In Our Time - Tristan and Iseult

Episode Date: December 31, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tristan and Iseult, one of the most popular stories of the Middle Ages. From roots in Celtic myth, it passed into written form in Britain a century after the Norman Conquest and almost immediately spread throughout northern Europe. It tells of a Cornish knight and an Irish queen, Tristan and Iseult, who accidentally drink a love potion, at the same time, on the same boat, travelling to Cornwall. She is due to marry Tristan's king, Mark. Tristan and Iseult seemed ideally matched and their love was heroic, but could that excuse their adultery, in the minds of medieval listeners, particularly when the Church was so clear they were wrong?WithLaura Ashe Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, University of OxfordJuliette Wood Associate Lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff UniversityAndMark Chinca Reader in Medieval German Literature at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the story of Tristan and Isolt was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages. From its roots in Celtic myths, it passed into written form in Britain a century after the Norman conquest, and almost immediately spread throughout Northern Europe. It tells of a Cornish knight and an Irish queen, Tristan and Isolt, who accidentally drink a love potion at the same time,

on the same boat, travelling to Cornwall where she is to marry someone else. They have no choice. They consummate their love at sea, and from that point must navigate the physical and moral dangers that follow. In one version he'd slain a dragon. She had saved him from certain death. They were a perfect match. Their love was heroic.

But could that excuse their adultery in the minds of medieval listeners, particularly when the church was so clear they were wrong? With me to discuss Tristan and his old are, Laura Ash, Associate Professor of English at Worcester College University, of Oxford. Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University, and Mark Kinka, reader in medieval German literature at the University of Cambridge. Juliet Wood, we've said the roots of the story are Celtic. Would you tell us where you think the origins of it are? Well, the origins are really in the international story patterns that you

find in Celtic tales. And one of them is Irish, the story of Deirdre, Deirdre of the Sorrows, who is forced to marry a king, an older king, and falls in love with someone else. And she puts her lover under Geish. She approaches him. And they escape periodically from the king. And in the end, he's killed. And she is forced to live with two kings. And she escapes this by throwing herself and killing herself.

The other story is Dermud and Grainya. Grania also is married to Finn McCool. Approaches Dermud again with Geish. And they too escape constantly until they are both killed. And you find all over Scotland and Ireland, Cromlex, which are the bed of Dermard and Grania. The third one, the really important one, is the location in Cornwall.

And that starts with the stone, which sort of says Tristan's son of Kunimaras is buried here. And that's the basis of assuming that Tristan might have been a historical character, although there's really no proof of that. But certainly the story becomes localised in Cornwall, becomes localised at Castle Door. That's where Mark's castle is. becomes localized at Issylt's Ford, the Ford where supposedly she sort of outsmarts the king.

And then that's the point at which the story is taken up by the Anglo-Norman storytellers, people like Barul in particular. But I think one has to remember how much folklore there is in these tales. Lots and lots of these stories sort of have folk links, more so than I think most other romances in the Middle Ages. Why are Cornwall and Ireland and Wales to certainly sense so attractive? Well, they are the edge of Europe. They've always been the sort of perfect place to have these magical stories.

Because they were pushed aside. Because they were pushed aside. And also I think one has to remember the importance of what is known as the Matter of Britain, which is the whole of the authoritarian tradition, which was a source that people could draw on for courtly references. What do you mean by the matter of Britain? I don't know about a book. It's all of the stories.

It was a collection. of material. The poets talked about the matter of Britain, the matter of Wales, the matter of France, and the matter of Britain included all of the Arthurian material, everything associated with it. It comes out as a term in the 14th century,

but it's referred to quite frequently as a distinct body of law which people could draw on and they did. I mean, this is basically where all of the romances come from. And most of the matter of Britain is centred on Britain, basically. I'm being confused. It comes

that in the 14th century, but we're talking about story that's sitting in the 12th century. So how did it influence those stories in the 10th century? Because it existed before this. It's only really in the 14th century that people said, the matter of Britain, the matter of Wales, sorry, the matter of Britain, the matter of France, the matter of Troy.

But the stories go back much earlier. We have evidence of 8th and 9th century. Not much before that. And I always have to add the caveat, but although we have evidence in the 8th and the 9th century, the texts are actually 13th century. century and later. Right. So are we relying much on oral history there then? This is what's assumed to be

behind it, it is. But of course, oral history is a very, very tricky thing to pin down. Is there any good archaeological history? There is, there is archaeological history. Tintagel, castle, door, places like that have been excavated. The problem with the archaeological history is that they have in turn created a lot of folklore, particularly in the 1930s when the first big excavations were done. people were actually looking for proof of Arthur and Tristan and Isold and these stories. And of course, when you look for proof, you find it. So the archaeology has created a whole strain of new folklore that wasn't there before.

