The hero's place: medieval literary traditions of space and belonging

3. Tristan and Iseut before the Potion

179 3 Tristan and Iseut before the Potion wie kunde man mich vinden? ine kan ez niht erdenken wie: man suoche dâ, sô bin ich hie; man suoche hie, sô bin ich dâ: wie vindet man mich oder wâ? wâ man mich vinde? dâ ich bin: diu lant enloufent niender hin; sô bin ich in den landen, dâ vinde man Tristanden Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, vv. 19518–26 How could anyone find me? I cannot fathom how. If a man sought there I would be here, if he sought here I would be there. How or where shall one find me? Where am I to be found? Here, where I am—countries do not run away from one, and I am in those countries—so let Tristan be found there! The legend of Tristan and Iseut has reached us through multiple, sometimes fragmentary, textual manifestations and wide-ranging poetic and linguistic traditions. Because of this textual diversity, I will take a broader approach with this medieval legend than I have done with the Life of Saint Alexis and the Song of Roland. The many versions of the legend begin with Marie de France’s Le Lai du chèvrefeuille (ca. 1165), the fragmentary Old French 180 Tristan and Iseut before the Potion verse romances of Thomas (ca. 1170), Béroul (ca. 1180), and the Folies Tristan of Oxford and Bern (ca. 1185), and continue through various verse and prose “translations” well into the fifteenth century . I have chosen to focus mainly on the legend’s early French versions in verse, with particular attention given to the longer poems of Béroul (henceforth referred to as B) and Thomas (T). I have also given close attention to B and T’s close corollaries; namely, the Middle High German versions of Eilhart von Oberg (E) and Gottfried von Straßburg (G). Beyond their intrinsic interest, these texts offer portions of the narrative that have not survived in B and T, such as the story of Tristan’s birth and childhood. The corpus of tales and romances informed by the legend of Tristan and Iseut vary in form, in time period, in language, and in episodes told and episodes eliminated. Each poet who “tells” the story frames it within different spaces and infuses it with a unique sense of place. Nevertheless, each tale invariably recounts the illegitimate love of Tristan and Iseut and how this love is intimately related to death. A legend is a story that, although told in various manners by different romancers, consistently implements a given and limited set of motifs and narrative possibilities. In each version of the legend, these motifs are subservient to an unvarying paradigmatic view without which the legend would no longer be itself. In Tristan and Iseut’s case, this paradigmatic core is the oxymoronic connection between the love generated by a magical potion and death. Keeping in mind the above characterization of a legend, I would like to explore another aspect of Tristan and Iseut that is just as constitutive as the widely discussed love/death connection and reaches a deeper , perhaps more fundamental level of the story: the portrayal of the spatial and emotional dislocation experienced by its main character, Tristan. Tristan and Iseut differs essentially from the Song of Roland and the Life of Saint Alexis, as well as most other texts of its time, in that its protagonist is radically disconnected from a sense of belonging to place. Tristan and Iseut before the Potion 181 Merritt Blakeslee has pointed out that the legend of Tristan and Iseut divides naturally into two halves, the “romance of Tristan” and the “romance of Tristan and Iseut.”1 The first “half” tells the story of Tristan’s origins, childhood, and youth. It begins with the tale of his parents, Rivalin and Blanchefleur, recounts his reunion with his maternal uncle, King Mark, and ends with his decision to confront Morholt on Mark’s behalf (a decision that eventually brings him into contact with Iseut, Morholt’s niece). The second “half” (which is in fact much longer than the first) begins with Tristan’s battle against Morholt, Iseut’s beloved uncle, and ends with the lovers’ death. Alongside this division, I propose a second manner of dividing the legend, with the pivotal moment coming not with the lovers ’ first meeting but with their drinking of the love potion. When the lovers drink the potion...