Tristan & Isolde
The
story of Tristan and Isolde is the story of love as the guide, love as a divine
infusion. The date for the early
troubadours, who were the
first to celebrate this great theme, was the twelfth century – the troubadour
century. The great theme was what is known as courtly love,
which was by definition adulterous love.
(I) want to talk about the Tristan problem, which leaves a tension
between the social order – which is imported, implanted, and put on the person –
and the individual life. They don’t go together.
The word amor, Provençal for
amor, spelled backwards is
roma. So roma is the Roman Catholic church and its
sacraments, and amor is individual experience. By what
kind of magic can people put God in your heart? They can’t.
He’s either there or not there, out of your own experience.
The story of Tristan is that of a typical epic hero
whose parents have died. He is the orphan son.
His mother’s brother is the king of Cornwall (here we have the
uncle-nephew relationship), but Tristan himself was born in Brittany.
So we have the whole Celtic world. Tristan goes to his
uncle’s castle in Cornwall and arrives at the same time that an emissary has
come from the court of Ireland. The Irish king conquered the
Cornish king and requires a tribute: every four or five years young boys and
girls must be brought to the service of the Irish throne. The
queen of the Irish court is Iseult’s mother, whose name is also Iseult, and her
brother Morholt is the emissary who has come to collect the tribute: the Dragon
Knight, whose shield bears the emblem of a dragon.
This tale is based, of course, on the story of Athens and Crete, of Theseus and the Minotaur. In other words, we can see a perfectly standard mythological syndrome in this sequence, and that will continue. The arrival of the Irish champion, the queen’s brother Morholt, marks Tristan’s call to the hero adventure. His journey will continue with a dragon battle, an underworld journey, a bride theft, and a return. Tristan’s story and Iseult’s look closely at the themes of death and resurrection on the one hand and sickness and healing on the other, ringing changes on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the elder Iseult as Persephone, Queen of the Netherworld, in whom – as in Medusa and many other female monsters of this kind – the powers both of healing and of death reside. And the poet Gottfried von Strassburg, obviously, was perfectly aware of these analogies.
The
story of Tristan is that of a typical epic hero whose parents have died.
He is the orphan son. His mother’s brother is the king
of Cornwall (here we have the uncle-nephew relationship), but Tristan himself
was born in Brittany. So we have the whole Celtic world.
Tristan goes to his uncle’s castle in Cornwall and arrives at the same
time that an emissary has come from the court of Ireland. The
Irish king conquered the Cornish king and requires a tribute: every four or five
years young boys and girls must be brought to the service of the Irish throne.
The queen of the Irish court is Iseult’s mother, whose name is also
Iseult, and her brother Morholt is the emissary who has come to collect the
tribute: the Dragon Knight, whose shield bears the emblem of a dragon.
This tale is based, of course, on the story of Athens and Crete, of Theseus and the Minotaur. In other words, we can see a perfectly standard mythological syndrome in this sequence, and that will continue. The arrival of the Irish champion, the queen’s brother Morholt, marks Tristan’s call to the hero adventure. His journey will continue with a dragon battle, an underworld journey, a bride theft, and a return. Tristan’s story and Iseult’s look closely at the themes of death and resurrection on the one hand and sickness and healing on the other, ringing changes on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the elder Iseult as Persephone, Queen of the Netherworld, in whom – as in Medusa and many other female monsters of this kind – the powers both of healing and of death reside. And the poet Gottfried von Strassburg, obviously, was perfectly aware of these analogies. RG 95
In the Tristan story, there are
echoes of Theseus and the Minotaur all along the line. This
is the conflict: love against marriage, amour against honeur.
How do we bring these things together? The marriage
situation was that of normal medieval and Oriental custom, with the family
arranging the marriage. But the aristocracy of Europe
regarded this as intolerable, as is particularly evident in two of the greatest
poems of the Middle Ages, Gottfried’s Tristan and Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzival. RG 109
The
story of Tristan is of choosing love over marriage.
Marriage in the Middle
Ages - as in most of history - was a socially arranged affair wherein the family
would make the arrangements for political or financial reasons. In
twelfth-century France, there was a protest against this; the protest was
enunciated by the
troubadours and the whole tradition of Amor.
If you spell Amor backward you get
Roma; Roma means the Church and the sacrament of marriage, and
Amor means the awakening of the heart.
The poets or troubadours
of southern France were writing in a language called Provencal, and this is the
world which Eleanor of Aquitaine came - her grandfather, William X of Aquitaine,
was the very first troubadour.