Tristan

“Thus it came about that Rivalin recovered, and Blancheflor’s heart was burdened and unburdened of two different kinds of pain. She left great sorrow alongside the man and bore great sorrow away. She left the anguish of a love-lorn heart, but what she bore away was death. She left her anguish when love came; death she received with the child.”

This passage highlights the Mixed Fortunes that often occur in the story, often in association with love. While Blancheflor rejoices in Rivalin’s reciprocation of her love, she also faces sorrow and potential disgrace in having a relationship and becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The latter element of Rivalin and Blancheflor’s relationship also foreshadows the forbidden love between Tristan and Isolde. The juxtaposition of new life (a product of Rivalin and Blancheflor’s relationship) with death is likewise characteristic of love’s duality.

“His name came from ‘triste.’ The name was well-suited to him and in every way appropriate.”

While Rual names Tristan after the tragic circumstances surrounding his birth, the narrator also has in mind Tristan’s own ultimately tragic fate. It is worth noting that even when Tristan goes by “Tantris,” this aspect of his name does not go away; in fact, the rearranged order underscores the name’s meaning, as “tant triste” means “so sad” in French.

“Tristan, gifted well-bred youth, sat and played on so elegantly and politely that the strangers kept looking at him as one man and confessed in their hearts that they had never set eyes on any person adorned with so many excellences.”

This passage demonstrates the way Tristan almost immediately gains the universal admiration of whomever he happens to meet. He inspires wonder and awe in those he comes across owing to his mastery of languages, music, manners, and all sorts of various skills. His exceptionality has two sides, however: While he is apparently singularly gifted and favored by fortune, he is also set up for a particularly tragic fate.

“By His will and command a tempest arose on the sea so perilous that they could no longer fend for themselves.”

While God does not appear as a character in the story, this passage, which follows the prayers of Curvenal and others for Tristan’s safety, suggests divine intervention on Tristan’s behalf. Further divine intervention occurs when the narrator claims that God aids Tristan to defeat Morold. While Tristan receives God’s help in certain cases in the first half of the story, he becomes ensnared in an apparently inalterable tragic fate in the second half.

“His form, moreover, was shaped as Love would have it […] He was so well-favored in presence and manners that it was a joy to watch him.”

This passage exemplifies the narrator’s presentation of Tristan as an ideal male courtier and knight. He possesses male beauty, the manners and talents a nobleman should possess, and the virtues of a knight. The first half of the story idealizes the two tragic figures to maximize the emotional impact of the second half, which in part concerns the despoiling and ruining of their perfection.

“‘You see,’ said the retainers, ‘God has heaped his bounty on this child for a life of sheer delight.’”

This passage demonstrates how fortune initially favors Tristan, who is cheerful, easygoing, and able to overcome any difficulties with his numerous talents. This is an example of dramatic irony, however; while Tristan appears to be uniquely favored by God, the reader knows that he is destined for a sorrowful life.

“Since it has come about that, after all, my sweet sister has left me you, I shall, if God grant, be happy for the rest of my life.”

Mark’s words present an important example of dramatic irony. While Mark initially gets much joy out of Tristan, who is devoted to him, Tristan also ends up being the source of Mark’s misery by engaging in an affair with Isolde. Tristan, whom Mark wants to be his heir, is eventually exiled from Mark’s kingdom altogether.

“Thus these two opposites, constant success and abiding misfortune, were paired together in one man.”

Despite Tristan’s knighting, he is still tortured by learning of the identity and death of his father. This idea of Tristan embodying two opposing strains of fortune appears throughout the story, as bad fortune follows good and vice versa.

“If it is a fact that you cannot inspirit anyone so far that he dares to fight in God’s name and in a just cause against that one man for the wrong suffered by you all and the plight of this land, and if you would be good enough to leave it to God and to me, then indeed, my lords, in God’s name I will give my young life as a hostage to fortune and undertake the combat for you!”