So when you refer to Mark's Castle and Mark was the king who sent for his old to marry him and he was the uncle, we take it of Tristan, in one of the versions. Was there a Mark's Castle or did they in the 19th century make it up? Well, actually the 17th century made it up. The references to Castle Door and Tintagel as Mark's Castle are a little bit are later than the text. So we're never really sure how these things were localised or how these things were re-localised. So we're not be stretching a point to say we're often talking about fiction here. We are talking completely about fiction.

There's really no evidence for Tristan as a historical character. Well, that means we can go mad, doesn't it really? We did. We have. Laura, Laura Ash, one of the first to write down the story, it appears, was Thomas of Britain. What do we know about him? Very little. We know that he was called Thomas because he tells us himself twice in the bit of poetry we've got. And because the German poet who translated his work into German a few decades later called him Thomas of Britain.

We know he was working around 1170, in the 1170s, say, 1160. to 80s. We know he was probably from Normandy, but he was working in England. And he was certainly writing for aristocratic courts and audiences. And that's about all we know. He wrote in French. He wrote in French, which was, of course, at the time, the language of England's aristocracy. And do we, what sort of text do we have? What's he left behind? So we think that the whole poem must have been something between 12 and 15,000 lines long. We only have about three and a half thousand lines. It survives in manuscript fragments.

But didn't later tell us of the story use parts of the text that we now no longer have? Absolutely. So we can construct. We have constructed what we think Thomas wrote from people who translated him later. So Gottfrey translated the whole, well, he began and he had reached almost to the end of Thomas' text. and then he, it seems, died and broke off before he could finish. But we have a whole translation as well, which is an old Norse. But it's worth bearing in mind that, as Julietette's been implying,

there's no such thing really as a whole story of Tristan. I mean, Thomas himself, when he's writing, it's the earliest, it's one of the earliest extant texts we have. But he still says, this story comes in many versions. Many people have told this story. I've heard many different ways of telling it in many different plots. And here's my version. And he says my version is definitive, but clearly he thinks of himself as one voice among many.

So is it possible briefly to encapsulate his story of this legend? Okay, very briefly. And of course, so most of this is reconstruction from later texts. The story begins with the love affair of Tristan's parents. What period does he set it in? The distant past. Right. That'll do? Shady distant past.

So from the false century perspective, he's saying the distant past. Exactly, exactly. So it begins with a love affair of it. of Tristan's parents, which is illicit and they elope, and then it ends tragically because he is killed in battle and she dies of grief in childbirth. Tristan is therefore named Tristan for sorrow. He's brought up... Trest French Sorrow. Exactly so. He's brought up not knowing who he is, but he ends up at his uncle's court and is accepted as a favourite, makes his way, and then is identified as the nephew of King Mark and becomes a huge favourite court. He goes on. on various exploits and ventures. He defeats an Irish prince challenger, Morald, who comes to demand tribute from Cornwall

and has some various adventures in Ireland. And in the defeat of Morald, he leaves a chip of his sword in Moral's skull. And this is important later, because when he's in Ireland later, trying to win the hand of the Princess Isert for King Mark, Isert matches the piece of sword to the chip in, Tristan's sword realizes who he is and wants to kill him, but resists, doesn't kill him. And then he succeeds in winning the right to take her back to Cornwall.

Because he argues it was a fair contest. Yes. We know that they drink the love potion by mistake at sea, and we have a fragmentary bit of manuscript of that in which Thomas explores what this means and how it happens to them. Tristan has gone to Ireland at the request of the king to bring back Issa, as the bride.

The King has heard is the right woman for him to marry. So he's there as an ambassador and emissary. Exactly so. But the reason that Mark has decided that Isert is the bride for him is because Tristan had met her before, spent time with her, came back to Mark and said, this woman is astonishing.

And so there's already a tie between Tristan and Isert which is not openly acknowledged. So they come back on the bird. They come back. By this point, Izert is no longer avert. virgin and so she persuades her lady-in-waiting, to take her place in the marital bed on the first night. She's taken the love potion accidentally on the ship with him and they consummate the water.

