A Noble Heart:  The Courtly Love of Tristan and Isolde

 

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain is our first account of Arthur as a king. We now know from the Chronicles that he was not a king but a dux belloruni, a war leader who assisted the British kings in defending the land against the incoming Anglo-Saxons and Jutes. He died, and the land was conquered - at least what we now call England was conquered. The Celtic lands and the earlier Celtic people were not - the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Irish, and the people of the Isle of Man. Well, that's a treasure trove, you might say, of the old Celtic traditions. It's out of there and Brittany that this material comes. 

 

            Then we have the conquest of the English who have conquered the Celts. The conquest of the English in 1066 - the only date that most people know - by William the Conqueror brings the north French, really the Norman people, into Britain. 

 

            The situation was much as it is on a college campus. The freshmen have been persecuted by the sophomores. The Celts have been persecuted by the English. Next year they all move up. In comes another freshman class. This earlier freshman class is now the sophomore class, and they're doing the persecuting. But this sophomore class was formerly the freshman class that was persecuted by the sophomores who are now the juniors. So there's a kind of fellowship between the juniors and the freshmen against the sophomores. Accordingly, the Celts (the juniors) and the Normans (the freshmen) are against the English (the sophomores). 

 

            The English were put out into the pigsties and nobody spoke English in England. They all spoke Norman French. To this day, we use Norman French words for the meat that appears on the table and English words for the meat that is out on the farm. Swine out there, pork at the table. Calves out there, veal at the table. 

 

            These Normans didn't have TV, so what did they do with their time? Well, they liked to hear stories, and the old Celtic tales are some of the best stories in the world. So this whole tradition of oral bardic literature that has grown up - "The Hope of the Bretons" and so forth - is recounted in the Norman courts by the bards. 

 

            Meanwhile, there's this great, great dame of the whole Middle Ages: Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was the wife of two great kings. She was married to King Louis of France, went with him on the Crusades, and came back completely bored with Louis. So one morning he wakes up and discovers that Eleanor has gone to marry the future king of England, Henry II. So she's the wife of two kings, she's the mother of King Richard the Lion-Heart and of King John, and she's the grandmother of every royal head in the land of Europe in the next generation. She's it. Her period is exactly the period of the Grail romances. 

 

            Now where did Eleanor of Aquitaine come from? She came from the south of France. So she brings the south of France to the English throne and is the inheritor of the traditions of the whole of Europe. Her grandfather, William of Poitiers, was the first of the troubadours. Now the Arthurian tradition, through the bards, goes to the Continent. But the Continent isn't interested in Arthur, it's interested in his knights - the stories of these Celtic heroes transformed into Christian, armor-clad knights. Meanwhile, the stories come into the field of courtly love. Eleanor, her granddaughter Blanche of Castile, and her daughter Marie of Champagne were the great ladies of the period. They were the ones who were the cultivators of the whole theme of courtly love. 

 

            And as I've said already, courtly love had to do with love and not with marriage. The whole tradition of the troubadours has to do with love, and our tradition of psychology begins at that time. What is the psychology of love? What happens when this thing strikes? There were debates among the troubadours as to what love was. One of the most apt formulations was that of the troubadour Girhault de Borneilh: "The eyes are the scouts of the heart. The eyes go forth to find an image to recommend to the heart. And when the eyes have found such an image, if the heart [and here's the key word] is a gentle heart [that means a heart capable not simply of lust but of love, two totally different things] then love is born." This is news. 

 

            When you hear talk about love from pulpits, there are two kinds of love, and neither one is personal. The first kind of love is lust, which I define as the zeal of the organs for each other. It's completely impersonal. The other kind of love is agape, spiritual love - "love thy neighbor as thyself" - no matter who it is. It, too, is completely impersonal. Now here comes Europe, the personal experience: "The eyes go forth to find an image to recommend to the heart." This is not a heart of lust, but a heart that knows how to respond to an image. That's the rescue - delight in the manifestation of the divine in a person. When the heart is completely taken by this image of love, nothing else counts; and in the courtly tradition, nothing else  counted. Amour. And what is the principal threat? Honor. So you find in these traditions of the Middle Ages this conflict between honor and love. The ultimate sacrifice for a noble heart is the sacrifice of honor for love. So that's the theme that we're up against here. 

