Iseult

Iseult of Ireland is fetched across the sea to marry a man she has never met, and on the voyage she and her escort drink a potion her own mother brewed for the wedding night. From that point neither of them has a will in the matter.

The tradition is unusually kind to her as a result. Guinevere's affair is a choice and is judged as one; Iseult's is a chemical fact. Gottfried builds an entire poem on the distinction, and readers have argued ever since about whether it makes her innocent or merely doomed.

Malory keeps her as a courtly figure and gives her a rival with almost the same name — Iseult of the White Hands, whom Tristram marries and does not touch, which is its own small cruelty. She survives Tristram's murder and dies over his body.

Malory's handling of her is complicated by a second Iseult. After years of separation Tristram marries Iseult of the White Hands, in Brittany, largely because of the name — and then does not touch her, which the tradition presents as fidelity and which is also a piece of quiet cruelty toward a woman who has done nothing.

The ending belongs to the first Iseult. When Mark murders Tristram as he sits harping, she is there, and she dies over his body. The Welsh and French traditions give the pair a stranger memorial: from their graves grow two trees, or a briar and a vine, which meet above the church and cannot be cut apart. It is the one image in this literature that grants a pair of lovers something after death, and it is granted to the two who never chose each other.