And they fall in love and they have a great time on the boat, which we are told in some detail. And then so the lady-in-waiting loses her virginity in Mark's marital bed. The substitution is made. And from then on we have the meat of the story, which really is in three sections. There are the long periods when they're at court, conducting their affair, and Mark is riven with suspicion. People attempt to expose them and there's never quite proof and they're repeatedly challenged and then reinstated.

Then there's a phase when Mark can't bear it anymore and he banishes both of them and they go into the forest and the final endgame and Thomas's version kicks in here. Isert is back at court. Now Tristan is banished alone and he meets another woman, a beautiful woman called Isert and he decides for a series of psychologically mad reasons. that he will marry this other Isert. And now we have a love quadrangle.

We can come back to that. Yes, we can. Finally, he's wounded by poison. Only Queen Isert can save him. She is on her way to save him. His wife tells him that she is not coming and he dies of despair. And then Isert comes and finds his body

and she lies down and dies also. In what became the love of death. Much later on invite. Thank you very much. Mark Kincah. Did the Thomas version spread and to where? Certainly by the early 13th century, it's spread from England to continental Europe

and also to Scandinavia. We've got Gottfried's reworking of Thomas's text. Gottfried of Strasbourg. Gottfried of Strasbourg. Or that's how he's referred to. I mean, the evidence to connect him with Strasbourg is pretty tenuous. But at any rate, if that's right, that's a version of Thomas reworked into Middle High German,

the literary form of German at the early 13th century, probably dated around about 1210, so it's got to Germany. There is, in fact, a second translation of Thomas into German, made further north, probably somewhere in the northwest, in a literary language which is usually called low-franconian, so it's the forerunner of literary Dutch. And we just have fragments of this low-franconian, Tristan. Again, translated or adapted from Thomas,

it's also reached Scandinavia. We also have the old Norse saga of Tristan and Dissolter. saga is very important because it enables us to reconstruct the whole of the plot of Thomas, because it is in fact the only, I think, translation of Thomas surviving that actually completes the whole story. It survives mainly in manuscripts of the 17th and 18th centuries, but those manuscripts contain a prologue in which they say that the translation was made by a monk called Brother Robert in 1226 at the court of King Hawke-on-Hawken Arsau. on Hawken the 4th of Norway, you can cast some doubt on the authenticity of that statement

because it's only contained in much later manuscripts. But if it's true, and I mean it might be, it would be, it would certainly fit with what we know about the court of King Hawkon, that Hawcon was interested in promoting European literature, love literature, so this would certainly fit with a kind of cultural programme in Norway in the early 13th century. There's another version by Beiru. Who was he, and what was his version? Well, again, Beirul we know nothing about, apart from the name that's transmitted in the text, which again is fragmentary.

How long can we go? Nothing. It's again, it's a Tristan romance in French, and this time in continental French, so not from England, very certainly written in continental France. Our best guess is that it's from the second half of the 12th century. How was he different from Thomas?

It's different both in the actual plot. It contains different details, and it's very different in the approach that it takes to telling the story. I mean, so far as the plot is concerned, you get quite significant differences in the sequence of events but I think the most striking difference is that the love potion in Beirul is time limited

in the Thomas tradition of the story the potion causes those who drink it to love until they die so it's absolute and unending love in Beirle's version we're told that the potion's effect wears off after three years it works only for that period of time Is it different in tone and incident as well? It's extraordinarily different I think one way of characterising the difference

I suppose, is to say that in the Thomas tradition of the story, the storytellers, the authors are very interested in mining the story for general problems that they can put up for intellectual debate and discussion. Yeah, can we move to the Baru tradition now? In Beiro, I think the interest is very much in extracting the maximum of narrative suspense and excitement from the story, that you want to make it vivid, dramatic, suspenseful for the audience. For example, there's the episode in which there's a very famous episode in which Mark has sentenced the lovers to death.

Tristan is to be put to death. Iselt, as she's called, is to be handed over to a colony of lepers. That's her punishment for adultery. So, Islt is being led away by the lepers. Tristan is awaiting execution. He's being held captive in a chapel right on a high rock, you know, when nobody thinks he can escape from. He gets out of the window, he makes this perilously, hundreds of feet onto the cliffs below. So it's a death-defying leap.

