There are three Old Irish tale-types that feed into the Tristan legend: 1. aitheda (or, elopement tales), in which a young woman runs away from her older husband with a younger man; 2. tochmarca (or, courtship tales), in which a woman takes an active part in negotiating a relationship with a man of her choosing that results in marriage; and 3. immrama (or, voyage tales), in which the hero takes a sea voyage to the Otherworld.
The Old Irish tales that share the most in common with Tristan and Isolt’s doomed affair are Tochmarc Emire (“The Wooing of Emer”), a tenth-century aithed; and Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (“The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne”), an aithed whose earliest text dates to the Early Modern Irish period but whose plot and characters can be traced to the tenth century. In these stories, the female characters wield tremendous power and are closer to their mythological roots as goddesses. Other tales that are reminiscent of Branwen’s complicated relationship with Isolt include the ninth- or tenth-century Tochmarc Becfhola (“The Wooing of Becfhola”) and the twelfth-century Fingal Rónaín (“Rónán’s act of kinslaying”).
When the Romans withdrew from Britain in the fifth century, many residents from the south of the island immigrated to northern France. For the next five centuries, trade and communication was maintained between Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany. The Bretons spoke a language similar to Welsh and Cornish, which facilitated the sharing of the Arthurian legends, to which they added their own folktales. By the twelfth century, the professional Breton conteurs (storytellers) had become the most popular court entertainers in Europe, and it was these wandering minstrels who brought the Tristan legends to the royal French and Anglo-Norman courts—including that of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, famed for her patronage of the troubadours in the south of France.
The Breton songs of Tristan’s exploits were soon recorded as verse romances by the Anglo-Norman poets Béroul, Thomas d’Angleterre, and Marie de France (notably, the only woman), as well as the German Eilhart von Oberge. Béroul’s and Eilhart’s retellings belong to what is often called the version commune (primitive version), meaning they are closer to their folkloric heritage. Thomas’s Tristan forms part of the version courtoise (courtly version), which is influenced by the courtly love ideal.
The twelfth century is often credited with the birth of romance, and Tristan is at least partially responsible. Which is not to say that people didn’t fall in love before then, of course (!), but rather that for the first time, the sexual love between a man and a woman, usually forbidden, became a central concern of literature. The first consumers of this new genre in which a knight pledges fealty to a distant, unobtainable (often married) lady were royal and aristocratic women and, like romance readers today, their appetite was voracious. While the audience was female, the poets and authors were male, often clerics in the service of noblewomen. The poetry produced at the behest of female aristocratic patrons might therefore be considered the first fan fiction.
However, while the courtly lady may have appeared to have the power over her besotted knight, in reality noblewomen were rapidly losing property and inheritance rights as the aristocracy became a closed class ruled by strict patrilinear descent. Legends like that of Tristan and Isolt provided a means of escape for noblewomen who were undoubtedly in less than physically and emotionally satisfying marriages of their own, while also reinforcing women’s increasingly objectified status. The portrayal of women in the Tristan legends therefore exemplifies the conflict between the forceful protagonists of its Celtic origins and the new idealized but dehumanized courtly lady.
It is this conflict that particularly interests me as a storyteller and which I explore through my own female characters. Because the legend as I have inherited it is a mix of concerns from different historical epochs, I decided to set my retelling in a more fantastical context that allowed me to pick and choose the aspects of the tradition that best suited Branwen’s story. In this way, I also followed in the footsteps of the medieval authors who, while they might make references to real places or kings, weren’t particularly concerned with accuracy. The stories they produced weren’t so much historical fiction as we think of it today but more akin to fantasy.
During the nineteenth century, the German composer Richard Wagner drew on his countryman Gottfried von Strassburg’s celebrated thirteenth-century verse romance of Tristan as inspiration for his now ubiquitous opera. Gottfried had, in turn, used the Anglo-Norman version of Thomas d’Angleterre as his source material, demonstrating the unending cycle of inspiration and adaption. The Tristan legends started as distinct traditions that were grafted onto the Arthurian corpus (possibly in Wales, possibly on the Continent) and became forever intertwined with the thirteenth-century prose romances.
Concurrently with Gottfried, there was a complete Old Norse adaption by Brother Róbert, a Norwegian cleric, and the Tristan legends gained popularity not only throughout Scandinavia but on the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy. There were also early Czech and Belarusian versions, and it was later translated into Polish and Russian. Dante also references the ill-fated lovers in his fourteenth-century Inferno, and Sir Thomas Malory devoted an entire book to Tristan in his fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur, one of the most famous works in the English language.
The popularity of Tristan and Isolt fell off abruptly during the Renaissance but was revived by the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who sought an antidote to the changes enacted by the Industrial Revolution—although they viewed their medieval past through very rose-tinted glasses. Nevertheless, the preoccupation with Tristan and Isolt, as well as their supporting characters, has persisted for more than a millennium and it would be surprising if it did not persist for another.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristina Pérez is a half-Argentine, half-Norwegian native New Yorker who has spent the past two decades living in Europe and Asia. She holds a PhD in Medieval Literature from the University of Cambridge and has taught at the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong. Wild Savage Stars is the second book in the Sweet Black Waves Trilogy. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Map
Dedication
Dramatis Personæ
Part I. Unto the Breach
The Queen’s Champion
Land of Giants
Doors to Nowhere
The Wild Moon
Red-Hot Ashes
A True Queen
Kernyv Forever
A War in the Otherworld
The Only Hostage
Stone of Waiting
The Intoxicating One
The White Moor
Games of Chance
A Year Without Death
Dressed in Fire
Before the Beginning
First Night
Light me From the Inside
Part II. Into the Wreck
Quickening
Onward, Armorica
All That We Are
The World you Thought you Lived In
Ways of Seeing
Allies
The Touch of Dhusnos
Just Once
Matrona
Like a Dragon
Ériu’s Comfort
Nothing but Sand
False Flag
Death in the Night
A Thousand Seas
The True Heir
A Better Path
Don’t Speak
No Exit
Become the Dark
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Sources, Literary Transmission, and World-Building
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Kristina Pérez
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First hardcover edition, 2019
eBook edition, August 2019
eISBN 9781250132840
An té a dhéanfadh cóip den leabhar seo, gan chead, gan chomhairle, dhíbreodh é go Teach Dhuinn.
Wild Savage Stars Page 37