 

            There are a lot of wonderful stories about the troubadours. There's an entire volume from the twelfth century on the lives of the troubadours and their wild absurdities to win the woman's regard. One troubadour falls in love with a woman whose name means wolf. He clothes himself in a wolf skin and pretends, as a wolf, to attack a flock of sheep. Of course the sheep dogs pounce on him and tear him to pieces and he's in pretty bad shape, so he's taken into the woman's castle to be healed-by her and her husband. Another buys himself the robe of a leper and cuts off two of his fingers and then sits among the lepers. The lady comes out of her castle and says, "Well, my God, there's Gerard." So he wins her regard that way. These troubadour stories are wonderful. 

 

            Then there were the courts of love, where the ladies sat in judgment on cases. For example, there's one very famous case of a gentleman who proposes himself to a lady as her lover, but she says, "No. I have a lover. But if I cast him off or lose him, then you're next in line." Well, her husband dies, she marries her lover, and along comes Buddy, who says, "Here I am." She says, "Why no, I've married my lover." He says, "Well, you know there is no such thing as married love." So he brought it to the court, which declared that married love is a contradiction in terms and that he was next in line. So you have this tension in the medieval world between these two traditions. 

 

            The principal language for the celebration of courtly love was Provencal, or langue d'oc, the language of the south of France. I spent a whole year working on langue d'oc at the University of Paris, and it's pretty boring stuff. But the interest is formal; for example, how to get the lady's name into the poem without her husband recognizing it. So a lot of the intricacies of poetic virtuosity have to do with this hidden address to the lady. 

 

            An important thing about courtly love is that the lady must assure herself that the suitor is a gentle heart and not just a lusty boy. So you have this whole tradition of delay, and test, and trial. If the chap is good with a sword and a lance, he's sent out to guard a bridge. Traffic in the Middle Ages was considerably encumbered by young men guarding bridges who wouldn't let anybody across. Or if he's better with the pen than with the sword, he's told to write poems, things like that. When the lady is assured that what is being addressed to her is the gentle and not the lusty heart, she may grant what is known as merci. That's a technical term. Now merci, and the degree of merci that's granted, will depend on the lady's opinion of the lover. It may consist in the privilege of kissing her on the back of the neck once every Whitsuntide, or it may go considerably further than that. The lady who accepts service without, at some time, ultimately expressing either merci or rejection is sauvage, "savage." In one medieval story of a woman who was sauvage, her suitor, trying to prove himself in battle, disports in a wild way and gets killed. Then she realizes. 

 

            So the Arthurian romances, the stories of the knights, appear on the Continent. The first writer was Chretien de Troyes, the court poet of Marie of Champagne. Chretien began writing at the end of the twelfth century -1160 to 1190 are the main dates. It used to be thought that he invented these stories. We now know he did not. He was the one who first set down the stories of the Celtic, bardic storytellers. His first work, now lost, was his Tristan. The date would have been something like 1160. A whole spate of Tristans followed. Thomas of Britain is a major figure, but the great one, the one that Wagner used, is that of Gottfried von Strassburg, which dates from about 1210 - half a century after Chretien. 

 

            Well, the ladies of the court were not altogether pleased with Tristan. A young couple drink a potion and are just seized with love and then go out into the forest. So it is a wild love in the forest. No, love must be in the court.

 

            The second work by Chretien - you can see he was writing for Marie - was Erec. It's a wonderful story of a young knight who has had great fame and then falls in love. Now this is a modern as well as an ancient theme. His career is wrecked by his devotion to his love. This is the theme, honor or love. His honor is wrecked. He is no longer winning the battles, and when he realizes this, he becomes rejective of her. This is the normal thing for today, you know: you marry at twenty-two and divorce at twenty-eight to recover. So he pushes her aside and then goes forth to win back his fame. She trots along behind him - she's right there all the time - and then finally her loyalty to him, in her rejection, solves the whole problem. 

 

            The next is Chretien's Cliges, a strange story. There were a lot of stories coming in from the Orient at this time, and there's a lot of Oriental stuff in Cliges. Some scholars say this is a moral story, whereas the others with adultery in them are immoral. This is a moral story. The lady will not grant merci to her lover, because she's married and will not commit adultery. So they bring it about that her husband dies, and then she can have her lover. That's a moral story, but it's one that never got very far in the Middle Ages. Nobody picked that one up. 