Tristan’s speech demonstrates his unique virtue and bravery as a knight. While every other noble of Mark’s kingdom, including Mark, is willing to submit to the humiliation and tribute Morold demands, Tristan offers to risk his life to maintain his honor and to defend justice.

“Seeing so many arts and acquirements at Tristan’s command this priest was moved to deepest pity for his sufferings and, delaying there no longer, went to the queen and told her that there was a minstrel in the town, a man racked with pain suffering a living death, and that no man born of woman was ever so rare in his art or of a more cheerful disposition.”

This passage demonstrates how Tristan’s talents vault him socially, in part because he craftily employs them to get what he wants. Tristan’s musical abilities and his amiability so impress this priest that the priest hurries to bring Tristan to the queen’s attention. He is such an object of wonder that word of him quickly spreads, and he comes to the attention of the ruler of whichever land he happens to be in.

“But her secret song was her wondrous beauty that stole with its rapturous music hidden and unseen through the windows of the eyes into many noble hearts and smoothed on the magic which took thoughts prisoner suddenly, and, taking them, fettered them with desire!”

This passage demonstrates the unique powers of Isolde’s beauty and the intoxicating power of love generally. Although the love potion presents an instance of literal magic, beauty has magical effects that take away people’s freedom of will, as the metaphor likening desire to bonds demonstrates. Isolde in particular inspires such desire in various men that they scheme elaborately to make her theirs.

“By rights he should rule a kingdom or some land of suitable standing. It is an odd world, where so many thrones are filled by men of inferior race and not one has fallen to his lot.”

This passage suggests that Tristan exhibits innate nobility even when he is disguised as a commoner. Earlier in the story, the nobles of Mark’s court cannot believe that he is a merchant’s son, and here Isolde finds it shocking that Tristan, handsome and marvelously gifted, is not noble. The idea of Tristan being a commoner appears to other nobles a strange case of disorder—an upending of “natural” hierarchies.

“Honor and Loyalty harassed him powerfully, but Love harassed him more. Love tormented him to an extreme, she made him suffer more than did Honor and Loyalty combined.”

Tristan does not present love as causing extreme suffering. Love undermines the values that previously oriented Tristan in the world and takes away his free will by submitting him to its torments. Honor and loyalty, key virtues for a knight, cause Tristan torment only in their combat against forbidden love.

“When the two lovers perceived that they had one mind, one heart, and but a single will between them, this knowledge began to assuage their pain and yet bring it to the surface.”

Tristan depicts the love potion in particular (and love more generally) as creating one person out of two. Love abolishes differences and creates a single desire: to be together. This idea recurs throughout the story, culminating when grief at the loss of Tristan immediately kills Isolde.

“At times they were happy, at others out of humor, as is Love’s custom with lovers; for in their hearts she brews pain besides pleasure, sorrow and distress as well as joy. And distress for Tristan and his lady Isolde was when they could not contrive a love-meeting.”

This passage continues to frame love as both good and bad. The unabating desire that accompanies love prevents the lover from taking pleasure in anything else while also tormenting the lover whenever they cannot be with the loved one. The word choice (“brews”) links this duality back to the potion itself, heightening its symbolism.

“However distressing suspicion is in love, its presence is not so irksome but that one would endure it far better than proven animosity. There is no help for it—love must have doubt.”

The narrator repeatedly writes of Mark as caught in a trap, seeking to prove a suspicion whose proof would only torture him more than the suspicion. The fact that love undermines Mark’s equilibrium even though he does not drink the love potion further suggests its transformative powers. Moreover, the passage suggests that love necessarily comes with the jealousy and paranoia that is destructive to the lover.

“With these two, truth and untruth, he was deceived. He suspected both alternatives, yet both eluded him. He neither wished the two of them guilty, nor wished them free of guilt.”

