The Lover and the Statue: Idolatrous Love in Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar

As early as the first paragraph of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, a thirteenth-century Old Norse translation of Thomas of Britain’s Tristran,¹ the narrator tells us that we will hear of the “óbæriliga ást” (Jorgensen 1999, 28) of Tristram and Ísönd, and thus of the seminal theme of the European Tristan-corpus: unbearable love. Yet the translator’s adaptation of the romance diverges significantly from his French source, as Thomas’s long passages describing the psychology of his characters’ love are often truncated or condensed in the Old Norse text. It is thus easy to understand that an earlier critical viewpoint would express “that the translated saga provided a factually accurate but emotionally reduced rendition of its exemplar” (Finlay 2004, 206).² Despite the promise of its opening, scholars have argued that Tristrams saga misses the main preoccupation of its continental counterparts: psychological explorations of the obsessive love of its protagonists. As Alison Finlay indicates in the quotation above, this has been taken as evidence of a less developed interest in love on the part of the Norse translator and his audience.

However, Tristrams saga includes an episode that does offer significant insight into the psyche of the saga’s protagonist. In the so-called Hall of Statues episode, a lovesick Tristram constructs a hall filled with lifelike representations of Ísönd and other characters (chapter 80). The narrator provides a lavish, ekphrastic description of both the hall and the statues within it, a description that is remarkably long and detailed. In this essay, I argue that Tristram’s hall represents a striking externalization of his lovesick psyche, and that the inclusion of the episode therefore indicates a strong interest in the psychology of love. I read the Hall of Statues and, in particular, the wonderfully lifelike representation of Ísönd, as a device that represents Tristram’s memory and purposefully recalls idol statues.

Tristram’s construction and subsequent adoration of his statue places the romance at the center of medieval debates on image theory and idolatry. It showcases the production of an artwork that is at once a lifelike representation of reality and a powerful illusion created by the protagonist’s frustrated passion. In a discussion of this episode³ in Thomas’s text, Tracy Adams writes that the French Tristran attempts to deal with his mental and physical desire for Ysolt⁴ by “reproducing Iseut’s presence—her essence—in a statue” (2005, 152), and suggests that he is able to capture that essence in his art.⁵ I argue, however, that the statue of Ísönd in the saga is a physical idol produced by Tristram’s unchecked imagination and desire—a manifestation of his delusions. The setting of Tristram’s creative act supports this reading: in a remote forest, the hall physically excludes all external impressions, allowing Tristram’s obsession with his absent lady to grow while simultaneously removing him from society.

The hall is the product of an enclosed, cupidous imagination, what Michael Camille calls an “idol of the mind” (1989, 307–8). Since this unhealthy inventive activity stems directly from the love potion that Tristram and Ísönd unwittingly drink, it is an extreme and particularly vivid example of the devastating effects of love-madness on the psyche. The inclusion of this episode in the saga therefore not only points to Thomas’s interest in contemporary philosophical and artistic debates about the relationship between desire, imagination, and idolatry, but also indicates the Norse translator’s (and perhaps his audience’s) interest in such topics. The Old Norse translation might express characters’ interiority differently than continental romance, but interiority and psychological depth are nevertheless present in an episode such as the Hall of Statues. Showing its protagonist increasingly isolated in a hall that is the product of his own imagination, the saga forcefully depicts the idolatrous potential of the isolated, lovesick mind.

Tristrams saga is an important part of the European Tristan-corpus as a whole. Indeed, since Thomas’s Tristran is extant only in fragmentary form, the...