home
6. The identification of this figure remains a matter of scholarly speculation
5. Tristan the Younger — Son of Tristan and Isolde
1. Several of the later prose elaborations of the legend,
• particularly within the tradition of the vast Thirteenth-Century AD Tristan en Prose,
• posit the existence of a son born of the union of Tristan and Isolde
• — or, in some versions, of Tristan and the second Isolde (Isolde of the White Hands, whom he married in Brittany)
2. This figure, Tristan the Younger,
• inherits his father's name and, in some versions,
• continues his adventures in a second-generation Arthurian romance,
• participating in the Grail Quest or engaging in various chivalric enterprises that recapitulate and transform the themes of the parent legend
3. His existence as a narrative figure serves the dynastic and thematic interests of the prose tradition:
• the continuation of the Tristan line
• beyond the double death of the lovers provides a kind of symbolic mitigation of tragedy
4. In versions where he is identified as the son of Isolde of the White Hands,
• there is an inherent irony:
• he is the product of a marriage that remained, in the tradition, unconsummated or emotionally hollow
6. Tristan — bore witness to a legal document at the Swabian Abbey of Saint Gall (AD 807)
1. Amongst the documentary evidence that bears upon the currency of the name Tristan in historical contexts rather than literary ones,
• a witness subscription at the Swabian Abbey of Saint Gall
• — one of the great Carolingian monastic houses and a principal repository of early mediaeval charters —
• records a person named Tristan as a signatory to a legal document in the year AD 807
2. This attestation is of considerable significance for the history of the name’s diffusion,
• demonstrating that by the early Ninth Century AD it had spread from its presumed Brythonic and Pictish origins into the heart of the Carolingian Frankish realm,
• there to be borne by a person sufficiently prominent to witness an abbey’s legal transactions
3. The presence of the name in a Swabian ecclesiastical document suggests either that the name’s renown
• — perhaps through early forms of the Tristan legend circulating in oral or written tradition —
• had already reached German-speaking lands,
• or alternatively that it represents an independent naming tradition with no necessary connexion to the insular Brythonic original
7. Turstan Crectune/Crichton — granted Lothian lands by Scottish King David (AD 1128)
1. In the records of the reign of King David I of Scotland (r AD 1124–1153)
• — the great reforming king who introduced Norman feudal structures and Augustinian religious houses into Scotland —
• there appears a figure named Turstan Crectune or Crichton,
• who received a grant of lands in Lothian from the royal hand circa AD 1128
2. The name Turstan or Thurstan is a Scandinavian name (Þórsteinn, “Thor’s stone”) quite distinct etymologically from Tristan,
• but the phonological convergence of the two forms in mediaeval Scots-Latin documents
• has occasionally led to their conflation in secondary literature
3. The Crichton family of Lothian
• — prominent in Scottish mediaeval history —
• derives its name from the estate here granted,
• and the survival of this charter provides valuable evidence for the social history of nomenclature in twelfth-century Scotland,
• where Norman, Scandinavian, Brythonic, and Gaelic naming traditions intersected
4. Comparison of Other Tragic Lovers to Tristan
1. Introduction to Comparison of Other Tragic Lovers to Tristan
1. Figure of Tristan as tragic lover
• — the young man of exceptional gifts who is destroyed by an irresistible and socially transgressive passion —
• participates in a pattern of extraordinary antiquity and geographical range
2. Across these pairs,
• we glimpse the same tragic shape:
• love as sovereign claim,
• fidelity as test,
• and the inevitability of loss
• when personal desire collides with cosmic or political order
• —just as Tristan’s passion for Isolde forever disrupts the realm of Cornwall
3. From shepherd-gods of Mesopotamia to heroes of Irish mythology,
• from the pastoral lovers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the warring households of Verona,
• Archetype of the lover doomed by the very intensity of his loving recurs with a consistency that suggests it addresses something fundamental in human experience:
• the conflict between desire and social order,
• between the life-force and the death-drive,
• between the individual and the cosmos
4. What follows is a comparative survey of the principal tragic lovers whom scholars have associated
• — directly or typologically —
• with Tristan, arranged roughly in chronological or cultural sequence from the most ancient to the most recent
2. Solar and Fertility Deities
1. “Solar Deity” (and his Sister “Flowerful Maiden”)
• At the most abstract and archaic level of Proto-Indo-European mythology,
• scholars of comparative religion
• — most notably those working within the traditions established by Georges Dumézil and subsequently refined by Calvert Watkins, Martin West, and others —
• have identified a recurring mythological pattern in which a solar deity is coupled with or separated from a sister or female companion identified with flowers, spring, or the fertile earth
• The motif of the solar hero whose love for the "Flowerful Maiden"
• — a hypothetically reconstructed figure whose name contains the Proto-IE root *bhleh₃- (to bloom, to flower) —
• recurs in cognate traditions across the Indo-European world,
• from the Vedic Savitr and Ushas to the Baltic sun-myth of Saule and Perkūnas's daughter
• The significance of this archetype for the Tristan legend lies in the consistent association of the hero with solar imagery
• — his birth at a propitious solar moment, his name's possible connexion to bright or blazing sound —
• and of Isolde with a luminous femininity of supernatural or semi-divine provenance
• The triangle of the old king
• (Mark, cognate perhaps with Welsh March, "horse", and also potentially a figure of the waning year-king),
• the young solar champion,
• and the radiant queen may encode a mythological drama of seasonal succession older than any of the literary forms in which we encounter it
• The archetypal marriage of sun-god and earth-goddess, death in winter, rebirth in spring
2. ‘God of Light/Sun’ (and ‘Goddess of Sovereignty/Land’)
• More specifically within “Celtic” tradition,
• a structural parallel exists between the Tristan legend and pan-“Celtic” mythological motif
• of the young god of light or solar power (Belenos, Lugh, Mac Óg) who must enter into relationship
• — whether amorous, combative, or both —
• with the Goddess of Sovereignty, the genius of the land itself
• In this reading,
• Isolde represents not merely a woman but the embodiment of the land's sovereignty
• — an idea consistent with the Irish flaith tradition,
• in which the legitimate king must wed the goddess of the land in a sacred marriage (hieros gamos)
• Mark, as the established king who possesses Isolde but cannot truly hold her,
• is the old or inadequate king whose grip on sovereignty is contested;
• Tristan, as the young champion who wins the queen in battle and love,
• embodies the vital solar force that the land requires
• The love potion, in this reading,
• is not a mere narrative contrivance but a mythological vestige of the sacred bond between the solar hero and the sovereignty goddess
• This cosmic union ensures the land’s fertility but courts political danger
3. Utu (and Inan(n)a)
• In the Sumerian religious tradition,
• Utu — the sun-god,
• twin brother of Inanna (goddess of love, war, and sovereignty)
• — stands in a relationship of protective fraternal love towards his sister that,
• in certain hymnic and narrative texts,
• shades into an intensity bordering on the erotic,
• or at least into a profound complementarity that makes each the indispensable counterpart of the other
• Inanna’s descent into the Underworld,
• and Utu’s role in her rescue and restoration,
• parallel the motif of the solar hero who must descend into death or near-death in order to recover the beloved
• The triangle of Utu, Inanna, and Dumuzi (Inanna’s husband and the paradigmatic dying god)
• offers an early articulation of the three-way tension between solar brother-protector, sovereign goddess, and mortal consort that recurs,
• in altered form, in the Tristan legend
• The Sumerian Sun-God’s descent myth echoes Tristan’s journey between life and death
4. Dumuzid (and Inan(n)a)
• Dumuzid (Sumerian; Akkadian: Tammuz) is the divine shepherd and husband of Inanna,
• whose death and periodic restoration from the Underworld constitute one of the earliest attested narratives
• of a dying and rising god whose fate is inseparably linked to a powerful female consort
• Inanna,
• returning from her sojourn in the realm of the dead,
• is required to designate a substitute to take her place;
• she chooses Dumuzi, her husband,
• who is thereupon dragged to the Underworld by the galla demons
• His sister Geshtinanna volunteers to share his fate,
• and the two alternate in the Underworld
• across the seasons
• The comparison with Tristan is structural:
• both Dumuzi and Tristan
• are gifted young men
• destroyed by the terrible force of a love
• that operates in defiance of cosmic or social law;
• both die by violence
• that is in some sense the consequence of their erotic connexion;
• and both are associated with seasonal or natural cycles that figure their deaths
• as something other than mere personal tragedy
• The Shepherd-God’s underworld sojourn mirrors Tristan’s exile and longing
5. Adōnis (and Aphrodite)
• Adōnis
• — a Hellenised form of the Semitic Adon (lord) —
• is the beautiful mortal youth beloved of Aphrodite, the goddess of love,
• whose death by a wild boar (sacred to Ares or, in some versions, sent by Artemis)
• whilst hunting became the paradigmatic myth of beauty destroyed in its prime
• The cult of Adonis,
• attested in Byblos and Cyprus before its adoption into the Greek world,
• was associated with the annual summer festivals (Adōnia)
• in which women mourned the God’s death with ritual weeping
• — “gardens of Adonis” planted in shallow pots
• that quickly withered in the summer heat serving as symbols of transient beauty
• The structural parallels with Tristan are pronounced:
• both heroes are of surpassing physical beauty;
• both are loved by a woman of supernatural or semi-divine status;
• both die of wounds received in a context related to their erotic transgression;
• and both deaths are accompanied by a mourning that takes on cosmic or communal dimensions
• The boar-wound of Adonis resonates with the poisoned wound of Tristan,
• and in both cases
• the wound that kills is one that cannot be healed by ordinary means
• After his death, this beautiful youth (loved by the goddess Venus)
• gave his blood to Venus who created the anemone flower from his blood,
• symbolising his short life and the cycle of life and death
6. Adōnis (and Persephone)
• In the alternative version of the Adonis myth
• — preserved in Apollodorus and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses —
• Adōnis was placed as an infant in a chest and entrusted to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld,
• who became enamoured of him and refused to return him
• Aphrodite and Persephone thus disputed ownership of the beautiful youth,
• and Zeus adjudicated that Adonis should spend a portion of the year
• with each Goddess
• The motif of the hero divided between two women
• — one of the upper world and one of the lower, one of desire and one of death —
• translates almost exactly into the Tristan legend’s structure of the two Isoldes:
• Isolde of Ireland, the true beloved who represents the fullness of desire and the living world,
• and Isolde of the White Hands, the Breton wife who represents the shadow-life of marriage without love
• Tristan, like Adonis, is a figure whose erotic identity is constituted by a division between two feminine principles
• This is a story of an alternate seasonal bride, echoing Tristan’s divided loyalty
7. Atys (and Kybélē)
• Atys (also Attis) is the Phrygian youth beloved of the Great Mother goddess Kybélē,
• whose myth — centred on his self-castration and death beneath a pine tree —
• was one of the great mystery cults of the ancient Mediterranean world,
• carried to Rome by the late Republic
• and celebrated with extraordinary fervour
• at the spring festival of the Hilaria
• Atys was, in the commonest version of his myth,
• driven mad by the jealous goddess and in his frenzy emasculated himself;
• he died or was transformed beneath a pine tree,
• which thereafter became Cybele’s sacred tree,
• its resin weeping like tears of perpetual mourning
• The comparison with Tristan is less immediately obvious than with Adonis,
• but the structural element of the hero destroyed by the overwhelming force of a goddess's love
• — a force that is simultaneously creative and annihilating —
• is clearly parallel
• Moreover, the element of wounding in the generative members
• (present in some versions of the Tristan wound-motif,
• where the hero's thigh-wound
• carries symbolic implications of diminished vitality)
• resonates with the castration theme of the Atys myth
• This Phrygian consort’s ritual death-and-resurrection cycle parallels the lovers’ tragic separation
3. Classical Lovers
1. Pyramus (and Thisbe)
• Pyramus and Thisbe
• — the Babylonian lovers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV.55–166),
• separated by a wall and the enmity of their families,
• who arrange to meet at the tomb of Ninus and are destroyed by a chain of tragic misunderstanding —
• are the most obvious Classical parallel to Romeo and Juliet but equally relevant to the Tristan legend
• The motif of lovers separated by social prohibition who communicate through hidden means
• (the chink in the wall
• corresponding to the various ruses
• by which Tristan and Isolde communicate
• under Mark's surveillance
• — the chips of wood floated down the stream,
• the secret messages,
• the assignations in the orchard);
• the double death that arises not from malice but from error;
• and the memorial transformation of the white mulberry to red as a perpetual sign of their love —
• all these elements have analogues
• in the Tristan tradition
• Pyramus dies by his own hand, Thisbe by hers,
• each making of death an act of faithfulness to the other;
• Tristan and Isolde die in analogous fashion,
• each death caused by the impossibility of life without the other
• This is forbidden love separated by a wall, resulting in mutual suicide
2. Endymion (and Selene)
• Endymion
• — the eternally sleeping youth beloved of the moon-goddess Selene,
• who visited him nightly on Mount Latmos whilst he lay in his enchanted slumber —
• represents a distinctly different mode of tragic love:
• not the love that destroys through intensity and transgression,
• but the love that preserves its object through a kind of living death,
• an eternal sleep that maintains beauty inviolate at the cost of full living
• The comparison with Tristan is oblique but suggestive:
• Tristan in his various swoons and near-deaths,
• particularly in the episodes of the salle aux images (the hall of statues)
• in which he creates an image of Isolde to worship in her absence,
• participates in an Endymion-like relation to an absent, lunar feminine ideal
• Isolde,
• repeatedly associated with whiteness, moonlight, and luminous pallor in the poetry of the troubadours,
• is in some sense a Selene-figure who visits the sleeping or helpless hero
• The image-hall episode specifically
• — in which Tristan constructs and communes with an effigy of Isolde —
• enacts the Endymion myth’s inversion:
• it is the mortal who creates
• and tends
• the image of the divine beloved
• Nightly trysts under moonlight, this is a love that transcends mortal bounds yet courts isolation
3. Troilus/Troilo/Troiles (and Brisēís/Βρισηΐς/(Hippodámeia/Ἱπποδάμεια)/Briseida/Criseida/Criseyde/Cresseid/Cressida)
• Troilus,
• the youngest son of King Priam of Troy,
• and his beloved
• — who appears under radically different names and characterisations depending on whether we are reading Homer
• (where Briseís is Achilles’ captive, not Troilus’ beloved),
• the mediaeval Latin and French elaborations
• (Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie,
• where she becomes Briseida;
• Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae),
• Boccaccio’s Filostrato (where she is Criseida),
• Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (where she becomes the fully rounded Criseyde),
• or Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (where she is Cressida) —
• represent a love story progressively darkened
• from the merely sad
• to the almost nihilistically disillusioned
• across its textual tradition
• In Chaucer’s supreme version,
• Troilus is the faithful, passionate, idealising lover
• who is destroyed first by the departure of Criseyde to the Greek camp (as an exchange of prisoners)
• and then by her betrayal of him with Diomedes
• — a betrayal that Chaucer renders with agonising psychological complexity,
• neither wholly condemning Criseyde nor wholly exonerating her
• The comparison with Tristan:
• Troilus, like Tristan, loves at a distance,
• loves with a completeness that admits of no self-protection,
• and is ultimately destroyed less by the beloved’s rejectionthan by the circumstances that make faithfulness impossible
• Both Troilus and Tristan, at their most profound,
• are studies in the absolute nature of love
• and the impossibility of that absoluteness surviving in the contingent world
• Lovers divided by war and political necessity, their betrayals echo Tristan’s divided loyalties
4. Antony (and Cleopatra)
• Antony and Cleopatra
• — the historical and literary pairing of Marcus Antonius (83–30 BC) and Cleopatra VII Philopator (69–30 BC),
• given its supreme literary expression in Shakespeare’s tragedy of c AD 1606
• — represents the tragic-lover archetype transposed into the fully historical register
• Antony,
• a man of immense martial gifts and political power,
• is destroyed by his love for Cleopatra
• — or rather, the relationship is the vehicle through which his inherent contradictions
• (Roman discipline versus Eastern magnanimity;
• political calculation versus personal passion)
• are played out to their fatal conclusion
• Cleopatra,
• queen and political actor in her own right,
• is simultaneously the beloved and the sovereign
• — a Sovereignty-goddess figure of extraordinary cultural resonance,
• the last Pharaoh of Egypt and a woman in whom divine identity
• (she claimed to be Isis incarnate)
• and political reality fused
• Their double suicide
• — Antony’s botched self-stabbing,
• Cleopatra’s asp
• — enacts the same grammar as the deaths of Tristan and Isolde:
• the man who cannot survive the loss of the woman who is not merely his beloved but his world,
• and the woman who chooses death as the final assertion of her sovereignty over her own body and destiny
• Shakespeare’s treatment makes of their deaths a kind of triumph that transforms the tragic pattern into something approaching the sublime
• — the final, supreme expression of the archetype
• that began in the shepherd-hymns of Sumer and the wasting-sickness tales of ancient Ireland
