On The Legend Of Tristan

Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Iseult) remains one of the most popular medieval romances ever written. The tales originated in Germany, but bards in France and Britain composed their own versions of the story, a tale of adultery, betrayal, mistaken identity, and thwarted love. Eisner’s The Tristan Legend offers a study of the sources of the Tristan romance, tracing them through the various versions of the legend

When two boys save an old man from robbers, they learn of a competition in Londinium to decide the next king of Britain. The elder, Kay, is determined to prove himself worthy as a knight or a king. The younger is Arthur, a farm boy through and through - until he sees the sword in the stone.

First Published in 2002.

Tristan is the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall and one of his finest knights. Tristan is sent to Ireland to bring home Mark's bride, Princess Isolde. While in Ireland, Tristan slays a dragon and wins Isolde's hand for his uncle. But, through a twist of fate, Tristan and Isolde fall in love on the journey back to Cornwall.

I was a forever-bachelor kind of guy. I never planned on settling down. I never wanted a family of my own. Until a phone call came, the one woman I'd secretly loved my entire life needed my help. I went from bars and hook-ups to late nights on the couch. When her daughter is born, I find myself captivated by both of them, and falling deeper in love. What happened to my forever-bachelor life, and is that the life I want?

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords. The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates--the concepts of materiality and visuality--without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission. "Comprehensive and cutting edge, Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde defines the moment in the history of Tristan scholarship. The essays, gathered from both sides of the Atlantic, enrich and expand the key concepts of materiality and visuality to account for the proliferation of the Tristan story in an astonishing range of media. The collection gives scholars in several disciplines the tools to explore the productive connections between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture." --Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis "This is a major collection of essays that gives new direction to the study of one of the most important poets of the Middle Ages and one of the most fascinating works of literature from the period." --C. Stephen Jaeger, University of Illinois "Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde successfully opens up the conversation between literary historians and art historians on its intended subject, and as such is an original contribution to the field. The editors are well-versed in past and current medieval, and specifically Tristan, scholarship, and their substantial introduction lays out the methodology behind the investigation as well as the structure of the book." --Denise Della Rossa, University of Notre Dame