Tristan and Iseult
A Cornish knight is sent across the sea to fetch his uncle's bride, and on the voyage back the two of them drink, through a servant's mistake, the potion brewed for the wedding night. What follows is years of hunting horns and thorn hedges: a bare sword laid between them as they sleep in a forest hut, a leap from a chapel window onto the rocks, an oath sworn before the whole court in words chosen so that a man may keep it and lie. Surviving only in the fragments of Béroul and Thomas of Britain before Gottfried von Strassburg took it up, it is the story that made adulterous love a subject European literature could not put down.
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Lineage
- shares sources with ↑ The Mabinogion
- ↓ The Lais of Marie de France
- ↓ Cligès
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 71% · 13 shared
- 63% · 13 shared
- 52% · 11 shared
- 52% · 11 shared
- 51% · 11 shared
- 51% · 11 shared