• Shakespearean and Roman tragic duo
• whose love dissolves the boundary between political allegiance and personal devotion
• —echoing Tristan’s ultimate sacrifice
4. “Celtic” Hero-Heroine Pairs
1. Bres (and Brigid)
• In Irish mythology,
• Bres mac Elatha
• — the half-Fomorian king of the Tuatha Dé Danann
• whose reign of oppression
• precipitates the Second Battle of Mag Tuired (Cath Maige Tuired) —
• was married to Brigid,
• daughter of the Dagda
• and Goddess of Poetry, Healing, and Smithcraft
• Their union is tragic in a structural rather than purely romantic sense:
• Bres is a king of great physical beauty
• (bres itself meaning “beauty, fine thing” in Old Irish)
• but of moral deficiency,
• whose failure of the sacred duty of hospitality disqualifies him from sovereignty
• Brigid,
• as Goddess of Creative and Healing Power,
• represents precisely those qualities that Bres’ kingship lacks and destroys
• Their son Rúadán is killed by Goibniu the smith at the battle,
• and Brigid’s keening over his body is said to be the first caoine (keen, lament) ever heard in Ireland
• — a mythological aetiology of mourning itself
• The tragedy of Bres and Brigid is thus not the tragedy of two lovers destroyed by desire,
• but of a marriage between incompatible principles
• — beauty without virtue,
• power without generosity —
• that ends in death and the birth of sorrow
• Story of a King’s Violent Rise contrasted with the Land-Goddess’ Healing Power
2. Mongán (and Breothigernd/Findtigernd/(Dub Lacha))
• Mongán mac Fiachna is one of the most enigmatic figures of early Irish tradition:
• an historical king of Dál Fiatach (floruit c AD 600)
• who was simultaneously celebrated as a wonder-child begotten by Manannán mac Lir (the sea-god)
• upon his mortal mother, a shape-shifter, a poet,
• and a reincarnation of Fionn mac Cumhaill
• His beloved appears under several names in the tradition:
• Breothigernd (possibly “Flame-queen” or “Fire-sovereign”),
• Findtigernd (“Fair-sovereign” or “White-queen”),
• and Dub Lacha (“Dark Flame” or “Black Lake”),
• a multiplicity of names suggestive of a goddess-figure of fluctuating identity
• In the tale of Scél Mongáin and its congeners,
• Mongán’s wife Dub Lacha is wagered and lost to Brandubh, king of Leinster,
• and Mongán must employ his shape-shifting and poetic arts to recover her
• — a pattern that closely parallels the Tristan legend’s central triangle of lover, beloved, and rival king
• The recovery of the beloved through cunning and transformation,
• the theme of a love that survives separation and the intervention of a third party,
• and the tragic intensity of Mongán’s attachment to his multiply-named queen
• all place this Irish pairing in illuminating structural parallel with Tristan and Isolde
• Through exile and shape-shifting, love is tested by enchantment
3. Diarmuid/(Diarmaid Ua Duibhne)/(Diarmid O’Dyna)/(Diarmuid of the Love Spot) (and Gráinne/Grannia)
• The tale of Diarmuid and Gráinne,
• the central tragic romance of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology,
• is universally and rightly regarded as the closest Irish analogue to the Tristan and Isolde legend
• Gráinne,
• daughter of the High King Cormac mac Airt,
• is betrothed to the ageing hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (leader of the Fianna)
• but falls passionately in love with Diarmuid Ua Duibhne at the betrothal feast
• She places Fionn’s warriors under a geasa (a magically binding obligation)
• and elopes with Diarmuid against his will
• — for Diarmuid is bound by the code of the Fianna to loyalty to Fionn,
• and his compliance with Gráinne’s passion constitutes a fundamental betrayal of his lord
• The pair are pursued across Ireland by Fionn and the Fianna
• in a great tóraigheacht (pursuit),
• their resting-places commemorated in numerous topographical legends
• The runaway lovers motif
• —Gráinne’s bride-quest
• parallels Isolde’s reluctant journey
4. Niall (and Sadb)
• Niall
• — possibly to be identified with one of the several figures bearing this name in Irish tradition —
• and Sadb represent a pairing from the more obscure regions of the Irish mythological corpus
• Sadb (sometimes Saba, “sweet” or “goodness”)
• is most famously associated in the Fenian Cycle with Fionn mac Cumhaill,
• whose brief marriage to the deer-woman Sadb produced Oisín (the poet-warrior)
• A separate pairing of Niall and Sadb, however,
• appears in genealogical and narrative materials,
• placing this couple within a tragic eros tradition
• characterised by the separation of lovers
• through supernatural intervention
• and the motif of the woman transformed or carried off by otherworldly forces
• The structural elements
• — a mortal man of heroic quality in love with a woman of supernatural connexions
• and the inevitable tragedy that results from this asymmetry
• This is a story of love’s endurance despite political dispossession
5. Naoise/Naisii/Noisiu/Noise (and Deirdre/Derdriu)
• The tale of Deirdre of the Sorrows
• (Longes Mac nUislenn — “The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu”)
• is one of the three great sorrows of Irish storytelling (Trí Truaighe na Scéalaíochta)
• and provides perhaps the starkest Irish parallel to the Tristan narrative
• Deirdre (or Derdriu, “she who rages” or possibly “oak-spirit”)
• was prophesied at birth to bring ruin upon Ulster,
• and King Conchobar mac Nessa sequestered her in a remote fortress,
• intending to make her his own queen
• But Deirdre,
• catching sight of Naoise (Naisiu in the earlier spelling) of the sons of Uisliu,
• was instantly enamoured of him
• — she shamed him into carrying her off by invoking the warrior’s code against cowardice —
• and the pair fled to Alba (Scotland) with his brothers
• The parallel with Tristan is exact in its triangular structure:
• an ageing king (Conchobar/Mark) who claims a beautiful woman;
• a young champion of the king’s own following (Naoise/Tristan) who carries her off;
• a period of exile and pursuit;
• and a final destruction wrought by the king’s jealousy
• and the hero’s fatal return
• Naoise’s death is engineered by Conchobar through treachery;
• Deirdre, refusing to be used as an object of conquest,
• dashes her head against a rock in the chariot
• — or, in later versions, dies of grief
• The motif of the woman’s active choice of death over dishonour parallels Isolde’s death beside Tristan
• Doomed by a beauty prophecy, this is a slaughter at call of a jealous king
6. (Cú C(h)ulainn)/Cuchulainn (and Emer)
• Cú Chulainn and his wife Emer represent the tragic dimension of conjugal rather than adulterous love within the Ulster Cycle
• Emer,
• whose courtship by Cú Chulainn is narrated in Tochmarc Emire (“The Wooing of Emer”),
• beauty,
• chastity,
• sweet speech,
• needlework,
• wisdom,
• and chastity
• — a paragon of the heroic consort
• Their marriage, however,
• is perpetually under siege from Cú Chulainn's erotic adventures with supernatural women (Fand, Bláthnat, and others),
• and Emer’s tragedy is the tragedy of the faithful wife whose faithfulness cannot bind a husband whose nature exceeds the bounds of ordinary fidelity
• At Cú Chulainn’s death,
• Emer’s lament over his body is one of the great set-pieces of early Irish literature,
• her elegy both a praise-poem for the hero and a lover's formal farewell
• The comparison with Tristan:
• both heroes are torn between a loyal wife/lover and transgressive erotic obligations;
• in both cases the mortal woman who represents stable, legitimate love is ultimately unable to hold the hero,
• whose fatal destiny draws him elsewhere
• Fidelity-tests, magical loves, and rivalries echo Tristan’s divided affections
7. (Cú C(h)ulainn)/Cuchulainn (and Fand)
• The tale of Serglige Con Culainn (“Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn”)
• also known as Oenét Emire (“Only Jealousy of Emer”)
• introduces Fand, “Pearl of Beauty”,
• a woman of the sídhe (the Otherworld) and wife of Manannán mac Lir,
• with whom Cú Chulainn enters into an otherworldly love-affair
• during a period of sickness-induced vision
• He travels to the Otherworld to aid Fand’s people
• and remains with her in a supernatural existence outside ordinary time
• — a sojourn parallel to Tristan's periods in the forest of Morrois,
• existing purely in and for love
• When the time comes to choose
• between the mortal world (Emer, his wife)
• and the immortal Fand,
• Cú Chulainn is in agony
• Fand ultimately relinquishes him to Emer,
• recognising that Emer’s love is the more fully human and the more deserving;
• Manannán shakes his cloak between them, causing forgetfulness
• The love potion of the Tristan legend
• — the draft that removes responsibility and imposes an external causation for passion —
• resonates directly with this forgetting-cloak,
• and Fand’s Otherworld femininity parallels Isolde’s association with supernatural healing and Irish sídhe provenance
• Again, fidelity-tests, magical loves, and rivalries echo Tristan’s divided affections
8. (Cú C(h)ulainn)/Cuchulainn (and Bláthnat)
• Bláthnat ("Little Flower")
• is the wife of Cú Roí mac Dáire
• — the most powerful and mysterious king-figure of the Ulster Cycle,
• associated with shape-shifting and with the Otherworld —
• who betrays her husband for love of Cú Chulainn,
• revealing to him the secret of her husband’s magical fortress
• and the location of Cú Roí’s external soul
• Her betrayal results in Cú Roí’s death, killed by Cú Chulainn,
• but she herself is seised by Cú Roí’s poet Fer Chertne,
• who in revenge for his master’s death grasps Bláthnat in his arms
• and leaps from a cliff, killing them both
• The tragedy here is shaped by the motif of the woman who loves the wrong man
• — who abandons a powerful and in some sense cosmically significant husband
• for a young champion whose love she cannot ultimately secure —
• a pattern that recapitulates, in sharper and more violent form,
• the basic triangle of Mark/Tristan/Isolde
• The poet’s role as avenger,
• choosing to kill himself with the beloved rather than simply kill her,
• adds a dimension of aesthetic self-consciousness,
• as if the story is aware of its own tragic poetic structure
• Yet again, fidelity-tests, magical loves, and rivalries echo Tristan’s divided affections
9. Mider/Mid(h)ir (and Étaín/Édaín/Edain/Éadaoin/Etaoin/Aideen/Aedín/Adaon)
• The tale of Midir and Étaín
• — narrated in Tochmarc Étaíne (“Wooing of Étaín”),
• one of the oldest and most mythologically resonant texts of the Irish tradition —
• presents what is perhaps the most fundamental Irish expression of the tragic-lover archetype
• Midir is a great lord of the Otherworld (sídhe)
• who loves Étaín,
• a woman of surpassing beauty
• His first wife Fuamnach,
• consumed by jealousy,
• transforms Étaín
• into a pool of water,
• then a worm,
• then a fly,
• and finally blows her away on the winds of the world for many years
• Étaín eventually falls into a cup of wine drunk by the wife of an Ulster king,
• is reborn as her daughter,
• and grows up without memory of her divine identity or her love for Midir
• Midir,
• after long searching,
• finds her, now the wife of the High King Eochaid Airem,
• and attempts to win her back through a series of board-games against Eochaid
• He finally claims her with a kiss
• and carries her off as a swan,
• flying away over the king's hall
• The comparison with Tristan is remarkably precise:
• the divine or semi-divine beloved who is possessed by a mortal king (Eochaid/Mark);
• the otherworldly lover who seeks to reclaim her;
• the ruse of games and disguises (paralleling Tristan's various disguises in his approaches to Isolde);
• and the final carrying-off that represents both triumphant love and irreparable tragedy
• Surviving transformations and seasonal cycles, it is a love that survives metamorphosis
10. Ailill (and Étaín/Édaín/Edain/Éadaoin/Etaoin/Aideen/Aedín/Adaon)
• In a subsidiary episode of Tochmarc Étaíne,
• whilst Midir is attempting to recover Étaín from Eochaid,
• the king’s brother Ailill Anglonnach falls catastrophically in love with Étaín,
• his passion so consuming him that he wastes away in a love-sickness (tinneas grádha)
• Étaín,
• when she learns of his condition,
• compassionately agrees to meet him and provide the cure of her presence
• — but on each occasion that the assignation is arranged,
• Ailill falls into a deep sleep and cannot attend
• In his place appears a man in Ailill’s exact form,
• who approaches Étaín;
• she,
• realising he is not Ailill but some supernatural substitute,
• refuses him
• is Midir himself,
• testing the ground for his own later claim
• Ailill’s unrequited passion
• — the love that destroys health without being consummated,
• the longing answered by a supernatural impostor rather than by the real beloved —
• parallels the Tristanic motif of frustrated desire and the substitution of simulacra for reality
• Ailill’s structural position (the king’s brother,
• afflicted by love for the king’s wife)
• also has obvious resonance with Tristan’s position as king’s nephew
• Again, surviving transformations and seasonal cycles, it is a love that survives metamorphosis
11. Lom Laine (and Tethna)
• Lom Laine and Tethna
• represent one of the more obscure pairings
• within the broader Irish tragic-lover tradition,
• attested in fragmentary narrative and genealogical materials
• Tethna
• (the name possibly related to teth, “hot, ardent”)
• is associated with territories in Connacht,
• and Lom Laine (“bare/fierce lance/blade”)
• appears as a figure of violent passion in the materials that preserve their story
• The tale, in its extant form,
• exhibits the characteristic structural elements
• of the Irish tragic-lover tradition:
• a love that transgresses social boundaries,
• a separation enforced by external power or obligation,
• and a double death or mutual destruction that serves as the narrative’s resolution
• The relative obscurity of this pairing
• in the secondary literature
• may reflect the fragmentary state of its textual transmission
• rather than any lesser antiquity or significance in the original tradition
• This pairing entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
12. Oengus Mac ind Óc (and Deirbriu (“Maiden-breast”, byname for Findabair Bláthnat))
• Óengus Mac ind Óc
• — “Óengus the Young Son”,
• son of the Dagda and Boann,
• and the Irish God most purely associated with love and poetry —
• is most famously associated in the tale Aislinge Óenguso
• (“The Dream of Óengus”)
• with his love for Caer Ibormeith,
• the swan-maiden whom he seeks across the world
• before recognising and winning her at the feast of Samhain
• The byname Deirbriu
• — “Maiden-breast” —
• attaches in certain traditions to Findabair Bláthnat
• (“Fair Eyebrow, Little Flower”),
• a figure who combines characteristics of Findabair,
• daughter of Ailill
• and Medb (prominent in the tale Táin Bó Froích),
• with the epithet of floral and bodily beauty
• Óengus’ love for this figure,
• cast in the mould of the god of love pursuing an earthly or semi-divine embodiment of spring and floral beauty,
• recapitulates in divine key the same structural pattern as the mortal tragic lovers:
• the God/Hero separated from his beloved by otherworldly or structural barriers,
• the love that takes the form of a wasting dream (aislinge),
• and the eventual union that is simultaneously transcendent and fragile
• Again entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
13. Erc (and Eile)
• Erc
• — a name borne by several figures in early Irish tradition —
• and Eile,
• a Territorial Goddess identified with the plain of Eliogarty in Munster
• (whence Éile or Éle as a place-name),
• represent a pairing from the sacred-landscape tradition
• in which a mortal hero or king is united with,
• and ultimately destroyed by his union with,
• the spirit of a specific territory
• Eile as a Sovereignty Goddess
• embodies the land itself;
• her love for Erc constitutes a hieros gamos or sacred marriage
• of the type fundamental to “Celtic” sacral kingship ideology
• The tragedy arises from the impossibility of the mortal hero's sustaining the relationship with a divine territorial power
• — a structural parallel to the asymmetry between Tristan and the quasi-supernatural Isolde,
• whose healing arts, golden hair, and otherworldly origins mark her as something more than an ordinary queen
• Once again this pairing entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
14. Culhwch (and Olwen)
• Culhwch and Olwen
• — the earliest extant Arthurian tale in Welsh,
• preserved in Mabinogion
• and likely dating in its present form to Eleventh Century AD
• though drawing on much older materials —
• presents the story of Culhwch fab Cilydd,
• a youth who is placed under a tynged (fate, destiny) by his stepmother
• to the effect that he shall marry none but Olwen,
• daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr (“Chief of Giants”)
• The tale is technically a wooing-narrative (tochmarc) rather than a tragedy of adultery or separation,
• but it participates in the tragic-lover comparison through the element of love as external destiny
• — Culhwch does not choose to love Olwen so much as love is imposed upon him as a kind of compulsion —
• and through the extraordinary series of near-impossible tasks (anoethau) that Ysbaddaden imposes upon the suitor,
• each of which must be fulfilled before the marriage can take place
• Olwen herself
• (“She of the White Track”,
• from the white flowers that spring up wherever she treads)
• is a luminous figure of solar and spring symbolism,
• analogous to Isolde’s association with light and healing
• The parallel with Tristan
• lies chiefly in the theme of the hero who must prove himself
• through a series of trials in order to win or maintain his beloved,
• and in the cosmic or supernatural quality attributed to the beloved herself
• This pairing entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
15. Gronw (and Blodeued)
• Gronw Pebr and Blodeued (Welsh: “Flower-face”)
• are figures from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,
• the tale of Math fab Mathonwy
• Blodeued
• — created by the magicians Gwydion and Math
• from the flowers of oak, broom, and meadowsweet
• as a wife for the hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes
• (who was under a tynged prohibiting him from taking a human wife) —
• falls in love with Gronw Pebr, lord of Penllyn, whilst Lleu is absent
• Together they plot Lleu's death,
• exploiting the complex conditions of his near-invulnerability to kill him
• (Lleu does not die but is transformed into an eagle)
• Gwydion eventually restores Lleu,
• and Gronw is killed in retribution;
• Blodeued is transformed by Gwydion into an owl,
• the bird of night and ill-omen,condemned to be shunned by other birds forever
• The structural parallel with the Tristan legend is obvious:
• the woman created or given as a wife to a man she cannot truly love;
• the lover who enters from outside the marriage;
• and the destruction that follows from the triangle
• of legitimate husband, transgressive wife, and adulterous lover
• Blodeued, like Isolde,
• is a figure of ambivalent otherness
• — created by magic, not born of woman —
• whose love transgresses the bounds of the marriage arranged for her by others
• Entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
16. Gwawl fab Clud (and Rhiannon/Rīgantonā/(Rīgantona/Riga(n)tona))