 

            Now comes the great story of Chretien, his Lancelot. Lancelot was Arthur's greatest knight, who falls in love with Guinevere and goes through the whole ordeal. He becomes le fou, the one who's absolutely mad for love, and the two of them are completely engaged in a torrid passion. Well, the great story is that she's abducted. These women in the Middle Ages, and also in the earlier Greek tradition, have a habit of being abducted and then saved. Helen of Troy was abducted several times. The whole Trojan War was fought to get her back from Menelaus.

 

            Well, Guinevere kept being abducted, and this time she's abducted by the lord of a castle which is equated with the underworld. Arthur doesn't go to get her back; Lancelot goes. And he goes with such speed that he rides two horses to death. Well, after you've lost two horses, and you don't have another, and here you are walking in a suit of armor, you're not getting very far very fast. He's plowing along there, and a cart, driven by a churl, a peasant, passes him. In the cart are people who are being taken to be hanged or punished in one way or another. And he thinks, "If I were in that cart I'd get faster to Guinevere's rescue. But then, this would be a loss of honor to my armor, and my role as knight." So he hesitates for three steps before getting into the cart. But he does get in, and an adventure begins. 

 

            Well, the adventure includes a couple of trials, one of which is my favorite for the whole Middle Ages-the Trial of the Perilous Bed. A number of knights have to experience the Perilous Bed. You come into a room that's absolutely empty, except in the middle of it is a bed on rollers. You are to come in dressed in your full armor - sword, spear, shield, all that heavy stuff - and get into that bed. Well, as the knight approaches the bed, it shears away to one side. So he comes again, and it goes the other way. The knight finally thinks, "I've got to jump." So with his full gear, he jumps into the bed, and as soon as he hits the bed, it starts bucking like a bronco all over the room, banging against the walls and all that kind of thing, and then it stops. Then he's told, "It's not finished yet. Keep your armor on and keep your shield over yourself." And then arrows and crossbow bolts pummel him - bang, bang, bang, bang. Then a lion appears and attacks the knight, but he cuts off the lion's feet, and the two of them end up lying there in a pool of blood. 

 

            Then the ladies of the castle that's to be disenchanted by this great event come in and see their knight, their savior, lying there looking dead. One of them takes a bit of fur from her garment and puts it in front of his nose and it moves ever so slightly - he's breathing, he's alive. So, they nurse him back to health, and the castle is disenchanted. Lancelot went through this. 

 

            My great friend Heinrich Zimmer, talking about these materials, one time asked, "What's the meaning of a trial of this kind?" This is what you must do if you're going to interpret symbols. You've got to figure out the meaning of a thing like this. His answer, and I think it's probably correct, is that this is the masculine experience of the feminine temperament: it doesn't quite make sense, but there it is. That's the way it's going this time, that's the way it's going that. And he said, "The trial is to hold on." Be patient and don't try to solve it. Just endure it, and then all the boons of beautiful womanhood will be yours. 

 

            Well, the next trial of our friend Lancelot is what is known as the Sword Bridge. This is a bridge, made of a sword, across a roaring torrent. Lancelot has to go across with bare hands and feet on the sharp edge of the sword. Perhaps you know Somerset Maugham's novel entitled The Razor's Edge. This is a motif from the Kana Upanishad. "Any trip along your own path is a razor's edge." It really is; nobody's done it before. And it's so easy - particularly if what you're following is your bliss, your passion - it's so easy to tip over and fall into a torrent of passion that sweeps you away. This is a real lesson. So, having survived the Perilous Bed, Lancelot survives the Sword Bridge, and then he has disenchanted the castle in which Guinevere is a captive. He comes in to receive her great greeting and gratitude. But she's as cold as ice. Why? Because he hesitated for three steps before getting in that cart. How did she know? She's the goddess: women know these things. So that's the beautiful story of Lancelot, and it's the great one, Chretien's best. 

 

            His next story, Yvain, is one that appears also in a Welsh version, known as the Lady of the Fountain. I won't go through the whole story, just a bare outline. A knight comes to Arthur's court and tells of an adventure in which he has failed. There was a castle, a tree, a spring under the tree, a stone beside the spring, a ladle hanging from the tree, and the adventure consisted in dipping water from the spring onto the stone, at which moment a terrific storm arose, all the leaves and birds were blown from the tree, and out of the castle came storming the Black Knight-the thunder knight-who engaged in combat with the one that had dipped the water and overthrew him. Well, Sir Yvain, on hearing this story, says he's going to attempt the adventure. And he does. And when the knight comes out, Yvain runs his lance through the knight's body. The dying knight turns and, riding his horse still, gallops into the castle. Yvain follows, but gets caught with his horse between the portcullises, the heavy castle gates that drop down. A beautiful young girl in the castle, the queen's serving maid, sees him thus caught and thinks, "This is a beautiful knight. He should become the husband of my lady who has just lost her husband." This is Frazer's story of The Golden Bough, where the one that kills the priest becomes the priest of the queen. It's a hangover of an old, old mythological theme. 