And then just in the nick of time, he gets to ambush the lepers and rescue Islet and ride off with her into exile in the forest. But it's all narrated for this narrative suspense. You know, will he do it, won't he? That's very, very clear. So, Juliet, how clear was in the folklore and the subsequent stories the moral, how clear was the moral position of Tristan and Isselt? Well, folk tales tend not to take a moral position. the moral position will have been inserted by whoever is telling the tale. But it's certainly the case that if you look at the early versions,

particularly the Irish and the Scottish versions, it's all about conflict between the duty owed to an overlord. You can see this with Dermot in Finn and the love of a woman, again Dermud and Gronja. And this carries over particularly in Boreul, I think, who is often said to have got some of his stories directly from Cornwall, that you have this conflict of kind of duty and love. So it seems to be very often this is called the primitive version, although I personally don't particularly like that term,

but I think it is closer perhaps to the kind of complexities you get in the heroic world, and certainly in Welsh you have this image of Mark and of Tristan as heroic characters. Now there's something very interesting in Beryl in that he includes this rather strange story that King Mark has horse's ears. Now Mark in Cornish, Breton and Welsh means horse. So it's not surprising that you get that story and you find that story quite well attested, particularly in Welsh. So it suggests that Beryl has got closer to the localisation of the story in Cornwall, which is back to this notion of the matter of Britain as a major source for the romance writers. the Anglo-Norman and Continental Romance writers.

Did you give him years for merely comic purposes, or was this supposed to be significant? Well... It grew as how long, I'm told. It is probably for comic purposes. I think understanding medieval humour is something which we have problems with. And also, there's something slightly comic about Tristan as well.

I mean, again, you get this very tricksterish element to Tristan, which you don't with a lot of the other heroes. The Great Leap, for example. Dermott, his Irish parallel, does these great leaps as well. And there are lots of coming out of the chapel. And there are a lot of instances where Tristan will win by outthinking his opponents. Laura Ash, what's the position of the church on marriage and adultery here? The church is hardening its view of marriage, and yet we are told, we're not entitled,

we guided to approve of and root for the two lovers. Yeah. So during the 12th century, when Thomas was writing, the church had dramatically attempted to have a greater role in marriage. It had said that marriage was no longer just going to be seen as an alliance between noble families. Marriage was a sacrament and it had to rely on the absolute consent of both parties. This was a huge step forward, wasn't it? Yes.

And it's possible to argue many people have that the growth in the romance, the sort of fiction of love, is a response to that, saying if marriage has to be about consent, then we now need to understand what consent to that kind of bond would mean. Now there, of course, we come right up against the problem with Tristan, which is that it's all about love and love here is, as you say, adulterous, is directly against the bonds of marriage. And so on the face of it,

Thomas's narrative runs directly counter to Orthodox Christian teaching and some critics have argued that he must intend to condemn the lovers. He must just simply be showing their sufferings as an just punishment for their sins. The alternative, the diametrically opposed view is that no, he's rejecting the church entirely, he's almost elevating love itself as an alternative religion, a cult. And I think that that argument becomes much stronger when you get to go. Gottfried. But in Thomas's case, I think Thomas's narrative gives us a sense that he's just narrating something that's real, something that happens to people. The church, in the

fragments we have, the church barely appears. We don't have any religious figures telling them off or telling them they're doing the wrong thing. And so there's this sense, I think, just of moral independence. But much more interestingly, Thomas develops a moral sense based on not the question of are they sinning or not, but based on the question of the effect they have on others. So he shows us very painfully the hurt they cause to others all around them. And that, I think, develops a much more interesting kind of moral ambiguity than the simple question of, are they sinning by loving adulterously? Mark, I was going to come to you anyway. You want to come in. Can I just ask the question I was going to ask? You can wrap it in

what you're going to say. Can we go back to Godfried of Strasbourg, writing in German, the great stylist, as you all three have described in your notes? Does he take on this idea of moral ambiguity in any of words that Juliet and Laura brought it forward. Yes, I think he does. Thomas and then following him Gottfried do a very interesting thing in the language that they used to describe the adulterist relation, or in fact

the words that they put into the lovers' mouths themselves, the words that the lovers themselves used to describe their relationship, is very often borrowed from the church's own definitions of marriage. You can find these formulations which look like, you know, almost direct translations of

the Latin formulations you get in canon law, the law of the church, which provides all kinds of definitions of what the marriage is, what the sacrament is, and what adultery is. For example, when, in Thomas, when Tristan is agonising

over whether he should or shouldn't marry this second is older, of course he frames the problem to himself in terms of what he calls breaking his faith, Montierma Fué, is the phrase. I would break my faith, my oath, my loyalty,

my fidelity towards the first, And what's interesting is that in canon law, the phrase used for adultery is Fidemrangery to break the bond of marital fidelity. So that's very interesting that Thomas allows Tristan to formulate the project of entering into a legitimate marriage and entering an adulterous liaison, as though it would itself be an act of faithlessness of adultery. The canon lawyers insist that marriage is constituted by the two partners consenting to marriage. And canon law often says that it's the wedding ring that symbolises, that symbolises this consent and the bond of the two hearts. And they often refer to the ring as the annulus fidde. It's the ring that symbolises marital fidelity.