• Gwawl fab Clud
• (“Light, son of the Clud”)
• and Rhiannon
• — whose name derives from the Brittonic Rīgantonā
• (“Great Queen”, cognate with the Gaulish Rigantona and distantly with Irish Rígan, more specifically Morrigan meaning “Great Queen”) —
• represent a pairing from the First Branch of the Mabinogi in which Gwawl appears as the rejected suitor rather than the transgressive lover
• Rhiannon chooses Pwyll, lord of Dyfed, over the pre-arranged match with Gwawl;
• Gwawl’s claim upon her represents the old order,
• the established obligation,
• whilst Pwyll’s winning of her represents the triumph of authentic desire over social arrangement
• In this sense the comparison with Tristan is inverted:
• Gwawl occupies the structural position of Mark
• — the man whose claim is prior but whose love is not the true love —
• and Pwyll occupies the Tristan-position of the younger man who wins the radiant woman
• The subsequent humiliation of Gwawl in the magical bag
• (the “Badger in the Bag” game)suggests that his love was not wholly disinterested,
• and his transformation from suitor to enemy
• encodes the same dynamic of thwarted possession
• that drives Mark’s persecution of Tristan
• Again, the story entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
17. Gwyn(n)(was) ap Nudd (and Crei(r)ddylad/Creurdilad/Creudylad/Kreiddylat)
• Gwyn ap Nudd
• — Lord of the Tylwyth Teg (Fair Folk) and King of the Welsh Otherworld,
• associated with the Wild Hunt and the realm of the dead —
• and Creiddylad (whose name may be cognate with Cordelia
• and may derive from a Brittonic root connected to the heart, craidd)
• represent one of the most ancient and mythologically significant of the Welsh tragic pairings
• In Culhwch ac Olwen,
• it is told that Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwythyr fab Greidawl
• (an Otherworld champion associated with solar power)
• are condemned by Arthur to fight for Creiddylad
• every May Day (Calan Mai) until Doomsday,
• when the victor shall at last have her
• She was carried off from Gwythyr by Gwyn before the marriage could be consummated,
• and the annual combat is a ritual enactment of the eternal conflict
• between the Otherworld Lord of Winter and the Solar Champion of Summer
• for possession of the Sovereignty Goddess
• — the May Queen whose favour determines the flourishing of the year
• This myth
• — one of the most archaic Welsh mythological fragments —
• parallels the Tristan legend at the level of the structural rivalry
• between two men for a woman who embodies more than herself,
• and whose possession is contested not merely from personal desire
• but from something approaching cosmic necessity
• This story, once again, entwines sovereignty, shape-changing, or magical trials that mirror the tension between personal desire and royal duty
5. Biblical Prototype
1. Yeshua (and Miryam Migdalah — his mother’s sister)
• In certain strands of the Gnostic Christian tradition
• — particularly texts from Nag Hammadi library, including Gospel of Philip and Gospel of Mary —
• as well as in later heterodox and esoteric reinterpretations of the New Testament,
• Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus) is represented as standing in a relationship of especial spiritual intimacy with Miryam Migdalah (Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene),
• a relationship that some Gnostic authors described in the language of the bridal chamber (koinōnos, “companion, partner”)
• The identification of Miryam Migdalah as Yeshua’s mother’s sister (or mother’s sister’s daughter)
• — a reading present in some interpretations of the Johannine passion narrative —
• adds a dimension of familial transgression that resonates with the incestuous or quasi-incestuous dimensions
• which some scholars have detected in the Tristan legend
• (Mark as father-figure to the orphaned Tristan;
• the displacement of filial for erotic feeling)
• The comparison,
• necessarily speculative and dependent on heterodox textual traditions,
• situates the Yeshua–Miryam pairing within the archetype of the sacred marriage
• between the divine man and the woman of sovereign wisdom
• — a paradigm that underlies, at however great a remove, the Tristanic eros
• There is a bond of devotion and perceived scandal, later sanctified—anticipating the tension between sacred love and social constraint
6. Arthurian and Courtly Counterparts
1. Arthur (and his (half-)sister — Anna, Belisent, Sangive, Siefe, Gwyar, or Margawse/Morgawse/Morgause/Morgose/(M)orc(h)ad(e)s)
• The incestuous begetting of Mordred upon Arthur by his (half-)sister
• — variously named Anna (as his full sister), Belisent, Sangive, Siefe, Gwyar, or most famously Margawse/Morgause
• in the tradition descending from Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth —
• is one of the most uncomfortable and mythopoetically significant elements of the Arthurian legend
• Arthur’s union with his (half-)sister is presented in most versions as unknowing
• (he does not know who she is when they sleep together)
• but is nonetheless the sin that generates the doom of Camelot in the form of Mordred
• The comparison with Tristan lies in the motif of a love
• (or at least a union)
• that transgresses kinship prohibition,
• resulting in a child who embodies the destructive consequences of that transgression,
• and in the broader pattern of a great king whose downfall is precipitated by an erotic fault
• — his own in the case of Arthur, his queen’s
• and his nephew’s in the case of Mark
• Arthur and Tristan are, in the Arthurian moral economy,
• mirror-images of the cuckolded king and the culpable lover,
• their stories illuminating each other’s tragic logic
• This is a story of incestuous or politically fraught sibling loves that threaten royal legitimacy
2. Lancelot (and Guinevere)
• The love of Lancelot du Lac and Guinevere
• (Welsh Gwenhwyfar, “White Phantom” or “White Shadow”)
• is in the Arthurian tradition the most direct structural parallel to the love of Tristan and Isolde,
• a parallel explicitly acknowledged by Chrétien de Troyes in Le Chevalier de la Charrete
• and elaborated at extraordinary length in Vulgate Cycle
• Both Lancelot and Tristan are the supreme knights of their respective courts;
• both love the wife of their king and liege lord;
• both are torn between loyalty to the lord and fidelity to the love;
• and both ultimately cause the destruction of the Arthurian order through their adulterous passion
• The two love-stories were clearly aware of each other at the compositional level,
• with Tristan en Prose explicitly placing its hero among the knights of the Round Table
• and measuring him against Lancelot
• A significant difference is the role of the love potion:
• Lancelot and Guinevere’s love is voluntary
• and therefore, in the moral scheme of the romances, more culpable;
• Tristan and Isolde’s love is involuntary and therefore more pitiable
• This distinction shapes the entire emotional and theological register of each story
• This is the paradigmatic adulterous affair, honour torn between knightly duty and carnal passion
3. Anfortas (and Orgeluse)
• Anfortas (the Fisher King, the Wounded King of the Grail Castle)
• and Orgeluse (duchess of Logres, the proud and disdainful beauty)
• are figures from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (c AD 1200–1210),
• the most philosophically and theologically ambitious of the mediaeval Grail romances
• Anfortas suffered his terrible, unhealing wound
• — a spear-thrust through the genitals,
• a wound that makes procreation impossible and the land waste —
• precisely because he rode out as a knight al frouwen dienst,
• in service to a lady (Orgeluse),whose love he sought in contradiction of his sacred duty as Grail King
• to serve only the Grail and wait upon God’s time
• His wound, like Tristan's recurring wound,
• is both literal and symbolic
• — a physical enactment of the damage done to the soul
• and to the social order by the unchecked force of erotic desire
• Orgeluse,
• the beloved who ultimately loves Gawain,
• is a figure of Sovereignty-Goddess provenance similar to Isolde:
• beautiful,
• dangerous,
• the cause of many knights’ destruction,
• and ultimately the source of healing for those who can survive her tests
• The Fisher King’s wound and Tristan’s wound are mythological twins
• Fisher King’s wound is tied to his queen’s fidelity—healing only through a pure-hearted hero
4. Cligès (and Fenice)
• Cligès and Fenice are the protagonists of Chrétien de Troyes’ romance Cligès (c AD 1176),
• which is explicitly conceived by its author as a response to and inversion of the Tristan legend:
• Chrétien places in the mouth of Fenice a protest against the conduct of Isolde,
• who gave her body to one man whilst her heart belonged to another
• Fenice is determined to avoid this division of body and soul:
• she employs a magic potion to render her husband Alis incapable of consummating their marriage
• (believing himself to have enjoyed her, he sleeps with an illusion),
• whilst reserving her true self for Cligès
• She later feigns death,
• is entombed,
• and lives secretly with Cligès in a tower garden
• — an Edenic enclosure that parallels the forest of Morrois
• in its function as a space outside the social order
• in which the lovers can exist purely for each other
• The comparison with Tristan is thus ironically double:
• the story is constructed as an anti-Tristan,
• rejecting the moral ambiguity of the love-potion tradition,
• and yet in its structural logic it reproduces the very dilemmas it purports to overcome
• This is a love born of deception and healing, echoing Tristan’s fatal potion
5. Flori(o)(s)/Floire/Flo(r)(i)(e)(s)/Floyris/Floriz/Flóres/Fiorio/Aulimento/Φλώριος/Floria
        (and Bla(u)nc(h)efl(o)(u)r/Blanchiflor/Blanchefleur/Blantsefluor/Blans(c)heflur/Blancefloer/Blankiflúr/Blan(t)zeflor(e)(s)/Blankeflos/Biancifiore/Biancofiore/Rosana/Πλατζηαφλόρα/(Platzia Phlore)/Blancaflor/Biancef(l)ora/Bianczeforze)
• The romance of Floris and Blanchefleur
• — attested in French (Floire et Blancheflor, c AD 1160),
• Middle English, German, Italian, Norse, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, and numerous other traditions —
• is one of the most widely disseminated love-romances of the mediaeval world
• and presents a story of extraordinary tenderness:
• two children,
• and the other a Christian slave’s daughter,
• are raised together from birth,
• their shared name (Floris/Flores = "flower"; Blanchefleur = "white flower")
• encoding from the very beginning their destined unity
• When Blanchefleur is sold into slavery and removed to the East
• (to the Tower of Maidens at Babylon in the French version),
• Floris follows her disguised in a basket of flowers,
• discovers her in the harem,
• and is ultimately caught with her in a compromising position
• Condemned to death,
• each tries to sacrifice themselves to save the other;
• the Emir, moved by their mutual fidelity, spares them and allows their marriage
• The comparison with Tristan is structural:
• the young noble who pursues his beloved into the domain of a powerful king who holds her;
• the disguises and ruses required to gain access;
• the risk of death discovered together
• The love is, unlike Tristan’s, innocent and childhood-rooted,
• but the structural geometry of quest,
• sequestration,
• and disguised entry is cognate
• Lovers divided by war and political necessity, their betrayals echo Tristan’s divided loyalties
7. Non-Western and Later Echoes
1. Varghe/Varqe(h)/Varqa/Varka/Warqa (and Golshah/Golshāh/Golsah/Golšãh/G(h)ulshah/Gülşah/Gülþah’ta)
• Warqa and Gulshah is a Persian romantic narrative poem (mathnawi) attributed to ‘Ayyuqi (floruit c AD 1000),
• deriving from earlier Arabic sources
• and drawing ultimately on a tale from the pre-Islamic Arabian tradition
• Warqa (Arabic: “leaf, paper”) and Gulshah ("Rose King" or "Flower-sovereign")
• are childhood sweethearts from rival tribes
• whose love is thwarted by warfare, tribal conflict, and rival suitors
• Warqa is killed
• and Gulshah, in her grief, refuses to outlive him;
• a supernatural intervention (in the Islamic version, divine grace) eventually reunites them
• The tale exhibits the structure of the ‘udhrī or “Udhri” Arab tradition of love poetry
• — a mode of passionate, chaste, and ultimately fatal love associated with the tribe of ‘Udhrah,
• described by the Arab critic as a people “who die when they love” —
• which is the Arabic counterpart of the courtly love tradition
• and carries many structural parallels to the Tristan legend:
• the childhood origin of the love,
• the tribal prohibition that mirrors social prohibition,
• the separation,
• the double death
• The Persian elaboration adds elements of supernatural intervention
• and Sufi mystical resonance,
• reading the earthly love as a figure for the soul’s love of God
• Persian romance of star-crossed lovers whose faithfulness triggers royal enmity and exile
2. Vameq/Wāmiq and ((‘)Azra/Ozra/‘Adhrā)
• Wāmiq and ‘Adhrā
• (Arabic: “The Lover and the Chaste One”)
• is one of the earliest attested Persian and Arabic love-story traditions,
• predating the Islamic period and preserved in references by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
• in his Risāla fī al-‘Ishq (“Treatise on Love”)
• and in later Persian poetic catalogues
• The names themselves encode the tragic nature of the relationship:
• Wāmiq (the Lover, the Enamoured One)
• and ‘Adhrā (the Chaste, the Virgin
• — from the same root as the tribal name ‘Udhrah)
• represent a love that is defined by its unrealisation,
• its purity from consummation,
• and its fatal intensity
• The tradition is closely related to the Arabic ‘udhrī mode
• and to the legend of Majnūn and Laylā,
• and it participates in the pan-Eastern Mediterranean pattern
• of the tragic young lover who dies of love for an unattainable woman
• — a woman whose very name (Chaste, Virgin) ensures that the love cannot be fulfilled within the social order
• The comparison with Tristan:
• both Wāmiq and Tristan love with an absoluteness that their social world cannot accommodate;
• both are destroyed by that love;
• and in both cases the beloved’s name or identity carries symbolic weight that transcends individual personality
• Another Persian romance of star-crossed lovers whose faithfulness triggers royal enmity and exile
3. Ramin/Rāmin/Rāmīn (and Vis)
• Vis and Rāmin
  • — the Persian romantic epic composed by Fakhr ud-Dīn Gurgānī in the eleventh century (c. 1054),
  • based on a Parthian original of possibly pre-Sasanian antiquity —
  • is the Eastern work that stands in the most direct and fully articulated structural parallel to the Tristan and Isolde legend,
  • a connexion recognised by scholars since the pioneering comparative studies of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries AD
• Vis,
• a woman of extraordinary beauty,
• is betrothed to King Mōbad
• but falls passionately in love with his brother Rāmin;
• the love is facilitated (as in the Tristan legend) by a supernatural agent
• — the wet-nurse Dāya,
• who knows the art of love-magic
• and whose enchantments take the place of the potion
• Rāmin abandons his wife Gol for Vis,
• returns to her after a period of separation,
• and the pair ultimately triumph in a resolution notably less tragic than the Western tradition:
• Mōbad is killed by a wild boar,
• and Rāmin and Vis rule together
• The parallels with Tristan and Isolde are extraordinary in their precision:
• the older king (Mōbad/Mark),
• the young brother-champion (Rāmin/Tristan),
• the radiant woman of supernatural provenance (Vis/Isolde),
• the love-magic agent (Dāya/the Potion),
• the rival wife (Gol/Isolde of the White Hands),
• the final destruction of the king (by boar-wound),
• and the eventual triumph of the lovers
• The Parthian original,
• if it antedates the Arthurian tradition (as seems probable),
• may represent a common Eastern source
• from which both the Irish/Welsh
• and the French traditions ultimately derive their central plot-structure
• A Persian romances of star-crossed lovers whose faithfulness triggers royal enmity and exile
4. Romeo Montague (and Juliet Capulet)
• Romeo and Juliet
• — Shakespeare’s tragedy of AD 1594–96,
• drawing upon Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562),
• which itself drew upon Matteo Bandello’s Italian novella (1554)
• and ultimately upon Luigi da Porto’s Historia Novellamente Ritrovata di Due Nobili Amanti (c AD 1530) —
• is the most famous of all tragic love-stories in the Western tradition
• and the one most immediately associated in popular consciousness
• with the pattern of lovers destroyed by external social forces
• The Capulet–Montague feud that makes Romeo and Juliet’s love impossible
• is the domestic, urban form of the structural prohibition
• that in the Tristan legend takes the form of feudal loyalty and marital vow
• Both Romeo and Tristan are young men of exceptional quality who die before their prime,
• destroyed by the gap between the absoluteness of their love
• and the contingency of the world in which they must love
• The double death
• — Romeo’s suicide over the apparently dead Juliet,
• precisely parallels the structure of Tristan’s death from grief
• and Isolde’s death at his side:
• in both cases, a tragic misunderstanding (the message that does not arrive in time;
• the black sail) causes the first death,and the second death is the lover’s answer,
• the refusal to survive the other
• Shakespeare’s treatment,
• with its extraordinary lyric intensity and its tragic irony of near-rescue,
• may be regarded as the last great expression of the mediaeval tragic-lover archetype in its pure form
• A Shakespearean tragic duo whose love dissolves the boundary between political allegiance and personal devotion—echoing Tristan’s ultimate sacrifice
3. Beginnings
1. Family and other Asssociationss
1. Introduction to Family
2. Father
1. King Cibddar/Cynvawr/Cunomor(o)us/C(h)onomor(us)/Mark/March
• Son of Meirchion and Lord of Castellmarch on Lleyn Peninsula of North Wales
• King of Cornwall/Cornouaille (at Tintagel or Castle Dore)
• Compare with
• King Lab(h)raid(h) Loingsech/Lorc of Ireland
• (Fionn Mac Cumhail(l))/(Find Mac Coul)/(Finn Mac Cool)
• King Morc, son of Dela, of the Fomorians
• King Midas
2. King Tal(l)w(r)ch/Tal(l)orc of the Picts
3. King Meliodas/Meliad(us) de/of Lyones(se)/Liones/Lyens/Leon(n)ais
3. (Foster) Father/Father’s Steward/Marshal — Rivalen/Rivalin/Rouland/Rowland/Roald/Rual Canelengres/Kalegras/Kanelangres/(of Parmenie)/(le Foytenant)
4. Mother
1. Blancheflor/Blanchefleur
2. Queen Elizabeth/Isabelle/Elyabel/Eliabel de/of Lyones(se)/Liones/Lyens/Leon(n)ais
5. Stepmother — Agia, wife of Meliodas/Meliad(us)
6. Half-Brother — Allegreno
7. Maternal Uncle — King Cibddar/Cynvawr/Cunomor(o)us/C(h)onomor(us)/Mark/March
8. Lover — Isolde (La Beale Isoud)
9. Wife — Isolde of the White Hands (Isoud la Blanche Mains)
10. Brother-in-law — Kehydius/Kahedin(s)/Kærdin
11. Father-in-law — Hoel/Howell
12. Horse — Drudwyn
2. Birth — Tristan was born in an unhappy hour
1. His father had been kidnapped
1. By an amourous enchantress
2. Or by highwaymen
2. His mother, giving birth while out searching for her husband, died of exposure
3. Place — Lyonesse
1. Leonais/Lothian
2. Leonais, Brittany
3. Isles of Scilly
3. Childhood