This passage about Mark’s obsessive paranoia regarding Tristan and Isolde’s affair highlights the contradictions in his motivations. Mark’s jealousy causes him to try to catch the two in their affair, but the certainty of the affair would be an even greater pain for him. He is in a state of anxiety in which he cannot find relief, and any outcome of his investigations will only cause more distress. Since close observations on character psychology are relatively rare in the story, as in most literature from the era. These kinds of descriptions are particularly important.

“But the seed of suspicion in love is of a nature so accurst that it takes root wherever it is cast. It is so fertile, so fecund, and so sturdy, that even lacking moisture and all but dying, it can never die entirely.”

This metaphor describes suspicion and jealousy as similar to weeds. They are such necessary accompaniments to love that they even sprout between Tristan and Isolde, who have no reason to doubt one another since they both drank the potion. Jealousy torments all of the story’s lovers, from Tristan and Isolde to Mark and Isolde of the White Hands.

“They looked at one another and nourished themselves with that! Their sustenance was the eye’s increase. They fed in their grotto on nothing but love and desire.”

This passage demonstrates the story’s attribution of supernatural qualities to love. Not only do characters die of grief when their lover dies, but the presence of the lover also satisfies hunger and thirst, satisfying the body’s physical needs. Love and the assurances it provides is supposedly all that is needed for survival and happiness. However, Tristan and Isolde’s decision to return to Mark’s court challenges this idea.

“As soon as they were debarred from their pleasures by watchers and guardians and denied them by prohibitions, they began to suffer acutely. Desire now tormented them in earnest with its witchery, many times worse than before. Their need of one another was more painful and urgent than it had ever been.”

Tristan frequently personifies emotions. Here, for example, desire deploys “witchery” to “torment” the lovers—another instance of an emotion possessing supernatural powers to ensnare the person whom it afflicts. This passage’s description contrasts with Isolde and Tristan’s mental and physical well-being in the Cave of Lovers, paying attention to the misery of the couple when they are separated. While love provides pleasure when lovers are together, it brings intolerable pain when they are separated.

“Isolde was his joy and sorrow. Yes, Isolde, his distraction, both soothed and pained him! The more Isolde broke his heart in Isolde’s name, the more gladly he saw Isolde!”

“Isolde” here refers at one moment to Isolde of Ireland and at another moment to Isolde of the White Hands, demonstrating how Tristan turns the two over in his mind and tries to make one out of them; he hopes to find relief from his longing for Isolde of Ireland in the woman who shares her name. The quick shuffling of their names places the reader in a position of confusion over which is being referred to at which point; each is responsible for joy and sorrow in her own way, and Tristan hopes to confuse one for the other.

“On my faith, friend, you are not the man who possesses such renown! I know that if you were Tristan, you would feel the sorrow that I suffer; for Tristan has loved so deeply that he knows the ills by which lovers are afflicted.”

Dwarf Tristan, whom Tristan and Kaedin meet upon a road, reproaches Tristan after Tristan says that he will help him regain his lover the following morning. Tristan has become a legendary figure known for his forbidden love and his sorrowful longing, to the extent that he inspires a kind of pilgrim and kindred spirit. This scene also shows how Tristan’s life in exile seems to present him with reminders of his sorrowful love.

“Our death was hidden in the poison, and never shall we recover from it! It was given us in an evil hour, we drank our death with it. She must call to mind the sufferings I endured in loving her, as a result of which I have lost all my kinsmen, my uncle, the King, and his people, have been shamefully dismissed and exiled to other lands.”

Tristan refers to the potion as a poison responsible for ensnaring him and Isolde in their tragic fate and ultimately for killing them. He seems to have some premonition of his death, though his exile already serves as a kind of death. This is the only passage in which Tristan recalls everything he has lost as a result of his love for Isolde: his position in the world, the admiration of his friends, and the love of his uncle and adoptive father. Tristan acknowledges that love has ruined him, yet at the same time he only wants Isolde. He appears to regret the drinking of the potion, yet he cannot free himself of its effects.