The interesting thing is in Gottfried when the lovers are parting, Tristan goes into exile for the very last time. Isolder presents him with a ring and she says, take this ring so that you will remember me by it. But she went to scratch, she says it is an insigl de Truve, so a seal or symbol of fidelity. So again, that exact formulation is borrowed from canon law. So it's very striking that both of these authors, Thomas and Gottfried,

allow the adulterers to talk about their own relationship as though they were legitimately married in the eyes of the church. And that obviously magnifies the moral ambiguity and ambivalence of the story. Juliet, are there shifts in the different ways this story's told? Are there significant shifts? There are. there are quite strikingly different ways the story is told. The Welsh version, for example, is completely different. And it comes from earliest is the 16th century, but probably before that.

And basically in this story, you get Tristan and Esild, Tristan and Isseld, living in the forest, and nobody can attack Tristan, because if you do, his blood will cause your death. You can't wound him. So Arthur has to be brought in. And this is rather interesting. because by this time it seems that in the Welsh tradition Mark, Tristan and Arthur were always associated. So Arthur is brought in and he says, well, look, one of you is going to live with her when there are leaves on the tree and one of you is going to live with her when there aren't leaves on the tree.

And Mark gets to choose and Mark says, well, I want winter because the nights are longer. And it's Esselt, Islt, who says there are three trees that never lose their leaves, therefore I'm going to stay with Tristan and off she goes. It has a happy ending. and it doesn't have any... She picks the evergreens. She picks the evergreens. And it's interesting that it is...

It's Isselt who does this. She's a very active heroine and she is right from the start. Deirdre, Dermud, Grant Dermud's Grania, are all sort of various kind of, you know, I want you and you're going to have to take me.

And this is quite different from many of the other medieval heroines. So there is a kind of way of kind of looking at this tale. It's such an expansive, such an adaptable tale. And because of that, there's lessons to add morbidst in. Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Laura Ash, you began to move to Thomas' his handling of the psychological complexity of the four characters. Now, just to get it clear, there's Isolt, and then he goes away, and he thinks that he's lost her because she's married to Mark, his uncle, and he meets another woman called Isolt,

of the White Hands. And for complicated reasons, you say, He marries her. And can you just tell us what happens in this quadrille? Yes. So this is where Thomas's story begins as it exists, right in the middle of this debate he's having with himself, should I marry this other result? And he goes through a series of entirely internally contradictory reasons to do it or not to do it.

He thinks, she's forgotten me, I know she's forgotten me, I know she hasn't forgotten me, but she's married. So she has pleasure with her husband. Maybe if I were married, I would know what she felt. But then he also tries out the excuse that at least this way, she can't blame me for exercising lust with someone else because I were married to them. And then he realizes that he only wants this woman

because she means queen isert to him. And this comes to fruition horribly when on the wedding night he is getting undressed for bed and the ring that Zert gave to him that Mark mentioned is pulled off his hand by the shirt that he pulls over his head and off his hand, and he is stricken with the realization that he has done something terrible, and now he has to betray both women

because he's married another woman and betrayed Isert, but also he cannot bear to sleep with this woman, and so he betrays his wife by refusing to consummate the marriage. Which he never does. Which he never does. With Isle of the White House. And Thomas gives us the most astonishing then after this psychological exploration

of how he could have done this he then talks to us about what these four suffered in this terrible pattern. So Mark has the body of the woman he loves but will never have her heart and he knows it. Isert must submit to her husband

in bed but does not want him and does not love him and she cannot have or be with the man she does love. Tristan meanwhile cannot have the woman he loves and he lies in bed next to a woman he cannot bear to touch and the desert of the white hands longs for her husband, loves her husband and he cannot and will not ever touch her. And this description of this quadrille of hurt is, I think, just profound.