1. His stepmother tried to poison him so that her own sons would inherit Lyonesse
1. When she was caught, Tristan pleaded for her life
2. Tristan’s father granted his request
2. A bit annoyed with his son
1. Tristan’s father sent the boy to France for seven years
2. Under the tutorship of Gouvernail/Governal/Gorvenal
3. Gouvernail/Governal/Gorvenal later became Tristan’s loyal and competent squire
4. Tristan is raised by his father’s Steward/Marshal (when father dies, in some tales)
5. Tristan was kidnapped by merchants as a child
4. Adolescence
1. Tristan attracted the affection of King Faramon’s daughter
1. She gave him a brachet
2. She later died for love
3. The attachment may have been unsolicited
2. Tristan stayed in France more than seven years — learned all that he might learn in that country
1. He could speak the language well
2. Tristan laboured ever in hunting and in hawking
3. He learned to be a harper passing all others
3. He came home to his father (in the stories where his father is still alive)
4. Adulthood
1. Tristan eventually made his way to Cornwall
2. Rivalen/Rivalin/Rouland/Roald/Rual had been searching for Tristan since his abduction
1. Arrives at King Mark’s court
2. Was joyously reunited with his ward, Tristan
3. Mark learns that Tristan is his nephew
3. Age eighteen, Tristan fought and mortally wounded Sir Marhaus/Morholt in single combat
1. Offered to duel Morholt/Marhaus as his uncle’s champion
2. To free his uncle, King Mark, from paying truage (annual tribute)
1. Either to the King of Ireland
2. Or to the giant Morholt/Marhaus
3. Tristan killed Morholt/Marhaus, leaving a piece of his swordblade in the giant’s skull
4. Marhaus/Morholt had used a poisoned spear
5. Tristan sickened of his own wounds
6. Departed Cornwall to seek a cure
4. By the advice of a wise woman, Mark sent Tristan into Ireland to be healed
1. Disguised under the name Tramtrist/Tantris(t)
1. Tristan met Isolde (La Beale Isoud), the daughter of the king of Ireland
2. Was healed (cured) by her
3. Began to fall in love with Isolde
4. Taught her to harp
5. In return, Tristan killed a dragon that had been plaguing the king
2. Tristan met Palomides/Palamedes for the first time (not in the friendliest situation)
3. Tristan developed a friendship with Isolde’s father
4. Isolde’s mother discovers that Tristan was the man who had killed her brother
1. Isolde discovers Tristan’s true identity
2. The piece of the swordblade was removed from the giant Morholt’s/Marhaus’ skull
3. Matched with the remaining broken segment of Tristan’s sword
4. The king then spares Tristan’s life
5. Tristan and Isolde exchange rings
5. He leaves Ireland, and arrives in Cornwall
6. Tristan receives his father’s permission to stay at King Mark’s court in Cornwall (in the tales when his father still lives)
1. His father and stepmother depart of their lands and goods to Sir Tristan (having not done so already)
2. Tristan’s father dies (or is dead already in Tristan’s infancy or youth, as some tales tell us)
3. Tristan eventually entered a rivalry with Mark for the love of Sir Segwarides’ wife
4. Mark’s initial love of his nephew turned to dislike
5. Mark becomes engaged to Isolde
6. Sent Tristan into Ireland to escort Isolde (La Beale Isoud) to Cornwall
7. On the return voyage, they accidentally share a love potion meant for Isolde and Mark
8. Tristan and Isolde fall hopelessly in love and become paramours
9. Mark suspected their affair, having been informed by various vassals
10. He gave them every benefit of the doubt
11. Tristan and Isolde were, at various times
1. Tried
2. Exiled
3. Sentenced to death
12. For the most part, they managed to convince Mark of their innocence and returned to his favour
7. Tristan is finally banished from Cornwall (for ten years)
1. Tristan went to Brittany
1. He assisted the king/duke against an attacker
2. Married Isolde of the White Hands, daughter of the king/duke
3. Remembering his true lover on his wedding night, he declined to consummate his marriage
2. Tristan went to Logres
1. Where he fought at the Castle of Maidens tournament
2. Was imprisoned for a time
• Along with Palomides/Palamedes and Dinadan
• By Sir Darras/Damas
3. On his release, he chanced to visit a castle of Morgan le Fay’s
4. Morgan’s lover Sir Hemison
• Jealous of her attentions to Tristan
• Pursued the departing champion of Cornwall
5. Tristan distinguished himself at the Hard Rock Castle tournament
6. Tristan was installed as a member of the Round Table, getting Sir Marhaus’ old chair
7. The only fighting man of the time (except Galahad) who could beat Lancelot in a fair passage of arms
8. “Renaissance man” — “every estate loved him, where that he went”
3. Rarely or ever returned home to see how his own inheritance of Lyonesse was fairing
4. Tristan eventually returned to Isolde of the White Hands, in Brittany
5. Endings
1. Tristan was mortally wounded by a poisoned spear
1. Either while assisting Tristan the Dwarf to reclaim his kingdom
2. Or while helping his brother-in-law, Kahedin(s)/Kehydius/Kærdin, to sleep with a married woman
2. He sent for Isolde (Mark’s wife) to heal his wound
1. Telling the ship’s captain to fly white sails on the return trip if Isolde was aboard
2. To fly black sails if she was not
3. When the ship returned, Tristan asked Isolde of the White Hands the colour of the sails
1. Jealous of his love for the other Isolde
   1. She told him the sails were black
   2. When in fact they were white
2. Tristan died of sorrow and Isolde, finding her lover dead, perished on top of his body
4. They were buried side by side
1. A vine grew from Tristan’s grave
2. A rose sprung from Isolde’s
3. The plants intertwined, symbolizing the eternal love of Tristan and Isolde
6. Tristan’s Association with Related Physical Objects/Locations
1. Tristan’s Cairn (Snowdonia)
2. Tristan Stone (Fowey)
7. Occurrences of “Tristan” (by various names and descriptions) in Related “Literature”
1. Tristan Stone. Sixth Century AD.
2. of Britain/England, Thomas. Tristran(s) (Tristan),
            or Le Roman de Tristran(s) et Ysolt/Ysodt/Yseut/Ysod(e)/Isode (The Romance of Tristan and Isolde).
            Twelfth Century AD (after AD 1155, by AD 1170/1175).
3. de France, Marie. Le Lai du Chèvrefueil(le)/Chevrefoil (The Lay of Chevrefoil/Woodbine (the Honeysuckle)). mid/late Twelfth Century AD (AD 1170s).
4. La Folie Trist(r)an d’Oxford, or Oxford Folie Trist(r)an (The Madness of Tristan, or Tristan’s Madness).
            Twelfth Century AD (between AD 1175 and AD 1200).
5. Béroul. Tristan. late Twelfth Century AD.
6. La Folie Tristan de Berne (The Madness of Tristan). late Twelfth Century AD.
7. von Oberge, Eilhart. Tristrant (Tristan). AD 1170/1190.
8. von Zatzikhoven, Ulrich. Lanzelet (Lanzalet in French and Spanish; Lancelot in English). early Thirteenth Century AD (c AD 1200).
9. von Strassburg, Gottfried. Tristan. early Thirteenth Century AD.
10. Brother Robert. Trist(r)ams Saga ok Ísöndar (Saga of Tristan and Isolde). AD 1226.
11. Trioedd Ynys Prydein/Prydain (Triads of British Isle, or Welsh Triads), from Llyfr Coch Hergest (Red Book of Hergest).
             Eleventh/(late Thirteenth)/Fourteenth Centuries AD.
12. Tristan als Mönch (Tristan as a Monk). early/mid Thirteenth Century AD.
13. Post-Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal (Quest of the Holy Grail). AD 1230/1240.
14. Post-Vulgate Mort Artu (Death of Arthur). AD 1230/1240.
15. de Gat, Luce and Helie de Boron. Tristan en Prose (Prose Tristan). AD 1225-1235, second half of Thirteenth Century AD (AD 1276).
16. Trystan ac Es(s)yllt (Tristan and Isolde), otherwise known as Ystori Trystan (Story of Tristan). Twelfth Century AD (AD 800/1126/1200/1550).
17. Tristano Riccardiano (Riccardian Tristan). late Thirteenth Century AD.
18. von Freiberg, Heinrich. Continuation of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan. c AD 1290.
19. Sir Tristrem (Sir Tristan). c AD 1300.
20. Tristano Panciati(c)chiano (Panciati(c)chian Tristan). early Fourteenth Century AD.
21. La Tavola Ritonda (The Round Table). AD 1325/1350.
22. Saga af Tristram ok Isodd (Saga of Tristan and Isolde). Fourteenth Century AD.
23. (La) Vendetta (Che fe Messer Lanzelloto de la Morte) di (Miser) Tristano
             ((The) Revenge/Vengeance (taken by Sir Lancelot for the Death) of (Sir) Tristan). Fourteenth Century AD.
24. (I) Cantari di Tristano ((The) Songs of Tristan). mid/late Fourteenth Century AD.
25. Tóruigheacht/Tóraigheacht/Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (The Pursuit of Dairmait/Diarmaid and Gráinne).
             AD 1651 (Sixteenth Century AD), as early as Tenth Century AD.
26. Perceforest (Pierce the Forest). AD 1330/1344.
             (The most complete of the four manuscripts known is “Manuscript C”.)
             (It was written by David Aubert, c AD 1459/1460; for Duc Philippe de Bourgogne le Bon.)
27. Ysaïe le Triste (Ysaïe the Sad). late Fourteenth/early Fifteenth Century AD.
28. Tristrams Kvædi (Poem of Tristan). early Fifteenth Century AD.
29. Tristano Veneto (Venetian Tristan). Fifteenth Century AD.
30. Malory, Syr Thomas. (Le) Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur, or, as originally titled, The Whole Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table).
             This ‘Winchester Manuscript’ was published AD 1469/1470/1481/1483.
31. Quando Tristano e Lancielotto al Petrone di Merlino (When Tristan and Lancelot fought at a Stone of Merlin). late Fifteenth Century AD.
32. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur). Printed by William Caxton in AD 1485.
33. Sala, Pierre. Tristan. AD 1525/1529.
34. Tristan fragment. c AD 1550.
35. Tristram/Tristan og Isolde (Tristan and Isolde). Sixteenth Century AD.
36. (I) Due Tristani ((The) Two Tristans). AD 1555.
37. P(r)ovest′ o Tryshchane, or Povest o Trištanu i Ižoti, or Trysčan (Romance of Tristan, or Romance of Tristan and Isolde, or Tristan).
             c AD 1580.
38. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. AD 1592/1593/1596.
39. Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. AD 1602/1606.
40. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. AD 1606/1607/1608.
8. Astrological Signs Associated with Tristan
1. Libra — Venus+ — Air
2. Virgo — Mercury- — Earth
3. Leo — Sun+/- — Fire
9. Geography, Genealogy, and Timeline of Tristan
1. Geography of Tristan
2. Genealogy of Tristan
3. Timeline of Tristan
3. Lady Isolde, Tragic Lover in Logres
1. Introduction to Lady Isolde, Tragic Lover in Logres
2. Meaning, Origin, Existence, and Comparison: Isolde’s Name, Other Isoldes, and Other Tragic Lovers
1. Introduction to Meaning, Origin, Existence, and Comparison: Isolde’s Name, Other Isoldes, and Other Tragic Lovers
1. Isolde
1. — beloved of Tristan,
2. queen of Cornwall,
3. healer,
4. enchantress,
5. and the most luminous feminine figure of the mediaeval Brythonic and Franco-Norman romance tradition —
2. Where Tristan’s name reaches back to Pictish inscriptions of northern Britain
1. and “Celtic” vocabulary of martial tumult,
2. Isolde’s name has its deepest roots in Germanic linguistic world,
3. refracted through the prism of Welsh phonology
4. and elaborated by the courtly French imagination
5. into a word that seems to shimmer with its heroine’s own radiance
3. That shimmer was not accidental:
1. French romancers were exquisitely sensitive to the onomastic possibilities of the name,
2. and several of its forms carry within them an auditory echo of the Old French verb isoler
3. — to isolate, to make an island of —
4. which, whether or not it represents a genuine etymological connexion,
5. cannot but have enriched the semantic aura of a woman who stands,
6. in the tradition, perpetually at the intersection of proximity and distance,
7. of possession and unattainability
4. The name Isolde,
1. in its many orthographic and phonological variants
2. — from the Welsh Essyllt to the Old Norse Ísönd,
3. from the Italian Isotta to the Middle High German Isolt —
4. traces a remarkable arc of cultural transmission,crossing linguistic boundaries with a fluency that mirrors the heroine’s own movement between Ireland, Cornwall, and Brittany
5. Each variant carries its own semantic nuance and cultural colouring,
1. and the study of these forms is inseparable
2. from the study of the tradition that transmitted them
6. Beyond the single figure of the Irish queen, however,
1. the name was borne by others— by the rival Isolde of Brittany,
2. by a god-daughter,
3. by a daughter in the Italian prose tradition,
4. and by a Welsh Essylt of Gwynedd —
5. each of whom illuminates a different facet of the name’s cultural currency
7. And Isolde herself,
1. as a tragic lover,
2. takes her place in a tradition of women destroyed or transformed by overwhelming love
3. that extends from the Sumerian Inanna to the Egyptian Cleopatra,
4. from the Irish Deirdre to the Veronese Juliet,
5. each pairing offering a different angle of approach to the central mystery of eros
6. as simultaneously the most creative and the most annihilating of forces
8. This section addresses, in turn,
1. the meaning and origin of Isolde’s name across its principal variant forms;
2. the existence of other persons bearing cognate names within and adjacent to the romance tradition;
3. and the comparative placement of Isolde within the broader typology of the tragic beloved in world literature and mythology
2. Meaning and Origin of Isolde’s Name
1. Introduction to Meaning and Origin of Isolde’s Name
1. Few names in the mediaeval imagination carry the same aura of beauty, mystery, and emotional intensity as Isolde
• —the luminous heroine of the Tristan legend,
• whose story travelled farther,
• and transformed more profoundly,
• than almost any other figure of the romance tradition
2. Her name, like her narrative, is a palimpsest:
• layered,
• refracted,
• reshaped by the tongues and poetics of
• Wales,
• Brittany,
• France,
• Germany,
• Scandinavia,
• and Italy
3. Each linguistic tradition receives her differently,
• and each leaves its own tonal imprint
• on the name that has come to symbolise the very essence of tragic love
4. The earliest recoverable forms
• —Essyllt, Esyllt, Esyllt, and their cognates—
• anchor the inquiry firmly in the Brythonic world
5. From this Welsh nucleus,
• the name radiates outward across mediaeval Europe,
• undergoing a remarkable series of phonological, cultural, and symbolic metamorphoses
6. As the legend migrates
• from Welsh Triads to Breton lays,
• from Béroul to Gottfried,
• from Norse sagas to Italian prose cycles,
• the heroine’s name becomes a linguistic traveller in its own right:
• reshaped by scribes,
• adapted by poets,
• and reinterpreted by the mythic sensibilities of each region
7. What emerges from this long transmission is not a single, fixed etymology but a constellation of possibilities
8. Some readings emphasise vision and beholding, casting the name as a description of the beloved seen through the lover’s upward gaze
9. Others foreground movement, brightness, or sovereignty, linking the name to ideas of luminous activity or icy rulership
10. Still others—especially in the Norse and Germanic traditions
• —discover in the phonology of the name a fusion of ice, breath, spirit, and power,
• yielding interpretations that resonate with the cool, radiant, life-giving qualities
• attributed to Isolde throughout the romance corpus
11. To trace the meaning and origin of Isolde’s name, then,
• is to follow the legend’s own journey:
• a movement across languages, landscapes, and centuries,
• in which each culture hears something slightly different in the sound of her name
12. The following section explores this evolution in detail,
• beginning with the Brythonic Essyllt
• and unfolding through the full spectrum of mediaeval forms
• that together constitute one of the most fascinating onomastic histories in European literature
2. Essyl(l)t(t)/Iseu(l)t/Yseu(l)t(e)/Yso(l)t
1. The Welsh form Essyllt
• (also spelled Esyllt, Essylt, or Eseult in various manuscripts)
• represents, with high probability, the earliest surviving form of the name in the Brythonic tradition,
• and it is here that the etymological investigation must begin
2. Essyllt appears in Welsh Triads (Trioedd Ynys Prydein),
• where she is named as one of the three faithless wives of Britain
• — a moral judgement that sits in ironic tension
• with the tradition’s simultaneous celebration
• of her beauty and the irresistibility of her love
3. The name
• is also attested in early Welsh genealogical materials
• and in the margins of manuscripts associated with the Arthurian tradition
4. The etymological analysis of Essyllt has generated sustained debate
5. The most widely accepted derivation
• connects the name to Old Welsh elements is- (below, under) and seltu- (a gaze, a view, a looking),
• yielding a compound that might be rendered approximately
• as “she who is gazed upon from below”, “she who is looked up to”, or more evocatively “she who is beheld”
• — a name that is, in essence, a description of the beloved as seen through the lover’s eyes,
• an object of upward-directed contemplative adoration
6. An alternative etymology derives
• the first element from a Proto-Brythonic ịd- (to go, to move)
• and the second from seltu- or from a root related to brightness or light,
• producing “she who moves in light” or “she who is luminously active”
7. A third proposal connects the name to a compound of eis- (ice, frost — compare Old English is,
• Gothic eis) and waltu- (to rule) — yielding “ice-ruler” or “frost-queen”
• — a reading that finds some support in the association of Essyllt/Iseult
• with the cold beauty of the North and with the luminous pallor
• that the romance tradition consistently attributes to her
8. The French forms Iseult and Yseult(e)
• — employed by Béroul in his Tristan (c AD 1150–1190)
• and in numerous related texts —
• represent the Gallicisation of the Welsh or Brythonic original,
• the initial Es- becoming I- or Y- under the influence of French phonological conventions
• and the terminal syllable acquiring the characteristic French -ult or -eult
9. These forms are the most widely familiar in literary history,
• and their adoption by Béroul and his contemporaries established them
• as the default designations in the Franco-Norman romance tradition
10. The spelling Ysolt,
• more common in Provençal and some northern French manuscripts,
• represents a further contraction of the same base
3. Ysodd/Ysonde/Ísönd
1. The forms Ysodd and Ysonde represent variants
• found in certain Middle Welsh and Middle English manuscript traditions,
• in which the terminal consonant cluster of the base form is altered or expanded
• — -dd being a standard Welsh digraph for the voiced dental fricative
• (as in Welshydd, a sound not easily represented in Latin script),
• and -nde representing a terminal nasal
• and dental that gives the name a softer, more lingering conclusion
2. The Norse form Ísönd
• (also attested as Ísond or Ísondd in Old Norse manuscripts of the Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar,
• compiled at the court of King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway in AD 1226 at the instigation of the king himself,
• who wished to have the best of the Breton lays rendered into his language)
• represents a remarkable instance of phonological adaptation:
• the French Iseult is transformed into a recognisably Norse compound,
• with the first element Ís- (ice — Old Norse ís)