 

            Yvain does become her spouse. He forgets Arthur's court, and you know what this is: you have found your bliss, but it has disengaged you from your world of duties. So he's there with her, and Arthur's knights come and pour water on the stone. He has to come out then as the Thunder Knight, and he engages in combat with Gawain. Neither one can defeat the other, and neither one knows who the other is. Then they unhelmet themselves, and Gawain says, "Oh, hi, Yvain. Come on back to the court." So then he goes with Arthur's knights to the court and forgets the lady. 

 

            This is a basic spiritual problem: the split between the two worlds. The lady then sends a messenger and tells him, "You have lost me." Yvain then tries the adventure of getting back to her. The whole story is about the ordeal of recovering the relationship to your true being and then bringing her to the court. It's the whole problem of life. It's right there in that story. Do you understand? That's the problem. 

 

            So to review: Chretien wrote a Tristan that's been lost, and then Erec, Cliges, Lancelot, Yvain, and then he writes Perceval, which is his Grail story. But before I speak about Parzival, I first want to recount the Tristan story and bring out the main points there. 

 

            There were about six or eight Tristans in the Middle Ages. The most important one is that of Gottfried von Strassburg, who died before he finished it, so one has to turn to the story on which he was modeling his own. The characteristic of medieval storytelling is that you don't invent the story, you develop it. You take a traditional story and interpret it - give it new depth and meaning in terms of the conditions of your particular day. Now, the story of Tristan is of a youth whose parents have died. A typical epic hero is an orphan or the son of a widow. Tristan's mother's brother is King Mark of Cornwall. Tristan is born in Brittany. So here we have Brittany and Cornwall, the whole Celtic world. Tristan goes to his uncle's castle in Cornwall and arrives just at the time that an emissary, Morold, has come from the court of Ireland in Dublin. The Irish king has conquered the Cornish king, and he requires that every four or five years young boys and girls be sent to serve at the Irish court. This is based on the Cretan story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Morold has come to collect the youths and maidens. 

 

            The queen of Ireland, Isolt, is Isolde's mother. She has prepared a poison and put it on the sword of Morold. Tristan says to his uncle, "Let me handle that guy." His uncle says, "This is very dangerous." Tristan says, "No, this is the only way." So a jousting, a champion's battle, is prepared between Morold and Tristan. 

 

            Tristan rides against Morold. Morold's sword comes down on his knee, cuts him, the poison is injected, he's as good as dead. He replies by bringing his sword down on Morold's head, and splitting his helmet, and a piece of Tristan's sword remains in Morold's skull. 

 

            When Morold's body is brought back to Ireland, his niece, Isolde, who loved her uncle, takes the piece of Tristan's sword from his head and puts it in her little treasure chest - to remember Uncle Morold. 

 

            Meanwhile, Tristan becomes terribly sick. The wound is festering, and gangrene sets in. He says to his uncle, "Just put me in a little boat with my harp, and the boat will carry me to the source of this poison." And indeed, by magic the boat carries him to Dublin Bay. People hear this beautiful music - he was a miraculous young man - and they bring him to Queen Isolt to be cured. Since Tristan has disguised himself and calls himself Tantrist, Isolt does not recognize this chap nor realize that it is her poison that is killing him, and she cures him. 

 

            When the wound has healed to such an extent that the stench of his presence can be tolerated, she invites her daughter, Isolde, in to hear him play the harp. He plays wonderfully, and immediately the two fall in love, only they don't know it. This is the whole understanding of this story by Gottfried. They are crazy in love with each other, but they just don't know it. Tristan plays the harp better than he's ever played it in his life, and he becomes Isolde's harp teacher. 

 

            The model for this was the story of Abelard and Heloise, which dates from 1116, one century earlier. Abelard was Heloise's teacher and seduced her. Tristan is the teacher of Isolde. 