It gives us a psychological insight to all of the characters. And that's what's important. It's not just that our hero and heroine have feelings, as is the case in, I think, Beirul, you could say. But here there are other people whose feelings matter and we see that. There's an astonishing moment episode worth mentioning. Is Erta the White Hands is one day riding along with her brother, and her horse steps in a puddle and water splashes up her thigh, and she starts laughing uncontrollably. And her brother, who's a bit paranoid, says,

tell me why you're laughing. And she says, that water touched higher up my thigh than my husband has ever touched me. And is the most astonishing moment. So it's that psychological realism, which is incredible in Thomas. Can I go to you, Mark? Laura laid out this quartet of and Thomas challenges people who is the most miserable. Can you develop that? It's extraordinary thing to do.

It challenges the reader directly. It is. I mean, it's a really good example of this tendency I was talking about earlier, that Thomas and, like Kim Gottfried as well, has this very marked tendency of suspending the narrative and then resolving it into abstract or general problems which are then thrown open for debate. So what happens in this commentary,

is that, as Laura says, Thomas lays out this quadril of misery. He goes through each of the characters one by one and explains why they have a claim to be miserable in love. And that in itself, I think, is a very interesting statement. And he says, you know, I want to tell you what strange amor there is among these for, what strange love. It's a thing that brings only misery, quite a striking thing to say if you're telling a love story. But then he... For times four.

Yeah, but then... Times four. But then Thomas's narrator says that he's lost for words. He says, now I don't know what I can say, which of the four of these has the greater suffering in love, I will hand the judgment, the judgment, he uses that word, I'll hand the judgment over to lovers in the audience because I myself have no experience of it.

I've never, because es prover is the verb, try it out, experience, been through it. So that's very interesting. Him being a monk, I presume, that. We assume he is a cleric. So he probably doesn't. If he's being a good cleric and an unmarried cleric and a celebrate cleric, then he would have no direct experience of this.

So he hands this over to those. He says those of you in the audience who are lovers, you have experience of these things. You decide. But I think that's on the one hand, what's really fascinating here, I think is that on the one hand it seems as though he puts the audience above him in knowledge. You know, you have experience of something that I haven't, so you're better place to judge and answer this question than I have.

am. But on the other hand, experiences a very double-edged sword in Thomas. Tristan's decision to marry is based precisely on this idea of wanting to try things out, as Laura was mentioning. Tristan agonising of whether he should marry the second dessert, says to himself, I wonder what it's like for the first desert to be married and perhaps forgetting about her lover. The only way I can know whether she has forgotten me is I'll need to marry the second dieselder to try it out to es prover for myself. And of course that's the disastrous thing. We haven't mentioned what might be, you tell me if I'm wrong. The key factor, which is that as Tristan is bringing Isolt back to Cornwall,

over to Cornwall from Ireland, to marry Mark, he is accidentally, we're told accidentally. They together are given the love potion by Issel's servant. And together they take it. And that's it. Yes. Now, why was a love potion? introduced. Why didn't they just fall in love with each other like they're doing movies? Well, there's a, there are lots of different interpretations of this. And in Beirul, as Mark said, it's very clear that it is just a potion, it's a magic trick, it wears off,

and then the plot can go in different directions. In Thomas, you can make a perfectly reasonable reading of the whole poem by saying it's just symbolic. It's a way of saying to us, as readers, you may not doubt this love now. This is where it's going. In the same way that Chaucer has Troilus' story. struck by an arrow from Cupid. It's a narrative trick to say, you now know this is what's happening.

The question, obviously, it has a bearing on the moral question, the question whether they're free to act or whether they're bound into their love. And here I think what's more interesting is if we take it as symbolic, if we then ask ourselves the question of, if our emotions

are this strong, you know, if this is a love which means that you would burn yourself and the world to be with this person, does that then justify actions you take for that love, or does it not? And in the Middle Ages, there's a strong Christian line that says that the goal of life is to deny the self's longings in order to reach God. Now, we're much more likely to have an ideal of self-fulfillment to say, you know, it is to be true to myself, to fulfill whom I am, to pursue love, to pursue my love, to pursue my love. highest desires. But in fact, Thomas is, I think, ahead of both of those camps. Thomas says, he lays it out for us. He shows us that their emotions explain everything they do, but also that they don't, they can't justify anything that they do. And he shows us that through the pain of

others. And in that sense, I think he develops a genuine ethical exploration. Can you justify what they do? Well, it's impossible to say others are hurt by it. Should they not have done it? they could not do otherwise. Are other developments like this in earlier versions, or is this bringing something completely new to the table? No, I think there are, because in the Dermott and Grania story, Dermott has a love spot, and it's only in the...