• and the second -önd (breath, spirit — Old Norse önd,
• cognate with Old English ond
• and ultimately with the Proto-Germanic anđaz, spirit, breath of life)
3. The Norse form
• thus yields, through the accident or design of phonological convergence,
• a compound meaning “ice-breath” or “spirit of ice”
• — an image of luminous, cool, life-giving feminine power
• that accords beautifully with the tradition’s emphasis on Iseult’s healing arts,
• her association with the cold brightness of the north,
• and her function as the sovereign female principle who can restore life to the wounded hero
4. Isaot(t)a/Isotta/Ixolta/Izota/Izonda
1. The Italian tradition of the Tristan legend
• — represented principally by La Tavola Ritonda (c AD 1320–1340),
• I Due Tristani (late Fourteenth Century AD),
• and Tristano Riccardiano,
• as well as by numerous Italian prose adaptations of Tristan en Prose —
• renders the heroine’s name in forms that reflect the phonological preferences of Italian:
• Isotta (the most standard and widely used Italian form),
• Isaotta (an amplified variant that restores the full vowel of the second syllable),
• Ixolta (found in certain Venetian manuscripts, where the -x- represents the voiced sibilant),
• Izota (the form favoured in some south Italian and Sicilian manuscripts, where the -z- represents the same phoneme as -ss- or -s- in standard Italian),
• and Izonda (a form appearing in some manuscripts of the Tristano veneto and related texts,
• which adds a nasal consonant
• that moves the name towards a softer, more lyrical conclusion)
2. These Italian variants collectively demonstrate the extraordinary flexibility of the name across linguistic registers,
• each form sounding subtly different
• — Isotta stark and lovely,
• Isaotta more ceremonious,
• Izonda almost musical —
• and each carrying its own aesthetic colouring
5. Isalde/Isal(d)t/Isall/Iseo/Iseus
1. These forms
• — largely peripheral to the main tradition but of considerable interest for the history of the name’s transmission —
• cluster in the space between the Franco-Norman and Germanic versions
2. Isalde and Isalt appear in certain Middle High German manuscripts and fragments,
• representing adaptations of the name that bring it into the phonological neighbourhood of German -ald- compounds
• (cognate with Old High German ald, “old, great, noble”)
• and suggesting, however fancifully, a reading of the name as “ice-noble” or “noble-ice”
3. The form Isall,
• found in some Northern French and Walloon texts,
• may represent a hypocoristic or abbreviated variant
4. More linguistically distinctive are Iseo and Iseus:
• Iseo (the form employed in the remarkable Franco-Italian poem La Geste Francor,
• and preserved also as the name of a town on the shore of Lake Iseo in Lombardy,
• suggesting that the name may have had currency independent of the romance tradition)
• has a beauty and economy that gives the heroine’s name the quality of a pure vowel-sound,
• a sigh or an exhalation;
• Iseus (found in certain Anglo-Norman texts,
• representing a Latinised nominative form in -us)
• brings the name into the register of classical nomenclature
6. Isol(d)t/Ísot/Ísól/Ísodd/Isoud(e)/Iso(l)de
1. These forms represent the central Germanic axis of the name’s transmission
2. Middle High German Isolt
• (the form employed throughout Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, c AD 1210
• — the supreme artistic achievement of the German Tristan tradition
• and one of the great literary monuments of the European Middle Ages)
• variously interpreted as compounding is (ice) with walt (power, rule) or with hilt (battle) —
• yielding “ice-power”, “ruler of ice”, or “battle-ice”
• Gottfried’s use of Isolt,
• consistent throughout his unfinished masterpiece,
• carries with it the full weight of his extraordinarily nuanced characterisation:
• his Isolt is not merely a beautiful woman but a figure of near-metaphysical significance,
• the embodiment of what Gottfried calls edele herzen (noble hearts),
• those souls capable of suffering love’s perfect joy and perfect pain simultaneously
3. Old Norse
• Ísót (appearing in the Tristrams saga alongside Ísönd)
• and Ísól represent further Norse adaptations of the German or French forms
• The form Ísodd
• — found in some Icelandic manuscripts —
• is orthographically parallel to the Welsh Ysodd,
• representing the same terminal dental fricative
4. Isoude
• appears in the prose tradition
• and in several Middle English texts,
• including some of the shorter Tristan narratives,
• as a form that preserves the French root
• whilst moving towards the English phonological system
5. Isolde itself
• — the form now most familiar to modern readers
• through Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865)
• and the Malory-derived English tradition —
• is in fact a relatively late standardisation,
• the -lde terminal reflecting a German-influenced spelling preference;
• Malory himself uses the form Isoud or La Beale Isoud in his Morte Darthur,
• an epithet (“the Fair Isoud”)
• that is both a proper name and a description of surpassing beauty
• The form Isolde,
• through Wagner’s consummate artistic authority,
• has become the name by which the heroine is known to the world,
• just as Wagner’s opera has become the lens through which the legend is most widely experienced
3. Existence of Other Isoldes
1. Introduction to Existence of Other Isoldes
1. As with Tristan, the name Isolde
• — in its various guises —
• was not the exclusive property of the single heroine of the romance cycle
2. The tradition itself generated subsidiary or parallel Isoldes:
• most famously the second Isolde of the Breton tradition,
• whose presence in the narrative is structurally essential
• and whose relationship to the heroine is at once
• a foil,
• an echo,
• and a cruel parody
3. Beyond the romance tradition proper,
• the name appears in Welsh genealogical materials
• and in the Italian prose elaborations of the legend,
• and in certain texts a god-daughter bearing the name
• extends the onomastic reach of the heroine into the next generation
4. Each of these figures illuminates a different dimension of the name’s cultural and symbolic resonance
2. Queen Isolde/Iseult
1. Several versions of the romance tradition
• — most notably the Prose Tristan and certain of its derivatives —
• introduce a figure known simply as Queen Isolde or Queen Iseult
• who is distinct from the titular heroine:
• specifically, the mother of Iseult of Ireland,
• the Irish queen who is wife to King Gormond
• (or Gurmun, or Morholt’s liege in various versions)
• and who herself possesses the healing arts and the knowledge of love-potions
2. In Tristan en Prose tradition,
• this older Iseult
• — distinguished from her daughter by being called the Queen or the Elder Iseult —
• is the original mistress of the craft that her daughter inherits,
• and she is the figure who prepares the love-potion intended for Iseult and Mark
• but drunk in error by Iseult and Tristan aboard the ship from Ireland
3. The existence of this maternal figure
• — an Iseult who is the source of the very magic that destroys her daughter —
• adds a dimension of tragic irony to the legend:
• the mother’s art,
• intended to secure her daughter’s happiness in a political marriage,
• is the instrument of that daughter’s destruction
3. Isolde/Isoud(e)/Iseult/Iseut/Ysolt/Yseut the Dark of the White (Fair) Hands/La Blanche Mains/aux Blances Mains of Brittany
1. Iseult of the White Hands
• (Old French: Iseut as Blanches Mains,
• or Iseult la Blanche;
• also Isolt of Brittany,
• Ysolt aux Blanches Mains)
• is the figure whose role in the legend is second in structural importance
• only to that of the titular Iseult herself, and whose name
• — identical with her rival’s —
• is one of the most narratively potent devices in the entire tradition
2. She is the daughter of Hoel, king of Brittany
• (in some versions Havelin or Jovelin),
• and sister of Kaherdin (Caherdin, or Caerdin in Welsh-influenced versions),
• who becomes Tristan’s closest friend and companion in Brittany
3. Tristan,
• exiled from Cornwall and from the Iseult he truly loves,
• encounters this Iseult of Brittany and is drawn to her by the cruel accident of her name:
• in her, he hears an echo of the beloved from whom he is separated,
• and he marries her — in the account of Thomas of Britain and of Gottfried —
• not from love but from the terrible consolation of the name itself
4. The White Hands epithet
• — her most famous distinguishing attribute,
• which gives her an identity defined entirely by physical beauty
• and its contrast with the Iseult who possesses Tristan’s soul
• — encodes her tragedy with extraordinary economy
5. Her hands are white because they have never been stained by passion,
• never grasped at love’s full intensity:
• she is the virgin bride,
• the unconsummated wife,
• the woman who possesses the outward form of the beloved without the inward reality
6. In Thomas of Britain’s version,
• the marriage remains unconsummated
• — Tristan confesses that he cannot be a true husband to her,
• and she accepts this with a dignity
7. Her act of revenge
• — telling the dying Tristan that the sail is black when it is white,
• causing him to die of despair believing that Iseult of Ireland has not come to heal him —
• is simultaneously the cruelest and the most humanly comprehensible act in the narrative,the one moment when her long-suppressed bitterness overflows
4. Isolde — God-daughter of Tristan
1. In certain peripheral texts of the Tristan tradition
• — particularly those that represent the later,
• more elaborated branches of Tristan en Prose cycle —
• there appears a figure who bears the name Isolde or Iseult as the god-daughter of the hero himself
2. This figure is of limited narrative importance within the extant texts,
• but her existence is of considerable symbolic interest:
• she represents the transmission of the beloved’s name from one generation to the next
• through the mechanism of spiritual kinship rather than biological descent,
• suggesting that the name itself has acquired something of the quality of a sacred bequest,
• a spiritual inheritance that the hero wishes to perpetuate beyond the bounds of his own tragic love
3. The institution of godparenthood, which by the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries AD
• was understood in the West as establishing a quasi-familial spiritual bond,
• means that Tristan’s choice of this name for his god-daughter constitutes an act of devotion to Iseult
• that cannot be suppressed even by the demands of his life in Brittany:
• it is, in a sense, the most socially permissible form of the love that cannot otherwise be expressed
5. Isolde — Daughter of Tristan and Isolde in the Italian I Due Tristani
1. The late Fourteenth-Century AD Italian prose romance I Due Tristani (“The Two Tristans”)
• — a text that extends the legend into a second generation
• through the adventures of Tristan the Younger, son of the original lovers —
• introduces within its narrative economy a female figure bearing the name Isolde
• who is the daughter of the titular Tristan and his Iseult
2. This Isolde the Younger is thus the offspring of the great love itself,
• a figure who inherits both the radiant name and,
• in the narrative’s economy, something of the tragic destiny of her mother
3. Her existence as a character in Italian prose tradition represents the legend’s attempt
• to think beyond the double death of the lovers
• — to imagine what beauty and love, transmitted biologically and nominally across a generation,
• might look like in the world that the original lovers’ passion helped to create and destroy
4. That the daughter bears the mother’s name is not merely a convenience
• but a deliberate act of memorial and mythological repetition,
• suggesting that the name Isolde has become, in the tradition,
• synonymous with a specific quality of luminous, destined, tragic femininity
• that transcends the individual bearer
6. Essylt of Gwynedd
1. Distinct from the figure of Essyllt fab Tallwch
• (Iseult, wife of King March and beloved of Drystan, as she appears in Welsh Triads),
• Welsh tradition preserves references to an Essylt of Gwynedd
• — a figure whose identity and narrative function are less clearly delineated
• but who participates in the same cultural world of Welsh Arthurian and sub-Arthurian heroic legend
2. Gwynedd,
• the north-western kingdom of Wales with its heartland in Snowdonia,
• was one of the most powerful of the Welsh kingdoms and a major centre of Welsh literary and bardic culture;
• the association of an Essylt figure with this territory
• suggests a northern Welsh tradition of the name’s use
• that may be independent of or parallel to the Cornish/Breton tradition
• represented by the main romance cycle
3. Essylt of Gwynedd
• may be a doublet of the titular heroine,
• a figure who represents a localised Welsh version of the same mythological type
• — the luminous, sovereign-associated feminine who stands at the heart of tragic love-narratives —
• rather than a character developed from the continental tradition
4. Comparison of Other Tragic Lovers to Isolde
1. Introduction to Comparison of Other Tragic Lovers to Tristan
1. To consider the tragic lovers from Isolde’s perspective
• — to read the tradition from the beloved’s point of view rather than the lover’s —
• is to undertake a substantially different interpretative exercise from the corresponding survey of Tristan’s parallels
2. Where the male tragic lover tends to be figured as the agent of passion, the pursuer,
• the one who dies of the beloved’s absence,
• the woman in these pairings more commonly occupies the position of the one who is
• possessed,
• contested,
• transferred,
• mourned,
• or who herself becomes the instrument of destiny
3. Yet this is not uniformly so:
• Gráinne places Diarmuid under a geasa,
• Deirdre shames Naoise into carrying her off,
• Cleopatra is an autonomous political and erotic agent of the first order,
• and Isolde herself
• — in the most nuanced versions of the legend —
• is not simply the passive object of Tristan’s desire
• but a woman of sovereign intellect, healing power, and fierce emotional self-possession
4. The survey that follows reads each comparative figure
• not merely as an analogue to Isolde’s structural position
• but as a heroine in her own right,
• with her own characteristic mode of tragic agency,
• her own relationship to the forces of love, death, and cosmic order
2. Solar and Fertility Deities
1. “Flowerful Maiden” (and her Brother “Solar Deity”)
• In the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Indo-European mythological tradition,
• the “Flowerful Maiden”
• — a figure whose name contains the root bhleh₃- (to bloom, to blossom) —
• is the counterpart of the solar deity,
• a luminous feminine embodiment of spring fertility and natural abundance
• who stands in a relationship of profound complementarity to her brother or consort
• Her identity is constituted by flowering:
• she is the earth in its most productive and beautiful moment,
• the principle of natural creativity at the height of its expression
• The comparison with Isolde is suggestive at the level of symbolic register:
• Isolde’s Irish provenance,
• her association with healing herbs and natural remedies,
• and the consistent imagery of her
• golden hair,
• luminous skin,
• and supernatural beauty
• all place her within the archetype of the flower-maiden
• — the woman whose being is an embodiment of natural perfection
• Her name’s possible derivation from a root connected to brightness or ice-light
• further aligns her
• with the solar/lunar feminine pole of the Indo-European mythological system
2. ‘Goddess of Sovereignty/Land’ (and ‘God of Light/Sun’)
• “Celtic” Goddess of Sovereignty
• — the genius of the land who must be ritually wedded to the legitimate king to validate his reign —
• is the archetype that Isolde most fully instantiates within the Brythonic and Irish mythological tradition
• In Irish flaithiús (sovereignty) tradition,
• the land itself is feminine,
• and the king’s authority derives from his union,
• literal or symbolic, with the Goddess who embodies it
• Isolde’s provenance from Ireland
• — in the romance, she is a princess of the Irish royal house,
• possessed of healing arts
• and the authority of Irish sovereignty —
• marks her as a figure who carries within herself the divine legitimacy of the land
• That she is given in political marriage to Mark,
• a king whose legitimacy may be incomplete or compromised
• (different texts give different hints of his inadequacy),
• and that she is truly claimed by Tristan, the young solar champion,
• enacts the sovereignty myth at the level of courtly narrative
• Isolde does not merely love Tristan;
• in the deepest stratum of the legend,
• she confers upon him the sovereignty she embodies
• — a gift that Mark cannot truly receive because he has not won it through love
3. Inan(n)a (and Utu)
• Inanna
• — the great Sumerian goddess of love, war, and celestial sovereignty,
• identified with the planet Venus in its dual role as morning and evening star —
• is the divine feminine figure who perhaps most fully illuminates the mythological dimensions of Isolde’s character
• As the counterpart of Utu the Sun-God
• (her twin brother in the Sumerian tradition),
• Inanna embodies the totality of feminine divine power:
• she is simultaneously the goddess of erotic love and of armed conflict,
• of desire and of death,
• of the upper world
• and (through her descent) of the underworld
• Her ambivalence
• — her simultaneous creative and destructive force —
• resonates directly with Isolde’s role in the legend:
• Isolde heals Tristan with her arts
• (the creative, nurturing dimension)
• and simultaneously destroys him
• by the irresistibility of her love
• (the consuming dimension)
• The love-potion that both binds and liberates,
• that creates the most intense life
• and simultaneously makes ordinary life impossible,
• is a narrative equivalent of Inanna’s dual nature
4. Inan(n)a (and Dumuzid)
• In her relationship with Dumuzid (Tammuz)
• — the divine shepherd whom she chooses as her husband and whom she subsequently,
• upon her return from the Underworld,
• designates as the substitute who must take her place in the realm of the dead —
• Inanna enacts the most fundamental of all tragic-lover archetypes from the female perspective
• She loves and destroys in a single gesture;
• the beloved who was chosen freely
• is surrendered to death as a structural necessity of the cosmic order
• Comparison with Isolde is both structural and emotional:
• Isolde, like Inanna, loves with an intensity that exceeds the social structures designed to contain love,
• and her love is simultaneously the source of the hero’s greatest vitality
• and the ultimate cause of his death
• Final scene of the legend
• — in which Isolde arrives too late to heal Tristan
• and dies herself upon his body,
• two deaths following each other with the logic of cosmic inevitability —
• parallels the mythological dynamic of Inanna and Dumuzi:
• love as a force that creates and destroys in equal measure
5. Aphrodite (and Adōnis)
• Aphrodite’s love for Adōnis
• — the beautiful mortal youth whose death in the boar-hunt
• she was powerless to prevent despite her divine status —
• places the Goddess of Love in the unfamiliar position of the mourner,
