Isolde

The legend is older than the French poets who made it immortal. The Welsh Triads know her as Essyllt, the wife of March son of Meirchyawn and the love of Drystan son of Tallwch, and one triad tells how Drystan guarded March's pigs while the swineherd carried a message to her, with Arthur himself trying and failing to steal a single pig from under the lovers' noses. Her name may have come to Wales from the old Germanic Ishilde, the ice-battle. And Cornwall keeps an anchor in the real earth: near Castle Dore, the fort long identified with King Mark's court, stands a 6th-century memorial stone carved with the words Drustanus lies here, son of Cunomorus, and Cunomorus, the old documents say, is the name they called King Mark. Somewhere beneath the romance, two people may have loved and died within sight of that stone.

The story proper begins with a wound. The Morholt, champion of Ireland and brother of the Irish queen, comes to Cornwall to claim its tribute in flesh and gold, and young Tristan, nephew of King Mark, kills him in single combat, leaving a splinter of his own blade in the dead man's skull. But the Morholt's sword was poisoned, and Tristan's wound will not heal. He casts himself adrift in a boat and is carried to Ireland, where, calling himself Tantris, a wandering harper, he is nursed back to life by the queen and her daughter, the younger Isolde, both mistresses of the healing art. He returns home, and then returns to Ireland again, for King Mark has sworn to marry only the woman from whose head came two strands of golden hair dropped by a bird at his window. Tristan wins her for his uncle by slaying the dragon that was devouring Ireland, cutting out its tongue, and is found half-dead of its venom by Isolde and her mother. As she nurses him she takes up his sword, sees the notch, fits it to the splinter from her uncle's skull, and knows that Tantris is Tristan, the slayer of her kin. She stands over his bath with the blade raised, and cannot strike.

Peace is made: Isolde will sail to Cornwall as King Mark's bride. Her mother, foreseeing everything, brews a love potion for the wedding night, a wine of such power that those who drink it together must love each other, and she seals it in a golden cup and entrusts it to Brangaine, Isolde's faithful maid. On the voyage, Tristan and Isolde, thirsty, find the cup and drink. In the oldest French version, that of Beroul, the potion burns for three years; in the courtly versions of Thomas and Gottfried von Strassburg it binds them for life; in every version the result is the same. They look at one another, and all is lost, and the legend has never decided whether the potion caused the love or merely excused it.

Isolde goes to her wedding as the most compromised bride in literature, and Brangaine takes her place in the dark of the wedding night so that King Mark receives a virgin. What follows is a queen's life lived at the edge of discovery: the tryst beneath the orchard tree, with the king hidden in its branches and betrayed only by his shadow in the pool; the jealous barons and the malicious dwarf Frocin, who sprinkles flour on the floor to catch a lover's footprints; the blood from Tristan's reopened wound that condemns them both to the fire; Tristan's leap from the chapel cliff; and Isolde, in Beroul's fierce version, handed over to a colony of lepers as her punishment, until Tristan comes out of the woods and carries her away. They live together as outlaws in the forest of Morrois, sleeping with a naked sword between them, and when King Mark finds them so, he reads the blade as proof of their restraint, exchanges rings, and withdraws. When the three years of the potion run out, the lovers part like waking from a dream: Tristan returns Isolde to her husband, and goes into exile.

In Brittany he meets a second Isolde, Isolde of the White Hands, daughter of Duke Hoel, and marries her for her name and her face, and cannot consummate the marriage, because the first Isolde holds his heart entire. Then comes the last wound, a poisoned stroke no doctor in Brittany can cure, and Tristan sends for the one healer who has never failed him. The message is agreed: if Isolde the Fair is on the ship, it will carry white sails; if not, black. She comes at once. But Isolde of the White Hands has heard the secret, and out of jealousy she stands at her husband's bedside and tells him the sails are black. Tristan turns his face to the wall and dies. Isolde lands, runs to the house, finds him dead, and stretches herself beside him, and dies of grief upon his body. King Mark buries them side by side, and from Tristan's grave grows a honeysuckle and from Isolde's a rose, and the two plants wind so closely about each other that those who cut them find them grown together again by morning.

Malory folds the tale into the Arthurian world, making his Tristram a knight of the Round Table and La Beale Isoud the peer of Guinevere in beauty and in sorrow, loved hopelessly by the Saracen knight Palomides. But Malory gives the ending a darker turn: King Mark, mad with jealousy, comes behind Tristram as he sits harping before Isoud and strikes him dead with a sharpened glaive, and La Beale Isoud dies swooning upon his corpse. The modern world knows the lovers chiefly through two transformations: Joseph Bedier's retelling of 1900, which restored the old French tale to life, and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, whose final scene, the Liebestod, lets Isolde sing herself to death in transfigured love over Tristan's body. Through every telling she keeps her double nature: the healer who twice saved Tristan's life and the lover for whom his death was worth more than her life; the queen who deceived a king and the most faithful heart in all medieval romance.