A love spot. Something which makes all women fall in love with him. And this is only actually in the oral tales, which we get from Scotland. And Grania puts, when she realizes she's married to this old, old man puts everybody under a sleep spell and says to Dermot, she puts them under Geish, which is a compulsion. Again, it's almost like a love potion. She says, you have to love me. And D'edra does much the same. Now, we don't have any evidence of what's happening in Welsh. The only hint we

have is a rather obscure poem in the Black Book of Kamarvan, where there's clearly been, they've come across the sea. There's clearly been a sea journey. And the lovers are in some kind of of upset. So there does seem to be an earlier notion that this love is somehow structured. Can I come to you again, Mark? Why do you think that appeal to medieval audiences so much as it seems to have done when it seems so foreign to most of the experience that we get from other literature at the time? I think it probably does have to have something to do with these changes in marriage practices that Laura was talking about the church policing. and defining marriage increasingly.

I mean, you've got to... This is a story about an adultery in a royal marriage, and it's written for an aristocratic audience. It begins to take literary form in Western Europe in the second half of the 12th century. That's at the end of the period of about 100 years in which the marriage practices of the European aristocracy, so the very people for whom these stories are being written,

their practices are being transformed by the church's ever-encroaching control of marriage. And I suppose what you can say is that until the church had taken over, marriage consisted of two elements. There's a must. You got married because your parents had exchanged contracts. It wasn't up to the individuals at all. And you got married because you ought to.

There's a social expectation on you. It is the way of producing legitimate heirs. It is the way of passing down landed property. And with the church's insistence on consent, also defining and constituting a marriage, there's a new element which is that you get married because you want to. The individual's concerned have actually wished it. And if you think about it, what you've got in the adulterous relationship is this mixture of must and should and want.

The lovers must love because they're compelled, they drank a potion, they should because they're so suited to each other, and they actually want to. They make statements about how they want to be together. So I think the appeal is that the story offers this kind of fix, medium through this adulterous relationship, through which an aristocratic public can begin to think through. What is it that determines why two people are together for life, because they must, because they should be, because they want to be.

Julia Newwood, the story became less popular and it became, achieved a low, sank in status below the great Arthur legends. Is there any one explanation for that? I think the very complexity of the story and the fact that it works so well within a medieval courtly love tradition where these things mattered. And I think in a modern tradition, somehow it's less compelling. It then becomes more compelling because you can do all kinds of things with this story and it kind of has a resurgence. But I think the fact that it disappears quickly is simply a change in society.

Loras, the idea of love and death or love in death or death sealing love or completing love emerges and is taken up later. Had that happened before? Basically, love only ends in two ways. Either you die or it goes wrong. And therefore, as soon as narrative of love appears, if an author wants to say that someone's love is perfect, then logically we need to see the characters die. We need to see that they loved one another up to the point of death. And a French poet, well, a poet called Marie, who calls herself Marie de France, who was writing in England at about the same time as Thomas, she gives us a series of little short romances,

lays in which she toys with different structures of love and shows the connection of love with suffering, the idea that your willingness to suffer shows how noble your love is, and ultimately the connection of love with death, that when you love perfectly, then you love unto your death, and therefore, I think implicitly,

love brings with it death. And Marie retells the Tristan's story in a very abbreviated version in which she brings this to a perfect symbol. Their love was so fine. Their amour qui tant fu-fin, who was so perfect that it brought them to death on the same day. Do they love unto death or into death? Well, in the Thomas legend and in Gottfried,

we're told that when they drank the love potion, they drank their death. That they drank love, they drank death. Both are the same. This is taken up very seriously by Wagner in one of his greatest works. where we have the love death at the end and the music waiting, waiting, waiting for it and then resolves itself in the love death, that.

Was that Wagner or had that become accepted, had that marinated over the centuries? What's going on there? I think that's Wagner, this notion of the Lieber's taught the love death that's the fulfilment and your culmination of love. Death is what actually ensures the perpetuation of your love because it means you won't ever wake up from the night of love.