• the one left behind,
• the lover who survives the beloved
• and must channel her grief into the ritual structures of lamentation
• The Adōnia festivals,
• in which women mourned the God with the planting and withering of gardens,
• encode the feminine experience of loss in its most archaic form:
• the beloved is beautiful,
• transient,
• and ultimately beyond the lover’s power to protect
• Aphrodite’s relationship to Adōnis is,
• moreover, one of divine to mortal
• — the Goddess stoops to love a human,
• accepting thereby the asymmetry of mortal vulnerability —
• an asymmetry that parallels, in a different register,
• Isolde’s supernatural gifts
• (healing,
• magic,
• bardic knowledge)
• set against Tristan’s mortal susceptibility to poisoned wounds
• Isolde can heal him once, twice
• — but the third time,
• the wound and the circumstances conspire beyond her power,
• and she arrives too late:
• like Aphrodite at the boar-hunt,
• she reaches the beloved only when he has passed beyond her art
6. Persephone (and Adōnis)
• Persephone’s relationship to Adōnis
• — in the myth-variant in which she refused to return the beautiful infant placed in her keeping
• and was compelled by Zeus to share him with Aphrodite —
• represents a different mode of tragic feminine attachment:
• the love of the death-queen for the embodiment of living beauty,
• the desire of the underworld for what it cannot permanently hold
• Persephone,
• queen of the dead,
• is enamoured of the living boy
• precisely because his aliveness is the absolute opposite of her realm’s nature
• Comparison with Isolde operates at the level of the second Isolde
• (Isolde of the White Hands)
• as much as the first:
• the Breton Isolde,
• who cannot have Tristan’s living love
• and possesses only its cold shadow
• in the unconsummated marriage,
• is a Persephone-figure
• — the woman who holds the beloved in a kind of living death,
• a Breton winter-existence that is neither true life nor true death,until the true Aphrodite
• (Isolde of Ireland, the real beloved)
• is summoned to restore the dying hero to life
7. Kybélē (and Atys)
• Kybélē
• — the Great Mother of Phrygia,
• Goddess of Wild Nature and the Mountain,
• whose love for the beautiful youth Atys
• was at once overwhelming and annihilating —
• represents the archetype of the divine woman
• whose love is too great for its human object to survive
• Kybélē did not intend to destroy Atys;
• yet her love,
• precisely because it was the love
• of an immortal and all-consuming Goddess for a mortal,
• generated in him the madness that led to his self-destruction
• Parallel with Isolde:
• the potion that compels Tristan’s love
• operates in narrative function
• as Kybélē’s divine attraction operates in myth
• — as a force that bypasses individual will
• and creates a love of cosmic intensity in a mortal frame
• Isolde,
• unlike Kybélē,
• does not choose to enchant Tristan
• (the potion is drunk in error),
• but the effect is the same:
• a love so absolute that the ordinary structures of his life
• — loyalty to Mark, duty to his lord, the possibility of a normal marriage —
• are rendered impossible,
• and the hero is consumed by what should have been his happiness
3. Classical Lovers
1. Thisbe (and Pyramus)
• Thisbe
• — the Babylonian girl of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
• who loves Pyramus through a crack in a wall,
• who is the first to reach their moonlit assignationand the first to flee the lioness,
• and who returns to find Pyramus dead
• and drives his sword through herself in an act of absolute fidelity —
• is, from the female perspective,
• perhaps the most purely tragic of all the Classical parallels to Isolde
• Her suicide is not an act of madness or despair but of conscious, deliberate choice:
• she will not survive him,
• she will not return to the social world that separated them,
• she will make of death the last and most definitive expression of her love
• In this she is directly parallel to Isolde,
• who, finding Tristan dead in Thomas of Britain’s version,
• lies down beside him and wills herself to die
• — not from grief alone
• but from the sovereign decision that life without him is not the life she has chosen
• Both Thisbe and Isolde are women who exercise,
• at the last, the only autonomous choice remaining to them:
• the choice of where and with whom to die
2. Selene (and Endymion)
• Selene
• — the Moon-Goddess
• who visited the eternally sleeping Endymion
• each night on Mount Latmos —
• represents the archetype of the divine feminine lover
• whose beloved is preserved in a state of permanent beautiful helplessness
• Selene’s love cannot be reciprocated in the ordinary sense:
• Endymion sleeps,
• and she gazes upon him,
• and her love is a love of pure contemplation,
• of unilateral adoration without response
• Comparison with Isolde
• from this angle illuminates those episodes in the tradition
• in which Isolde tends the unconscious or sleeping Tristan
• — his wound-induced swoons,
• his states of near-death —
• when her love must be enacted entirely through the arts of healingand the act of watching,
• without the possibility of erotic or verbal communion
• In these moments Isolde is Selene,
• the luminous woman who loves across an unbridgeable distance,
• whose beloved is present in body but absent in consciousness
• Moonlike quality attributed to Isolde
• in many lyric contexts
• — her whiteness,
• her night-voyages across the sea —
• further strengthens this identification
3. Brisēís/Βρισηΐς/(Hippodámeia/Ἱπποδάμεια)/Briseida/Criseida/Criseyde/Cresseid/Cressida (and Troilus/Troilo/Troiles)
• The figure who moves
• from Homer’s Briseís
• (the captive girl whose seizure from Achilles triggers the Iliad’s central action)
• through Boccaccio’s Criseida
• to Chaucer’s Criseyde
• and Shakespeare’s Cressida
• undergoes one of the most extraordinary transformations in literary history:
• from passive object of contention between Achilles and Agamemnon
• to the fully rounded, psychologically complex woman of Chaucer’s supreme treatment,
• whose “slydynge corage” (sliding or unstable heart)
• has been endlessly debated as a character-fault,
• a survival-mechanism,or simply the honest record of a woman’s behaviour
• under conditions of absolute political helplessness
• From Isolde’s perspective,
• Criseyde represents the tragic beloved as victim of circumstances rather than of cosmic necessity:
• where Isolde is destroyed by the love-potion’s absolute compulsion
• and by the irreducible grandeur of what she and Tristan feel,
• Criseyde is destroyed by the modest, entirely human logic
• of finding the nearest warmth in the cold of the Greek camp
• Chaucer’s immense sympathy for Criseyde
• — his refusal to condemn her,
• his insistence that she did as well as any woman
• might have done in her situation —
• makes of her betrayal not a moral failure
• but a tragic illustration of the gap
• between the absolute demands of love’s highest expression
• and the contingent, fearful, compromising nature of human life
• under political pressure
• In this she is Isolde’s shadow-figure:
• where Isolde’s love is absolute
• and maintained to the last breath,
• and the comparison between the two illuminates the rarity and cost
• of the kind of fidelity that the Tristan legend celebrates
4. Cleopatra (and Antony)
• Cleopatra VII Philopator
• — last Pharaoh of Egypt,
• queen of a civilisation four thousand years old,
• daughter (in her own theological understanding) of Isis and Osiris,
• political strategist,
• linguist,
• and lover of two of the most powerful men in the Roman world —is, from the female perspective,
• the tragic-lover archetype at its most fully realised and most sovereign
• She is the only figure in the entire comparative tradition
• who matches Isolde in the combination of personal beauty,
• supernatural or divine provenance
• (Cleopatra claimed to be Isis incarnate, the Goddess embodied in a mortal queen),
• healing and arcane knowledge
• (Cleopatra was said to have written treatises on cosmetics, medicine, and the interpretation of dreams),
• and absolute, fatal love
• Shakespeare’s Cleopatra
• — the most complex and most fully human of all the tragic beloveds in the literary tradition —
• illuminates Isolde through the contrast of their modes of sovereignty
• Isolde’s sovereignty is implicit,
• encoded in her Irish provenance and her supernatural gifts,
• always in tension with the social subordination of the queen-as-wife;
• Cleopatra’s sovereignty is
• explicit,
• political,
• and exercised with the full consciousness of a woman
• who has governed one of the world’s great civilisations
• Both women die in an act of sovereign self-determination:
• Isolde lies down beside Tristan and wills herself to die;
• Cleopatra stages her own death as a queenly performance,
• the asp at the breast a nursing of death
• that is simultaneously an embrace of Antony and a defiance of Caesar
• The great speech in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra on her barge
• — the image of the woman who “beggared all description”,
• around whom the very air seemed to follow “as if it should do her homage”
• — is the Roman world’s equivalent of the descriptions of Isolde’s beauty
• that recur throughout the romance tradition:
• both women are represented as exceeding the capacity of language to contain them,
• as constituting by their very existence an argument that the world’s ordinary measures of value are inadequate
• Both deaths are also, in their own terms, victories:
• Isolde dies in love’s fulfilment rather than love’s frustration;
• Cleopatra escapes the triumph of Caesar
• and achieves, in dying, the reunion with Antony that the living world could not provide
• The Nile and the Irish Sea, the Roman world and the Arthurian,
• are finally less different than they appear:
• both are stages upon which the same immemorial drama of love’s absoluteness
• and the world’s insufficiency is perpetually re-enacted
4. “Celtic” Hero-Heroine Pairs
1. Brigid (and Bres)
• Brigid
• — daughter of the Dagda,
• triple goddess of poetry, healing, and smithcraft,
• wife of Bres mac Elatha in the Irish mythological tradition —
• is in some respects the most directly comparable figure to Isolde in “Celtic” feminine divine tradition,
• for Brigid embodies precisely the triad of powers that the romance tradition assigns to Isolde:
• the art of healing (Isolde heals Tristan's wound; Brigid is goddess of healing),
• the art of poetry and song (Isolde in several versions is a musician of supernatural gift;
• Brigid is the patroness of bardic poetry),
• and an association with the transformative arts of fire and craft
• (the love-potion’s preparation resonates with smithcraft’s transmutation of raw materials)
• Brigid’s keening over the body of her son Rúadán
• — the first caoine heard in Ireland,
• mythological origin of ritual lamentation itself —
• parallels Isolde’s mourning over Tristan’s body,
• which in Thomas of Britain’s version becomes a formal lament
• functions as both elegy and love-declaration
• Both women mourn at the intersection of love and death,
• and both mourn a man who died
• in consequence of the world’s violence
• breaking in upon a love that tried to hold it at bay
2. Breothigernd/Findtigernd/(Dub Lacha) (and Mongán)
• The multiple-named beloved of Mongán mac Fiachna
• — appearing as Breothigernd (“Flame-queen”),
• Findtigernd (“Fair-sovereign”),
• and Dub Lacha (“Dark Flame”) —
• is a figure of extraordinary interest from the perspective of Isolde
• precisely because the multiplication of her names
• enacts a condition that Isolde’s story also illustrates:
• the beloved who cannot be confined to a single identity,
• who exceeds any single name or description
• In the tale of Scél Mongáin,
• Dub Lacha is wagered and lost to Brandubh of Leinster,
• and Mongán must recover her through shape-shifting and poetic cunning
• — a pattern closely parallel to Tristan’s recovery of Isolde
• through disguise and ruse
• From the feminine perspective,
• this figure is a woman who passes from hand to hand
• not through her own choice
• but through the political machinations of men,
• yet who retains throughout an identity
• and a dignity that the narrative consistently honours
• Isolde’s situation
• — transferred from Ireland to Cornwall in a political marriage,
• claimed by Tristan through the love-potion,
• — enacts a similar structural predicament of the woman
• whose identity is contested between competing masculine claims
3. Gráinne/Grannia (and Diarmuid/(Diarmaid Ua Duibhne)/(Diarmid O’Dyna)/(Diarmuid of the Love Spot))
• Gráinne
• — daughter of the High King Cormac mac Airt
• and the protagonist of the Irish tragic romance most directly comparable to the Tristan legend —
• is, from the female perspective,
• a far more active and autonomous figure than Isolde:
• where Isolde’s love is compelled by the potion
• (the externally imposed love, for which she bears no moral responsibility),
• Gráinne’s love for Diarmuid is entirely self-generated,
• arising from her own desire at the betrothal feast
• where she is supposed to accept Fionn mac Cumhaill as her husband
• She rejects the world’s provision for her
• — the politically advantageous marriage to the greatest hero of Ireland —
• and chooses instead the young man whose beauty
• and supernatural love-spot (the ball seirce) she finds irresistible
• Her placing of the Fianna under a geasa to compel Diarmuid’s flight with her
• is an act of astonishing female agency:
• she does not merely desire but acts upon her desire in defiance of every social prohibition
• Parallel with Isolde is both close and illuminating
• Both women are on the point of being married to an older man of great power
• when they fall irresistibly in love with a younger champion;
• both use or are subject to a supernatural mechanism that compels or enables the love;
• both flee with their beloved through a landscape of exile that is simultaneously prison and paradise;
• and both are ultimately betrayed by the jealousy of the man they were supposed to marry,
• which engineers the beloved’s death
• Gráinne’s final, contested capitulation to Fionn after Diarmuid’s death
• — which she is variously represented as accepting from grief, pragmatism, or enchantment —
• is one of the most ambiguous and debated episodes in Irish literature,
• and it has no direct parallel in the Isolde tradition,
• where the heroine’s death is unambiguous and untainted by compromise
4. Sadb (and Niall)
• Sadb
• — a name possibly deriving from Old Irish sab (sweetness, goodness) —
• appears in different contexts in the Irish mythological tradition:
• most famously as the deer-woman beloved of Fionn mac Cumhaill,
• whose brief human existence produces the poet-hero Oisín
• before she is reclaimed by the Otherworld enchanter who has claimed her
• In her pairing with Niall
• (a figure of varying identity in the tradition),
• Sadb represents the characteristic pattern of the Irish supernatural woman
• who enters the mortal world for love and is ultimately unable to remain there
• — a figure whose beauty and provenance mark her as belonging to a realm beyond the human,
• and whose love for a mortal man is therefore structurally tragic:
• the asymmetry of mortal and immortal ensures that the love, however intense,
• cannot be sustained within the conditions of ordinary life
• Isolde’s connexion with Irish supernatural tradition
• — her healing arts,
• her mother”s potion-craft,
• the persistent association of Ireland in the legend
• with an Otherworld of beauty and danger —
• places her in the same mythological category as Sadb:
• the woman who brings the Otherworld’s gifts into the mortal world
• and whose presence is as transformative as it is ultimately destructive
5. Deirdre/Derdriu (and Naoise/Naisii/Noisiu/Noise)
• Deirdre of the Sorrows
• — Derdriu in the oldest versions of the tale,
• a name whose etymology has been variously connected to Old Irish derc (oak) or derdretar
• (“she who rages”, from a root related to agitation and weeping) —
• is the Irish figure whose tragic destiny most closely parallels Isolde’s
• in its essential structure and emotional register
• Both women are marked from birth or early life for a great love that will destroy kingdoms:
• Deirdre is prophesied to bring ruin upon Ulster,
• and her very beauty is understood from the beginning as a force too powerful
• for the world to accommodate without violence
• Like Isolde,
• she is intended for an older king (Conchobar mac Nessa)
• but claims for herself the young champion Naoise;
• like Isolde,
• she lives in exile with her beloved in a landscape of dangerous beauty
• (the wilderness of Alba, Scotland);
• and like Isolde,
• she is ultimately returned to the king who claims her through treachery rather than love,
• and is destroyed by the gap between the world’s provisions and the absolute demands of her own love
• Deirdre is, moreover,
• a figure of active agency in a way
• that earlier traditions of Isolde sometimes obscure:
• she shames Naoise into flight
• (“the shame-sod” technique,
• placing her hand on his cheek and threatening his honour before his companions),
• she sustains and enlivens the exile through her beauty and her love,
• and at Naoise’s death she enacts the ultimate act of feminine self-sovereignty,
• choosing her own death rather than submission to the conqueror
• Her great lament over Naoise’s body
• — preserved in the Old Irish poem Nī cuala ferba bíathar (“I have heard no words of comfort”) —
• is one of the supreme lyric achievements of the early Irish literary tradition
• and stands in direct structural parallel to Isolde’s death-lament in Thomas of Britain
6. Emer (and (Cú C(h)ulainn)/Cuchulainn)
• Emer
• — the wife of Cú Chulainn,
• possessor of the six gifts
• (beauty,
• chastity,
• sweet speech,
• needlework,
• wisdom,
• and chastity),
• and one of the great heroic women of the Ulster Cycle —
• represents the archetype of the faithful and ultimately forsaken wife,
• and her comparison with Isolde illuminates Isolde’s ambiguous position within the legend:
• she is simultaneously the transgressive beloved
• (the role Emer’s opposite,
• Fand, plays in the Ulster Cycle) and,
• at the deepest level of the tradition,
• the true and legitimate counterpart of her hero
• In the Tristan legend’s symbolic economy,
• Isolde of Ireland occupies a position analogous to both Emer
• (the true love, the one whose connexion to the hero is essential and irreplaceable)
• and Fand (the supernatural, Otherworld woman whose love exceeds the bonds of ordinary social obligation)
• Emer’s great lament over Cú Chulainn’s body at the ford of Baile’s Strand
• — in which she names his qualities one by one before stretching herself upon him and dying —
• is the Ulster Cycle’s equivalent of Isolde’s death beside Tristan:
• both are formal valedictions
• that transform mourning into the highest expression of love
7. Fand (and (Cú C(h)ulainn)/Cuchulainn)
• Fand
• — “Pearl of Beauty”,
• wife of Manannán mac Lir
• and the most luminous of the women of the sídhe —
• represents, from the female perspective of the Isolde comparison,
• the supernatural beloved
• who must relinquish her mortal lover
• to the claims of the ordinary world
• In Serglige Con Culainn,
• Fand falls in love with Cú Chulainn
• during his otherworldly sojourn