 

            Now this silly boy, when he's cured, goes back to Cornwall and says, "Oh, Uncle Mark, I met the most wonderful girl. She'd be just the wife for you." He speaks so gloriously of this wonderful girl that his uncle and the barons say, 'Well, why don't you go over and fetch her?" So Tristan, calling himself Tantrist again, goes back to fetch Isolde for his Uncle Mark. 

 

            Do you see the courtly love problem here? Tristan has fallen in love. His uncle has never seen Isolde. Mark and Isolde's marriage is standard medieval violence. There's no love in it. So from the point of view of the courtly love, Mark is disqualified. He's simply what is technically called le jaloux, "the jealous one" - that's the husband. 

 

            So Tristan goes back to fetch Isolde. Well, what has happened is that a great dragon has begun to trouble the country, and the king has said, "The person who kills that dragon can have Isolde as his wife." That's good old standard medieval stuff again. The dragon's a little bit unusual, but not in stories. Meanwhile, there is a young seneschal, or courtier, who wants Isolde, but doesn't have the guts to kill the dragon. But he keeps hanging around. When anyone is going to kill the dragon, he wants to be there. Perhaps he can make the claim. So, Tristan rides at the dragon. 

 

            Now Gottfried was a cleric, a low-level priest, not a noble or a warrior, and he describes the killing of the dragon in the most amusing, comical way: the dragon bites off the first half of the horse - that kind of thing. Anyway, Tristan kills the dragon with his lance, the dragon expires, and Tristan, to stake his claim, cuts out the dragon's tongue and puts it in his shirt. Now that's the worst thing you can do with a dragon's tongue, because it's poisonous. 

 

            So Tristan is walking along with the dragon's tongue inside his shirt, and it overtakes him, and he falls into a pool. There he is, under the water, and all that's sticking out is his nose. The other chap, meanwhile, cuts off the dragon's head and presents it as his claim for Isolde. 

 

            Well, Isolde and her mother are out walking and they come past this pool, and they look down. "Why, look at that! There's a nose, and then under that a man!" So, they take Tristan out, and, since Queen Isolt is used to curing people, they take him home to cure him. His sword and his armor are with him. 

 

            Soon Tristan is recovering pretty well, and one fine day, when he's in the bathtub, Isolde is fooling around with his armor. She pulls the sword out of the sheath and Wow! There's a nick in the sword. She runs to her little treasure chest and gets the piece of sword that came out of Uncle Morold's head. It fits. So, with the sword in her hand, she goes to Tristan, who's still in the bathtub, and raises the sword to strike him. But he says, "Hold on. You kill me, and that other guy gets you." Well, the sword was getting kind of heavy anyhow, so she let that one go. 

 

            When Tristan's finally cured, there comes this wonderful affair of the giving of Isolde to the killer of the dragon. The lout comes in with the dragon's head, and Tristan just says, "Let's open the mouth and see what's inside. There's no tongue. Where's the tongue? Well, right here." 

 

            So Tristan gets the girl, but instead of taking her for himself, he's going to take her back to King Mark. So you can see what a silly boy he is. He's only fifteen years old, so he doesn't know what's actually happened to him. 

 

            Isolde's mother then prepares a love potion, but there's a secret here. The poison and the love potion are essentially the same potion - the pain of love, the sickness unto death that no doctors can cure, all that sort of thing. So the woman who brought him there by poisoning him is now preparing the love potion that's going to be the fulfillment of this whole affair. Next comes the sequence we previously recounted: Brangaene, little Isolde's nurse, is instructed to go with them, keep the love potion, and present it to Mark and Isolde at the time of their marriage; but on the boat to Cornwall, she is careless, and Tristan and Isolde drink the potion. 

 

            Now comes a problem, a theological problem. If the love potion compels you to love, then the love of Tristan and Isolde, although it is adulterous, is not a mortal sin. To commit a mortal sin you must have a serious matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent of the will. If it's magic that's done it, there's no consent of the will, and it's a perfectly innocent love. Let's think about that. To resolve this problem, several of the authors of the Tristan story fixed it up so that the love potion would work for two or three years, and then, when it stops, sin begins. 

 

            So the couple drink the potion, and here's the situation I spoke of earlier: you have drunk your death. It's a great heroic statement in the Middle Ages. "I accept hellfire for this, and it won't be hell if I am burning with the love for Isolde." That's what it's saying. So, comes the wedding. The nastiest bit in the whole story is that Isolde, who can't bear the idea of being with Mark, persuades Brangaene to take her place in bed for the marriage night. Brangaene plays the role, and King Mark thinks it's Isolde. Now he's doubly disqualified. This is inattention to details, which just eliminates him.   