That's what the love is singing that duet in the second act of Wagner. Very early on in the early versions, when the two lovers die, particularly in the theatre version, they're buried on opposite sides of a river and plants grow out of their graves and unify. And they're cut down and they grow again and they're cut down and they're finally left. So there is an implication, certainly. There is this folk motif of lovers united in death by the image of these twisting plants,

which of course Marie takes up very much in her lay. it's implied. Certainly Wagner's romanticism takes it to the highest levels, or however one sees Wagner. But I think the implication is there beforehand. Laura? You're absolutely right. It's picked up everywhere. Marie makes them symbolic. Tristan and Izur are the hazel and honeysuckle bound together forever. But I think Thomas does something very different. I think he does something unique. I think he imply it because they don't die together. Tristan dies and then Izur comes and finds his body and lies down next to it and dies out of despair. We're told, Triste Amourou,

and la Belle isold not the same. He dies for his love, she dies for pity, they're separated by death. And I think this is because Thomas is not trying to write a symbolic libustot. He's not trying to write

something celebratory and glorious. He's trying to write something about real suffering. The same would go for Gottfried. In the case of Gottfried, I think death is the fulfillment of something, but it's not the fulfillment of love. It's the fulfillment of a tragic destiny.

It's very interesting that when Tristan the hero is baptized. We mentioned before that the name comes from Triste, sad. And when the infant is baptized, Gottfried's narrator comes in and he gives his German audience a little French lesson and says, that's what the French name means. And he says the name is apt not just because of the sad past, the sad circumstances in which this little baby was conceived and born,

but also it's utterly apt because of the sorrowful life that he's going to have, which will culminate in a very sorrowful death. but more than that, Gottfried also then adds that anyone who has read this story to the end will see how the name fitted the man and the man fitted the name. So death is not just the fulfilment of a tragic destiny, it's the fulfilment of an artistic strategy of composing the story in such a way that it inevitably appears to end in death as though that could be the only possible ending. So in that sense, death is a culminational fulfilment,

but not in the way that Wagner understood it. Finally, Juliet. Well, I think this goes back to the question you asked of the moral implications of the folk sources of this. And you get this very, very simple, repeated motif of the entwined plants. And by the time this develops, right up to the 19th century,

it becomes so elaborate that you get this kind of leber-stowed business. And I think that says something about the power of these storytelling patterns. They can go on and they can spread and they can be reinterpreted, they can fall out of fashion, and they can come back into fashion.

Thank you very much. Judith Wood, Laura Ash, and Mark Kinker. We'll be back in two weeks, Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what didn't we talk about?

Art, art and... He didn't talk much about disguise. You mentioned... So Tristan is always going places in disguise. In one of them, but not in all of them. So he cunningly calls himself tantris with the result that no one recognises him. Except his dog.

Right, yes. But that's played up to great, I think, for comic effect in Gottfried, where Isolda makes a discovery when she's got the splinter of the sword, and it fits the not in Tristan sword, and she's identified him. And then she's explaining to her mother how she's come to this discovery and that Tantris is really Tristan. And there's a very laborious explanation in which she says, now take the name Tantris, and the mother says, oh, all right.

Now you cut it in half into a tan and a tris, and the mother says, okay, I'm with you. And you put the second before the first, and what do you get? and the mother says, oh my dear, you are so clever. How did you think of this? And I'm convinced that that has to be played for comic effect. There's a fablio sort of element to all of this, which I think is always comic,

that the old husband is always being outsmarted by the young wife and her lover. You get this with the tree business where they see Mark reflected in the warfare. And then they stage this conversation where they say, how could he possibly suspect us? There's the German one where he disguises himself as a monk and sort of she's ill,

and he goes in and cures her. And Mark kind of thanked him profusely. And you kind of think, this is Boccaccio, basically. And it's a wonderful modern version of this. It's a comic book version. As a folklorist, you're allowed to read comic books, I hasten, and it's proper research, I hasten to add.

And in a comic, a graphic novel called Arthur 2000, all of Arthur's men are brought back, except Tristan is brought back as a woman. So he grouses about this throughout the whole thing and then decides, no, actually, he's really very happy about this. So you get a lesbian Tristan and Issel. And I just think that's wonderful. I also like the way that, so I mean, I just think Thomas' work is astonishing.

I think it's a masterpiece. And I like the way that he has to deal with all of these ideas that Tristan can go in disguise to court and no one will recognize him. Well, in Thomas's version, they always recognize him. They recognize him instantly. You know, as soon as dessert actually looks at him, she realizes panic ensues. And in this sense, I think Thomas is writing about, he's attempting to write about people, recognisable people,

not archetypes. It's not that Tristan is her love one another because he's the greatest knight and she's the most beautiful woman. It's because they happen to be in love because they are individual characters. You cannot be substituted. You know, Iserted White Hands is a hopeful substitute for Queen Isur and it can't work for a second because they're individuals.

I think we're about to be interrupted by another individual. Another individual offering to you. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk slash Radio 4.