• and enters into a passionate love-relationship with him;
• but when Emer appears and confronts them,
• Fand demonstrates a generosity and self-knowledge
• that the tale explicitly honours:
• she recognises that Emer’s love is the more fully human,
• the more deserving of Cú Chulainn’s loyalty,
• and she releases him
• Her lament at this relinquishment
• — the great poem in which she acknowledges
• that she will go away “like a spark from a fire” —
• is one of the most moving utterances of the tradition
• Fand’s predicament is not Isolde’s,
• for Isolde is not voluntarily surrendered
• and does not relinquish Tristan to his Breton wife;
• but the structure of the supernatural woman
• who loves a mortal man across a divide
• that the social world demands she respect is directly parallel,
• and Fand’s lament enriches our reading of Isolde’s grief
• through the contrast it offers
8. Bláthnat (and (Cú C(h)ulainn)/Cuchulainn)
• Bláthnat
• — “Little Flower” —
• is the wife of Cú Roí mac Dáire
• who betrays her husband for love of Cú Chulainn,
• directing the hero to the secret of Cú Roí’s fortress
• and his external soul
• Her act of betrayal is not arbitrary
• but is born of love:
• she is a woman trapped in a marriage
• to a king of cosmic but inhuman power,
• whose love for Cú Chulainn represents her claim
• to a life governed by human feeling rather than supernatural compulsion
• In this she is structurally parallel to Isolde,
• who is also a woman given in political marriage
• to a king she does not love and who refuses to allow that marriage
• to extinguish her authentic feeling
• But Bláthnat’s fate is starker than Isolde’s:
• she is not carried off and mourned
• but is physically seised and destroyed by Cú Roí's poet Fer Chertne,
• who grasps her in his arms and leaps from a cliff,
• making of her death a poetic act of vengeance and memorial
• The poet who kills the beloved of his dead master
• enacts a grim version of the role of the bard who,
• in the Tristan legend, tells and retells the lovers’ story:
• in both cases poetry and love are fatally intertwined
9. Étaín/Édaín/Edain/Éadaoin/Etaoin/Aideen/Aedín/Adaon (and Mider/Mid(h)ir)
• Étaín
• — whose name appears in a remarkable range of forms
• across the manuscript tradition
• (Édaín,
• Etaín,
• Aideen,
• Aedín,
• Adaon)
• and whose tale Tochmarc Étaíne
• is one of the oldest
• and mythologically richest texts of the Irish tradition —
• is the figure whose parallel with Isolde
• is perhaps the most precise
• and the most mythologically deep of all the Irish comparisons
• Like Isolde,
• Étaín is a woman of surpassing beauty
• who is in the possession of a mortal king (Eochaid Airem)
• whilst being claimed by a divine or quasi-divine lover (Midir of the Otherworld);
• like Isolde,
• she is sought through elaborate ruses and disguises by the one who truly loves her;
• and like Isolde, her identity and freedom are perpetually contested
• between the claims of legitimate marriage and the claims of a transcendent love
• What is unique to Étaín’s predicament,
• and what makes her the most mythologically profound of Isolde’s Irish parallels,
• is the element of reincarnation and amnesia:
• she has been
• transformed,
• scattered,
• reborn,
• and has grown up without any memory
• of her divine identity
• or her love for Midir
• She does not know who she is or what she has lost
• This condition of beautiful ignorance
• — of living within the limitations of the mortal world
• without access to the transcendent knowledge
• that would make those limitations unbearable —
• is the opposite of Isolde’s condition,and illuminates Isolde’s tragedy by contrast:
• Isolde knows, always and with terrible clarity,
• exactly what she loves and exactly what she has lost,
• and this knowledge is both her glory and her torment
10. Étaín (and Ailill)
• The episode of Étaín and Ailill Anglonnach
• — in which the king’s brother wastes away in a love-sickness for Étaín that he cannot satisfy,
• arranges an assignation that he cannot keep (falling into a supernatural sleep each time),
• and is replaced in the dark by Midir in Ailill’s form —
• places Étaín in the role of the compassionate woman
• who is willing to give her body in mercy
• even before the true claimant (Midir) appears
• Her discernment
• — recognising that the man who comes to her
• in the dark is not Ailill but someone supernatural —
• and her refusal to surrender to the simulacrum
• demonstrates her fidelity not to any particular man
• but to an internal standard of authentic love
• This resonates with Isolde’s fidelity to Tristan across the years of separation:
• she too maintains the interior truth of her love
• against the external counterfeit of her marriage to Mark
11. Tethna (and Lom Laine)
• Tethna
• — whose name is possibly related to Old Irish teth (hot, ardent, burning)
• and whose association with the territory of Éile in Munster
• situates her within the tradition of the Sovereignty Goddess identified with a specific landscape —
• is one of the more obscure feminine tragic figures in the Irish tradition
• Her pairing with Lom Laine ("bare/fierce lance")
• participates in the structural pattern of the Territory-Goddess
• whose love for a mortal champion constitutes a tragic union of divine and human
• that the world cannot sustain
• From Isolde’s perspective,
• Tethna represents the specifically Irish version
• of the Sovereignty-Goddess figure at her most geographically particular:
• a woman whose identity is inseparable from the land she embodies,
• and whose love for a human man is therefore an expression
• of the land’s own longing for the hero who will champion it
• Isolde,
• as an Irish princess carrying the sovereignty of Ireland’s most ancient traditions within her,
• participates in this mythological identity even in the continental romance forms
12. Deirbriu (“Maiden-breast”, byname for Findabair Bláthnat) (and Oengus Mac ind Óc)
• Deirbriu
• — the byname “Maiden-breast”,
• attached in some traditions to Findabair Bláthnat (“Fair Eyebrow, Little Flower”) —
• is the beloved of Óengus Mac ind Óc, the Irish god of love and youth, son of the Dagda and Boann
• Findabair in her primary role (as daughter of Ailill and Medb in the Táin Bó Froích)
• is a woman promised as a prise to one hero after another,
• her body employed by her parents as a political and military currency
• that is entirely independent of her own wishes
• — a condition of radical objectification that resonates powerfully
• with Isolde’s situation as a woman given in marriage
• to Mark as a political arrangement and claimed by Tristan through supernatural compulsion
• Association of this figure with the byname “Maiden-breast”
• — an epithet of tender, vulnerable, specifically bodily beauty —
• and with the love of the God of Beauty himself
• places her in the mythological register of the woman whose beauty
• is so absolute that it draws the divine itself into tragic engagement with the mortal world
13. Eile (and Erc)
• Eile
• — the Territorial Goddess identified with the plain of Eliogarty in Munster —
• represents, as noted in the corresponding entry in the Tristan survey, the Sovereignty-Goddess at her most geographically specific
• From Isolde’s perspective,
• the comparison with Eile illuminates the aspect of the heroine’s identity
• that is most often overlooked by the romance tradition’s focus on her personal beauty and the love-potion:
• she is not merely a beautiful woman
• but a sovereign feminine power with deep roots in a specific landscape
• Her Irish provenance
• — her origin in a land understood by the Welsh and Cornish traditions
• as the Otherworld in its most immediate geographical form,
• the island to the west that is the source of all healing and all danger —
• gives her an identity that transcends the personal and participates in the impersonal,
• cosmic quality of the Land-Goddess tradition
• Eile,
• as a name that is also a place,
• embodies this fusion of the personal and the territorial in its purest form
14. Olwen (and Culhwch)
• Olwen
• — “She of the White Track”,
• daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr
• in the earliest Arthurian tale Culhwch ac Olwen —is a figure of solar and spring symbolism
• whose comparison with Isolde operates principally
• at the level of the luminous feminine ideal
• White flowers spring up wherever Olwen treads;
• her beauty is explicitly superlative and cosmically charged;
• and her father, the Chief of Giants,
• imposes upon her suitor a series of near-impossible tasks
• that function as a trial of worthiness for the hand of one whose beauty exceeds the merely human
• Isolde,
• similarly, is a woman whose possession requires extraordinary courage and cunning
• — Tristan must
• slay the Morholt,
• brave the Irish court,
• survive poisoned wounds,
• and maintain his love against
• the king’s surveillance and the barons’ malice
• Both Olwen and Isolde
• are women of such supreme feminine beauty that they become,
• in effect, tests of the hero’s worthiness:
• whether he can sustain the love of one who is,
• in some sense, too radiant for the ordinary world
15. Blodeued (and Gronw)
• Blodeued
• — “Flower-face”,
• created from oak, broom, and meadowsweet
• by magicians Gwydion and Math
• and given as a wife to Lleu Llaw Gyffes —
• is, from the female perspective,
• perhaps the most radical and disturbing
• of all the Welsh parallels to Isolde
• Like Isolde of the White Hands,
• she is a woman given in marriage to a man she has not chosen;
• unlike Isolde of the White Hands,
• she acts upon her authentic desire
• by taking a lover (Gronw Pebr)
• and plotting her husband’s death
• Her transformation at the end of the tale into an owl
• — condemned to be shunned by all other birds,
• to be a creature of darkness and ill-omen —
• is the Welsh tradition’s judgement
• upon the woman who refuses the marriage arranged for her
• and claims the right to love as she chooses
• This judgement is itself a kind of tragic testimony:
• the woman who loves authentically and transgressively
• is destroyed not by death but by metamorphosis
• into the form of that which the daylight world fears and despises
• Blodeued’s owl-fate resonates, in an inverted register,
• with Isolde's fate:
• both women are defined by the tension
• between their authentic love
• and social order that demands their submission
• to a husband not of their choosing
16. Rhiannon/Rīgantonā/(Rīgantona/Riga(n)tona) (and Gwawl fab Clud)
• Rhiannon
• — the Great Queen,
• Welsh Sovereignty Goddess of the First Branch of the Mabinogi,
• whose name derives from the Brittonic Rīgantonā
• whose name is cognate with the Irish Morrigan Mor + Rigan as “Great Queen”
• and who arrives in the world of men on a horse that cannot be overtaken —
• is the archetypal Welsh feminine of
• power,
• dignity,
• and patient endurance
• Her comparison with Isolde operates at multiple levels
• Like Isolde,
• she is a woman intended by social arrangement for one man (Gwawl fab Clud)
• who chooses instead the man she truly desires (Pwyll, lord of Dyfed)
• and exercises her choice with a resourcefulness and intelligence that the narrative fully endorses
• Like Isolde,
• she is subsequently subjected to a series of humiliations and false accusations
• (framed for the murder of her own infant son,
• compelled to carry guests to the court on her back as a horse)
• that test her endurance to its utmost limit
• — and she endures with a dignity that never becomes mere passivity
• Rhiannon’s endurance under unjust suffering
• is the Welsh analogue of Isolde’s sustained fidelity
• under Mark’s surveillance and the barons’ calumnies
17. Crei(r)ddylad/Creurdilad/Creudylad/Kreiddylat (and Gwyn(n)(was) ap Nudd)
• Creiddylad
• — the woman disputed between Gwyn ap Nudd,
• lord of the Welsh Otherworld,
• and Gwythyr fab Greidawl,
• the solar champion,
• who must be fought over every May Day until Doomsday —
• is the most purely mythological of all the Welsh feminine tragic figures,
• for she is not a character with psychological interiority
• but a cosmic principle:
• Sovereignty of the Year,
• May Queen whose possession determines whether summer or winter,
• life or death,
• shall rule the land
• She is carried off,
• never surrendered,
• never consulted;
• she is the perpetual object of the eternal contest
• From Isolde’s perspective,
• Creiddylad’s situation represents
• the extreme case of the condition
• all the tragic beloveds share to some degree:
• the woman whose identity is constituted by being contested,
• who exists in the narrative primarily as the prise
• for which men destroy themselves and each other
• What distinguishes Isolde from Creiddylad
• — and what makes the romance tradition’s treatment of Isolde
• a genuine advance upon the mythological archetype —
• is that Isolde is never merely a prise:
• she thinks,
• speaks,
• heals,
• mourns,
• and chooses
5. Biblical Prototype
1. Miryam Migdalah (and Yeshua — her sister’s son)
• Miryam of Magdala
• — Mary Magdalene in the Latin tradition —
• occupies within certain strands of heterodox Christian and Gnostic tradition
• the position of the woman of supreme spiritual and personal intimacy with the divine teacher,
• the koinōnos (companion, partner) of the Gospel of Philip,
• the figure whom that text describes as loved by the teacher more than the other disciples
• In the Gnostic Christian tradition,
• she is the Sophia-figure,
• the embodiment of divine wisdom
• (as her name and office in some traditions make explicit),
• feminine counterpart of divine masculine principle
• Identification of her as Yeshua’s mother’s sister (or mother’s sister’s daughter)
• — making the relationship one of close but not quite first-degree kinship —
• introduces the dimension of quasi-incestuous or tabooed love
• that certain scholars have detected in the Tristan legend
• (the nephew-uncle relation between Tristan and Mark,
• and the parental quality of Mark’s feeling toward the orphaned Tristan)
• From Isolde’s perspective,
• comparison with Miryam Migdalah
• illuminates the aspect of Isolde’s role
• as the woman of
• wisdom,
• healing,
• and sacred feminine knowledge:
• the woman who possesses the gnosis
• that social order cannot accommodate,
• and whose relationship with the hero
• therefore necessarily exceeds what official structures are able to sanction
6. Arthurian and Courtly Counterparts
1. Arthur’s (half-)sister (and Arthur)
• Introduction to Arthur’s (half-)sister (and Arthur)
• Arthur’s (half-)sister
• — who appears under the names
• Anna (as full sister),
• Belisent,
• Sangive,
• Siefe,
• Gwyar (as full sister),
• and most famously Margawse/Morgawse/Morgause/Morgose/(M)orc(h)ad(e)s)
• in various branches of Arthurian tradition —
• is a figure of extraordinary complexity,
• for she bears simultaneously the burden
• of being the king’s sister (a position of honour and power)
• and the instrument of the kingdom’s doom
• (the mother of Mordred, whose incestuous conception is the original sin of the Arthurian world)
• Each of the names she bears carries its own tradition and its own nuance
• Anna
• Anna is the name given to Arthur’s full sister
• in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c AD 1138),
• where she is married to King Lot of Lothian and is the mother of Gawain
• This Anna is a figure of dynastic rather than erotic significance,
• and her comparison with Isolde operates at the level of the woman
• whose identity is entirely constituted by her relationships to the men around her
• — daughter, wife, mother —
• without independent narrative development
• Belisent
• Belisent appears in some later English versions of the Arthurian legend
• as a gentler, more passive figure, whose name
• (possibly connected to Old French bel, beautiful, and sent, feeling or sense)
• carries an emotional and aesthetic quality
• She is a woman of feeling,
• whose position in the legend
• is determined by her kinship to greatness rather than by any act of her own
• Sangive
• Sangive (also Sangieve or Sangive) appears in some German and Dutch versions of the Arthurian legend
• The name may be related to Latin sanguis (blood), giving the figure a name
• that encodes, with grim economy, her role as the woman through whose blood
• (specifically, incestuous blood of her union with Arthur)
• the doom of Camelot enters the world
• Siefe
• Siefe is a name found in some of the more peripheral branches of the tradition
• Its etymology is uncertain, though it may represent a corruption or adaptation of an Old French or Germanic original
• The figure bearing this name participates in the general pattern of Arthur’s half-sister
• as the hidden origin of the kingdom’s destruction
• Gwyar
• Gwyar (Welsh: possibly “gore, blood, humour”)
• is the Welsh name for Arthur’s full sister
• who appears in the earliest Welsh Arthurian materials
• as the mother of Gwalchmei (Gawain) and Medrawd (Mordred)
• Her Welsh name, with its resonance of blood and vital fluid,
• is the most ancient and mythologically charged of the sister’s designations,
• and it places her within a tradition of women
• whose identity is constituted by what flows from them
• — children, blood, destiny —
• rather than by anything they choose or do
• Margawse/Morgawse/Morgause/Morgose/(M)orc(h)ad(e)s)
• Morgause
• — the form popularised by Malory and subsequently employed in the vast majority of modern retellings —
• is the most fully developed version of the character and the one whose comparison with Isolde is most productive
• Where the other names represent the (half-)sister primarily as a dynastic or mythological function,
• Morgause in Vulgate Cycle and in Malory is a woman of considerable erotic agency:
• she seduces (or is seduced by) Arthur in an episode of mutual unknowing,
• but her subsequent career as
       — a queen,
       — mother of the Orkney knights,
       — and eventual lover of Lamorak makes her a figure of active feminine power
• Her comparison with Isolde illuminates the darker possibilities of the Isolde archetype:
• the woman whose love, whether for a half-brother or for a knight,
• transgresses the boundaries of what the chivalric order can sustain,
• and who is ultimately destroyed (Morgause is killed by her own son Gaheris,
• who discovers her in bed with Lamorak)
• by the violence her transgressions generate
2. Guinevere (and Lancelot)
• Guinevere
• — Welsh Gwenhwyfar
• (“White Phantom”
• or “White Shadow”,
• a name of unmistakeable Otherworld resonance),
• queen of Arthur and beloved of Lancelot —
• is Isolde’s closest parallel within the Arthurian tradition itself,
• and the two characters are clearly aware of each other at the compositional level,
• the authors of Tristan en Prose
• explicitly placing their heroine in dialogue (literal and structural) with the Arthurian queen
• Both women are queens given in political marriage to kings they respect
• but cannot love with the absolute love they find elsewhere;
• both conduct adulterous relationships with the supreme knight of their husband’s court;
• and both are, in the moral economy of the romances, simultaneously heroines and sinners
• — women whose love is both the most beautiful thing in their world
• and the cause of that world’s destruction
• The crucial difference between the two figures is one of moral register and narrative tone
• Guinevere’s love for Lancelot is,
• in the Arthurian tradition’s dominant presentation,