 

            So Tristan and Isolde are having their affair, and King Mark presently becomes aware of it. Properly, they should be killed, but he can't bear it. He loves them both. This is a noble man. And this is a beautiful, beautiful handling of the problem: he just says, "Get out of my sight. Go away." And they go into the forest. 

 

            What follows are the forest years of Tristan and Isolde. They come to a cave, a cave fashioned by the giants of pre-Christian times - we're back to the old Celtic Germanic time - and over the entrance is an inscription, "A Chapel for Lovers." They go in, and the whole chapel is symbolic. Every detail of it has symbolic meaning - chastity, loyalty, purity, all this kind of thing. All these terms have new meanings, of course, in this context. Where the altar would have been, there is a bed of crystal, and the sacrament of this altar is the sacrament of sex. Gottfried von Strassburg meant this, and the medieval people meant this. The sacrament of love is sexual intercourse. And it is a sacrament. 

 

            Well, they're in the bed, and it's beautiful, and directly above are two openings in the roof through which light comes. One fine day, they hear off in the woods the sound of hunting horns, the hunting horns of King Mark. Tristan thinks, "If King Mark comes and looks down through those openings and sees us asleep together, this will be too bad." So what does he do? He places his sword between himself and Isolde. Do you catch the sense of this? Honor against love? This is the sin of Tristan: to have put the sword between. 

 

            When Mark looks down, indeed he does see the two, with the sword between them, and he says, "Oh, I have misunderstood them." So he invites them back to court, and that, supposedly, is the end of their affair. Of course, they continue the affair, they are caught again, and this time there's no fooling. Tristan is exiled to Brittany, but before he goes, Isolde has to undergo an ordeal, which may have been an actual ordeal in the Middle Ages. She has to take an oath that she has not lain with any man but her husband. Having taken that oath, she is to take in her hand a red-hot iron bar. If her hand is not burned, she is vindicated and cleared of the accusation. 

 

            On the way to this trial, Isolde has to cross a river in a boat. So Tristan, in disguise, arranges to take the job of the boatman. So he's the ferryman who ferries her across the river, and when he has to lift her out of the boat, he manages to trip and fall on top of her. 

 

            Then she goes to the trial, where she says, "I've lain with no man but my husband and the boatman that fell on top of me." She didn't tell a lie, and the iron bar didn't burn her hand. Gottfried says, "And so you see, Christ is like a weather vane; he goes where the wind blows." That may be why Gottfried didn't finish the book.

No one knows how he died, but they were burning people to death in those days for statements of that kind. 

 

            Anyhow, Tristan goes to Brittany, and now comes the last part of the story. In Brittany, he hears of a young lady whose name is Isolde. She is known as Isolde of the White Hands. And this is the kind of thing that happens in medieval romance: he falls in love with the name, and so he marries the lady, poor little Isolde of the White Hands. But because she isn't the Isolde, he can't have intercourse with her, he can't bring himself to that act. 

 

            So she's out riding with her brother one day and the horse steps into a puddle and the water splashes up high on her thigh and she says to her brother, "The horse is bolder than Tristan." And her brother says, "What?" She explains, and he goes to Tristan and complains. But when Tristan tells him of his love for the other

Isolde, he understands the whole thing. 

 

            Tristan then gets into a battle and is wounded unto death. The only person who could cure him would be the Isolde that he loves, so he sends his wife's brother to bring her to him. They have an arrangement: if Isolde has consented to come, the boat will have a white sail; if she has refused, it will have a black sail. So he's dying in his wife's arms, the boat is coming, and she tells him the sail is black - actually it's white - and he dies. There's the Tristan story. There are echoes of Theseus and the Minotaur throughout it. 

 

            So the situation is love against marriage, and you might call it the counterculture against the culture. Marriages in medieval Europe were customarily arranged by the families, the aristocracy regarded this as intolerable, and so there was a celebration of the theme of love. How do we bring these things together? 

 

            I want now to give you the Grail answer, which is, in my thinking, one of the great, great stories of the Middle Ages. I think Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the high story of the Middle Ages. I would put it above Dante's Divine Comedy, for Dante ends up in heaven, while Gottfried ends up on earth, and the thing is solved here, now, in the flesh, and in a magnificent way.