Tristram, Iseult, and the potion

Tristram is sent to Ireland to bring back Iseult as a bride for his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. Her mother, meaning well, prepares a drink for the wedding night and entrusts it to Iseult's maid: a love potion of such power and magic that did any two drink thereof they must needs, without will of their own, love each other above all things.

On the ship, hot and thirsty, Tristram and Iseult drink it.

Gottfried von Strassburg builds his entire poem on the implication of that accident, and it is a genuinely radical argument. The Arthurian tradition's central scandal is Lancelot and Guinevere, and eight centuries of readers have argued about their guilt — did they choose, could they have done otherwise, is the love ennobling or damning? Gottfried removes the variable. Tristram and Iseult did not choose. There was no moment of decision to examine, nothing for a confessor to work with, no sin in any sense a court could recognise.

And they are destroyed exactly as thoroughly. The deceptions, the discoveries, the exiles, the deaths — all of it happens, in the same order, with the same result.

The conclusion is uncomfortable and it is meant to be: whatever this literature's tragedy of love is about, it is not about consent.

Malory pulls the whole story into the Morte and gives it more space than the Grail quest — a third of the book — turning Tristram into a knight of the Round Table, a hunter and a harper, and much the funniest man in it. And then he kills him in a sentence: Mark murders him from behind while he sits harping before Iseult.