• a free choice for which she bears full moral responsibility;
• Isolde’s love for Tristan is the consequence of a potion,
• externally caused, and therefore pitiable rather than culpable
• This difference determines the entire emotional texture of the two narratives:
• the Lancelot–Guinevere story tends towards tragic guilt
• and penitential resolution (Guinevere ends in a convent; Lancelot dies in holy orders),
• whilst the Tristan–Isolde story tends toward tragic pathos
• and the transfiguration of love by death
• Guinevere repents;
• Isolde does not,
• because she has nothing to repent
• — the love was given, not chosen
3. Orgeluse (and Anfortas)
• Orgeluse de Logres
• — the proud duchess of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival
• whose name encodes her defining quality (Old French orgueil, pride, disdain) —
• is one of the most complex and psychologically acute of the mediaeval romance heroines,
• and her comparison with Isolde illuminates the aspect of the heroine’s character
• that the tradition sometimes softens but never entirely suppresses:
• the fierce, disdainful, testing quality of the woman
• who has been wounded by love and refuses to be vulnerable again
• Orgeluse was the cause of Anfortas’ catastrophic wound
• (he rode out in her service in contradiction of his Grail duty)
• and has since then conducted a campaign of systematic destruction
• against any knight who pursues her,
• sending them to their deaths in quest of impossible tasks
• She is, in psychological terms,
• a woman who has transformed her own wound into a weapon,
• whose disdain is grief armoured against further injury
• Her eventual surrender to Gawain
• — the knight whose patient, good-humoured persistence and genuine valour
• finally unlock her wounded heart —
• is one of Wolfram’s great artistic achievements
• Comparison with Isolde:
• both women are associated with wound-causing and wound-healing
• as the twin poles of their feminine power;
• both are figures who test the hero’s worthiness
• through a series of trials that inflict real suffering;
• and both ultimately reveal,
• beneath the surface of sovereignty and resistance,
• a capacity for love of absolute intensity
4. Fenice (and Cligès)
• Fenice
• — whose name (“Phoenix”) announces her thematic role
• as a woman who will die and be reborn in the service of authentic love —
• is the heroine of Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès (c AD 1176),
• a romance constructed explicitly as a refutation of the Isolde legend’s moral premises
• Fenice protests,
• in one of the romance’s most celebrated passages,
• against the conduct of Isolde,
• who gave her body to one man and her heart to another
• — a division that Fenice refuses to accept for herself
• Her solution is characteristically French, rational, and somewhat disturbing in its thoroughness:
• she employs a love-potion to render her husband Alis incapable of consummating their marriage,
• feigns death,
• is entombed,
• and lives in a secret garden with Cligès in a state of perfect, private love
• Comparison with Isolde is thus doubly ironic:
• Fenice is designed as Isolde’s moral superior,
• the woman who will not surrender the sovereignty of her own body
• in the way that Isolde was forced to do by the political marriage to Mark
• Yet the means by which she achieves this superiority
• — magic, deception, a faked death, a secret existence —
• are no less transgressive than Isolde’s adulterous love,
• and arguably more calculated
• The Phoenix-name carries its own implicit critique:
• Fenice’s rebirth is a private, chosen transformation;
• Isolde’s death is a public, sacrificial one
• Both women are defined
• by their refusal to accept the division of body and soul
• that social order imposes upon women in forced marriages
5. Bla(u)nc(h)efl(o)(u)r/Blanchiflor/Blanchefleur/Blantsefluor/Blans(c)heflur/Blancefloer/Blankiflúr/Blan(t)zeflor(e)(s)/Blankeflos/Biancifiore/Biancofiore/Rosana/Πλατζηαφλόρα/(Platzia Phlore)/Blancaflor/Biancef(l)ora/Bianczeforze
        (and Flori(o)(s)/Floire/Flo(r)(i)(e)(s)/Floyris/Floriz/Flóres/Fiorio/Aulimento/Φλώριος/Floria)
• Blanchefleur (“White Flower”)
• — the Christian slave-girl beloved of the Saracen prince Floris
• in the widely disseminated mediaeval romance Floire et Blancheflor and its many European derivatives —is, from the female perspective, a figure of remarkable passive beauty and luminous vulnerability
• Her very name encodes her identity as the “white flower” of feminine grace,
• and the complementarity of her name with Floris’ (“flower” and “white flower”)
• establishes from the beginning a love of absolute, pre-social naturalness:
• two children named for the same flower,
• growing up together,
• inseparable by any logic but the world’s violence
• Her comparison with Isolde operates primarily at the level of the innocent beloved
• — the woman whose beauty draws the hero across the world in quest of her,
• who is sequestered in the Tower of Maidens like Isolde in Mark’s court,
• and whose discovery with her lover in a compromising position
• precipitates a crisis of judgement that is ultimately resolved in favour of love
• Both Blanchefleur and Isolde are women held against their authentic love by a powerful man’s authority;
• both are recovered by the beloved’s extraordinary courage and cunning;
• and in both cases the discovery of the lovers together
• becomes an occasion for the world to choose between
• justice (the letter of the law)
• and mercy (the spirit of love)
• The difference is in resolution:
• Blanchefleur and Floris are spared and married;
• Tristan and Isolde are not
7. Non-Western and Later Echoes
1. Golshah/Golshāh/Golsah/Golšãh/G(h)ulshah/Gülşah/Gülþah'ta (and Varghe/Varqe(h)/Varqa/Varka/Warqa)
• Golshah (“Rose-sovereign” or “Flower-king”,
• a name of Persian origin in which gol, “rose, flower”,
• is combined with shah, “king, sovereign”)
• is the beloved of Warqa in the Persian and Arabic romantic narrative tradition of Varqa and Golshah
• Her name,
• compounding the floral beauty of the beloved with the royal authority of the sovereign,
• makes her simultaneously a woman of personal loveliness and a figure of legitimate power
• — a combination directly parallel to Isolde’s position as both the most beautiful woman in the legend
• and a princess of Ireland
• Golshah, like Isolde,
• is a woman who loves from within a tradition that understands true love
• (the ‘udhrī mode) as inevitably fatal:
• to love in this tradition
• is to enter a relationship with death from the beginning,
• to accept that the love’s absolute quality
• is inseparable from its destructive force
• Her reunion with Warqa after death and separation
• — in the Islamic version of the tale,
• offers a resolution that the Tristan legend withholds in this world
• but implies in the famous entwining of the vine and honeysuckle
• (or briar and yew) that grows from the lovers’ graves
2. (')Azra/Ozra/‘Adhrā and (Vameq/Wāmiq)
• ‘Adhrā
• — “the Chaste One”, “the Virgin”,
• from the Arabic root related to chastity and to the tribal name ‘Udhrah —
• is the beloved of Wāmiq in one of the oldest attested Persian and Arabic love-story traditions
• Her name
• is simultaneously her identity
• and her tragic condition:
• she is the Chaste One,
• and her chastity is not merely a personal attribute
• but a cosmic principle that makes the love
• for which Wāmiq will die
• irresolvable in the terms of ordinary life
• Love of Wāmiq for ‘Adhrā cannot be consummated
• because she is the Chaste One;
• the very quality that makes her who she is
• is the quality that makes the love tragic
• This paradox
• — the beloved whose defining attribute is the impossibility of her possession —
• resonates directly with the Isolde legend’s central dynamic:
• Isolde, as Mark’s queen,
• is by definition unavailable to Tristan,
• and it is precisely this unavailability
• — this gap between the absolute love and social structure that forbids it —
• that gives the legend its tragic power
• ‘Adhrā's name is the conceptual archetype of Isolde’s impossible position
3. Vis (and Ramin/Rāmin/Rāmīn)
• Vis
• — the heroine of Gurgānī’s Vis and Rāmin (c AD 1054),
• the Persian romantic epic whose structural parallels with the Tristan legend
• are more precise than those of any other Eastern text —
• is, from the female perspective,
• the most complete and fully realised of all Isolde’s comparative figures
• Like Isolde,
• she is a woman of exceptional beauty
• who is betrothed and married to an older king (Mōbad) through political arrangement;like Isolde, she is the victim of a supernatural love-magic prepared by a quasi-maternal figure (the wet-nurse Dāya)
• that compels her love for the king’s younger kinsman (Rāmin);
• and like Isolde, she maintains that love through years
• of separation, surveillance, and social condemnation
• with a fidelity that the narrative fully endorses
• The crucial difference between Vis and Isolde is in the resolution:
• Vis and Rāmin triumph,
• for Mōbad is killed by a boar
• (in a remarkably precise parallel to the boar-deaths
• of Adonis and, structurally,
• of the old year-king figure in “Celtic” myth),
• and the lovers are reunited to rule together
• This triumphant resolution
• — absent from the Western Tristan tradition in its primary forms —
• suggests that the Parthian original of the story,
• which Gurgānī is adapting,
• may have preserved a version of the tragic-lover myth
• in which the old king is ritually removed and the young lovers inherit his sovereignty:
• the myth of sacred seasonal succession in its positive, life-affirming form,
• which the Western tradition, influenced by Christian moral theology and its suspicion of carnal love,
• transformed into the double-death of the lovers
4. Juliet Capulet (and Romeo Montague)
• Juliet Capulet
• — Shakespeare’s thirteen-year-old heroine,
• the youngest and in some respects the most radically sympathetic
• of all the tragic beloveds in the Western literary tradition —
• represents the final crystallisation of the archetype
• that Isolde inhabits
• at its most courtly and elaborated
• Where Isolde
• is a woman of full maturity,
• sovereign power,
• healing knowledge,
• and a complex emotional history when the legend begins,
• Juliet is barely at the threshold of womanhood:
• her youth is both her most poignant quality
• and the source of her particular kind of courage,
• for she acts without the cautionary experience
• Juliet’s comparison with Isolde
• illuminates both the universality
• and the specific cultural coding of the tragic-beloved archetype
• Both women are daughters
• being married off for political or social reasons
• against the logic of their own hearts;
• both love instantly and absolutely,
• without the gradual accumulation of feelingthat the social world would consider prudent;
• both are destroyed by a tragic misunderstanding
• (the message that does not arrive; the false news of death)
• that is simultaneously the cruelest accident of circumstance
• and the structural logic of a love too large for the world to contain without destruction
• Juliet’s suicide
• — the dagger driven home with a resolution
• that fourteen years of ordinary life would not have had time to form —
• is the last and most radical expression of the principle
• that Isolde’s death beside Tristan embodies:
• the refusal to survive the beloved,
• the choice of love’s absoluteness over life’s continuation
• Shakespeare’s treatment of Juliet, moreover,
• grants the heroine a poetic language and an intellectual authority
• that far exceed the social role assigned to her:
• her balcony speeches,
• her soliloquies in the tomb,
• her immediate and practical intelligence in crisis
• (it is Juliet who proposes the friar's plan, Juliet who drinks the potion without wavering)
• all constitute her as the tragedy’s moral centre
• In this she parallels Isolde as Gottfried renders her:
• a woman whose interior life and intelligence
• are the legend’s deepest subject,
• even when the external action appears to be about the man
3. Beginnings
1. Isolde’s Parentage
1. Queen Isolde/Iseult
2. King Anguish or King Gurman/Gurmun/Gormund
2. Isolde meets Tristan
1. Isolde cures Tristan
2. Tristan falls in love with Isolde
3. Isolde is courted by Palomides/Palamedes
4. Isolde sponsors Tristan in Tournament against Palamedes/Palomides — Tristan wins
5. Tristan’s Identity is revealed and he is chased from Ireland
6. Tristan returns to Ireland to fetch Isolde for King Mark of Cornwall
7. Tristan regains favour with Isolde’s Parents
8. Isolde is allowed to depart for Cornwall with Tristan
3. The Love Potion
1. Love potion is prepared and given to Bragwaine/Brangaine/Brangvein/Brengvein
2. Isolde and Tristan mistakenly drink it
4. Tristan kills Sir Breunor — Duke Galeholt/Galahaut and Tristan become Friends
4. Early Ending
1. Morgan le Fay’s Magical Drinking Horn
1. Divergent Endings
2. Isolde marries Mark
3. Isolde consummates Relationship with Tristan
4. Mark learns of Isolde’s Infidelity
5. Isolde and Tristan caught
6. Tristan sentenced to Death — Isolde sent to Leper House
7. Isolde and Tristan rescued and spend time together
8. Mark fetches Isolde
9. Isolde sends Tristan a Message telling him to take care of his Latest Wound
2. Tristan and Isolde of the White Hands
1. Tristan banished to Brittany — Helps Duke Howell/Hoel
2. Tristan marries Isolde of the White Hands — Lancelot denounces Tristan
3. The True Isolde sends a Letter to Guinevere
4. Guinevere comforts Isolde
5. Isolde and Guinevere develop long-lasting relationship
6. Isolde sends a Letter to Tristan — Tristan returns to Cornwall
7. Sir Kehydius/Kahedin(s)/Kærdin falls in love with Isolde — Tristan misunderstands and flees
8. Tristan goes mad — Early Ending to Story
5. Continuation
1. Isolde finds Tristan mad
1. Rumours of Tristan’s Death — Isolde goes Mad
2. Mark stops Isolde’s Suicide
3. Mad Tristan is Found, Recognised, Brought to Mark’s Castle, and nursed by Isolde’s Love
4. Tristan banished from Cornwall for Ten Years — Bragwaine/Brangaine/Brangvein/Brengvein finds Tristan
5. Tristan is injured in a Tournament and disappears again
6. Isolde learns of the Tournament when some of Arthur’s Knights visit Cornwall
7. Sir Darras throws Tristan into Prison — Tristan becomes Ill and is Released
8. Palomides/Palamedes and Tristan repeatedly seek to do Battle
2. Isolde spying on Tristan
1. Tristan becomes a Knight of the Round Table
2. Spies of Isolde and of Mark report on Tristan’s Fame
3. Mark plans to slay Tristan — Arthur brokered a Truce between them
1. Isolde to be given to Mark for half a year — Mark chooses Winter
2. Isolde to be given to Tristan for the other half
• This gives Isolde to Tristan during the season in which the trees are green
• Tristan points out that the yew tree is green all year round — So that Tristan could claim Isolde for both seasons to himself
4. Isolde and Tristan continue their Affair in spite of Mark’s Secret Knowledge of it
6. Endings
1. Tristan’s Imprisonment and Escape
1. Tristan saves Mark — Mark plots to kill Lancelot
2. Tristan is mistaken for Lancelot and becomes Injured — Mark imprisons Tristan
3. Isolde discovers Tristan’s whereabouts
4. Perceval forces Mark to free Tristan — Mark forges Papal Letters
5. Mark throws Tristan back into Prison
6. Tristan sends Letter to Isolde
7. Isolde orchestrates Tristan’s escape
8. Mark is put in Prison until Isolde and Tristan arrive safely in England
9. Lancelot gives Isolde and Tristan refuge in his Castle of Joyous G(u)ard(e)
10. Isolde shows her Sense of Humour
11. Many further Adventures ensue
2. Tristan and Lancelot
1. Tristan attends the Lonazep Tournament
2. Isolde remains in contact with Guinevere
3. Isolde refused to go to Camelot to celebrate Lancelot’s return from Madness
4. Tristan returned to Joyous G(u)ard(e) instead of Questing for the Grail
5. Isolde and Tristan have children
6. Isolde and Tristan die
7. Isolde’s burial site
7. Occurrences of “Isolde” (by various names and descriptions) in Related “Literature”
1. of Britain/England, Thomas. Tristran(s) (Tristan),
            or Le Roman de Tristran(s) et Ysolt/Ysodt/Yseut/Ysod(e)/Isode (The Romance of Tristan and Isolde).
            Twelfth Century AD (after AD 1155, by AD 1170/1175).
2. de France, Marie. Le Lai du Chèvrefueil(le)/Chevrefoil (The Lay of Chevrefoil/Woodbine (the Honeysuckle)). mid/late Twelfth Century AD (AD 1170s).
3. La Folie Trist(r)an d’Oxford, or Oxford Folie Trist(r)an (The Madness of Tristan, or Tristan’s Madness).
            Twelfth Century AD (between AD 1175 and AD 1200).
4. Béroul. Tristan. late Twelfth Century AD.
5. La Folie Tristan de Berne (The Madness of Tristan). late Twelfth Century AD.
6. von Oberge, Eilhart. Tristrant (Tristan). AD 1170/1190.
7. von Zatzikhoven, Ulrich. Lanzelet (Lanzalet in French and Spanish; Lancelot in English). early Thirteenth Century AD (c AD 1200).
8. von Strassburg, Gottfried. Tristan. early Thirteenth Century AD.
9. Brother Robert. Trist(r)ams Saga ok Ísöndar (Saga of Tristan and Isolde). AD 1226.
10. Post-Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal (Quest of the Holy Grail). AD 1230/1240.
11. Post-Vulgate Mort Artu (Death of Arthur). AD 1230/1240.
12. Tristan als Mönch (Tristan as a Monk). early/mid Thirteenth Century AD.
13. de Gat, Luce and Helie de Boron. Tristan en prose (Prose Tristan). AD 1225-1235, second half of Thirteenth Century AD (AD 1276).
14. Trystan ac Es(s)yllt (Tristan and Isolde), otherwise known as Ystori Trystan (Story of Tristan). Twelfth Century AD (AD 800/1126/1200/1550).
15. von Freiberg, Heinrich. Continuation of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan. c AD 1290.
16. Sir Tristrem (Sir Tristan). c AD 1300.
17. La Tavola Ritonda (The Round Table). AD 1325/1350.
18. Saga af Tristram ok Isodd (Saga of Tristan and Isolde). Fourteenth Century AD.
19. Tóruigheacht/Tóraigheacht/Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (The Pursuit of Dairmait/Diarmaid and Gráinne).
             AD 1651 (Sixteenth Century AD), as early as Tenth Century AD.
20. Perceforest (Pierce the Forest). AD 1330/1344.
             (The most complete of the four manuscripts known is “Manuscript C”.)
             (It was written by David Aubert, c AD 1459/1460; for Duc Philippe de Bourgogne le Bon.)
21. Malory, Syr Thomas. (Le) Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur, or, as originally titled, The Whole Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table).
             This ‘Winchester Manuscript’ was published AD 1469/1470/1481/1483.
22. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur). Printed by William Caxton in AD 1485.
23. Tristram/Tristan og Isolde (Tristan and Isolde). Sixteenth Century AD.
24. (I) Due Tristani ((The) Two Tristans). AD 1555.
25. P(r)ovest′ o Tryshchane, or Povest o Trištanu i Ižoti, or Trysčan (Romance of Tristan, or Romance of Tristan and Isolde, or Tristan).
             c AD 1580.
26. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. AD 1592/1593/1596.
27. Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. AD 1602/1606.
28. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. AD 1606/1607/1608.
8. Astrological Signs Associated with Isolde
1. Libra — Venus+ — Air
2. Taurus — Venus- — Earth
3. Cancer — Moon-/+ — Water
9. Geography, Genealogy, and Timeline of Isolde
1. Geography of Isolde
2. Genealogy of Isolde
3. Timeline of Isolde