The Myth of Tristan and Isolde

It is advisable to read the tale – www.timelessmyths.com/arthurian/tristan.html - before reading the article, as well as the various links brought here, because of lack of space for more detailed explanations. The purpose of this article is to show the pagan mythical origins which exist at the basis of the story of Tristan and Isolde. This story has appeared in writing in practically all forms of literature from ancient times till today. As a Medieval legend, it was known as a couple of 12th cent. romances, and appeared in poetic form by Thomas and by Gottfried of Strasberg in the 14th cent.; in the 15th cent. it formed a part of the Arthurian legends by Sir Arthur Malory in his book La Morte d'Arthur; there is also an Icelandic balad about the death of Tristan. It was the basis for Wagner's opera of that name, and for a novel by Joseph Bedier in the 19th cent., and it was the background of modern poetry in Hebrew of the 20th cent., by the poet Avraham Balaban. My point in this articles is that all these different version were initially based on a prehistorical pagan myth, which never appeared in writing but it parallels the main elements of ancient myths from prehistoric, pre-writing, Europe and the Middle East. To clarify, there is a need to explain the diffrences between the various styles of writings, in order to justify the apellation used in the title. A myth is a symbolic story using mainly divine beings as its main characters; such myth is many times used in rituals, enacting the various characters in the story as representatives of either the forces of nature, or various groups of people. A myth can be religious in purpose, it can be historical or it can present social changes. The best known pagan myth tells the story of the Canaanite divinities Anat, Baal and Mot as they appeare in the 14th cent. b.c. Ugaritic scripts – http://www.phoenicia.org/pagan.html . The characters of the twin-brothers Baal and Mot represent, respectively, the motivated spirits (i.e., gods) of the rains and liveliness of winter and the dry death of summer in the Middle Eastern area; their names mean, respectively, Lord and Death. These seasonal gods rival for the love of their sister-lover Anat, who represents the Goddess of Nature in charge of the events created by the battle between the rival gods and their cyclic dying and coming back to life in turns. In this Canaanite myth, much later than prehistorical times, the sistere-lover figure of the Goddess is separate from the Mother Goddess, who is Atherat, mother of all the gods (about the nature of the Goddess see below). A known historical myth is the story of Biblical Abraham's wanderings with his family from his place of origin in the south of Mesopotamia, via the northern part of Syria, to the Land of Canaan – thus explaining the origins and purpose of the Jewish people. Various myths presenting social changes are described by Robert Graves in his book The Greek Myths, telling of the taking over of a prehistoric Pelasgian matrilineal society in Greece by patriarchal tribes invading from Central Asia. In contrast to symbolic myth, which is based on actual events, the legend, known sometimes more popularly as a fairytale, is a fantastic story of human characters encountering all sorts of wonderful creatures and events; such stories use many ancient mythical themes, without actual understnading of their symbolizm. The romance is a special kind of legend, which deals mainly in Love; from this type of legend the word "romantic" is derived, together with the modern European word for "novel" – "roman". In the opera, there is an emphasis on emotional conflict, while modern poetry approaches every theme in a personal way. My contention is that the story of Tristan and Isolde began its life as a myth (i.e. as a symbolic tale of real events), telling the life-story of the Sun God, ritualistically enacting the yearly course of sun in the sky, under the auspices of the Goddess of Nature, who is, in turns, his mother, his lover, and his killer, when he is brought as sacrifice to her at the end of his life. Such myth is that of the Scandinavian story of Balder, the "eye of the sky", who was killed by his underworld brother-rival Hodder for the sake of the love of the Goddess Nana, who was both their mother and their lover, and for the rule over the world – www.balderrising.org/balder_the_beautiful.htm The myth of Tristan as the Sun God, though with some Scandinavian connections, essentially belonged to the Celtic people, who had moved in ancient times from their original locality in the north of Italy of today's, wandered by way of modern Spain and through the Bay of Biscay, and settled in five distinct areas of North-Western Europe: Bretany, Cornwall, Wells, Ireland and Scotland. The basic myth from which the story of Tristan and Isolde is derived is that of the Sun God born at Midwinter, becomes strong in Spring and marries the young representative of the Goddess of Nature in early Summer, gets killed by his rival at Midsummer and goes to the Underworld in autumn, from which he is born again at Midwinter. Tristan, representing the Sun, is born in Bretany, the southernmost site of the Celtic world; the south is the only place from which the sun shines at Midwinter in northern countries. When Tristan grows up, he reaches as a young man the court of his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, which is situated at the center of the Celtic world (Wells does not form a part of the main story); like the invigorated sun in Spring, Tristan then shows his prowess as a fighter and as a poet and musician. But the court belongs to King Mark, whose name denotes "horse" – an animal sacred to the sun. In fact the King, as a relative of Tristan, acts as the part of the hero who particularly represents the Sun God at his peek; and it is he who actually marries the representative of the Goddess of Nature as a young bride in the form of Isolde the Fair. It is also Tristan's function, as his name, "born to sorrow", denotes, to be always wounded while fighting his rival, and get to the point of death. In this story, however, Tristan plays a double part of the young Sun God as a lover of the Goddess, and of his own "weird", or "fate", as Graves calls him in his book The White Goddess – http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Graves.index.html -- against whom he fights and by whom he is mortally wounded; in the story, however, Tristan never fights against King Mark himself, probably because the self identification here is too close. The first rival Tristan fights is a messanger from Ireland, a nephew of Queen Isolde, young Isolde's mother. Tristan fights against him, kills him but receives poisonous wounds from his sword; he is forced to go to Ireland to get himself cured by the Queen there, and that is the next stage in Tristan's wanderings. In this story, Ireland also plays a double role: it is the northernmost place of the Celtic world, from which the Sun shines in Midsummer; but Midsummer is not only the peak of the Sun's rule over the world, it is also the point where he is killed by his rival and leaves the world of the living to go "west". Because Ireland also lies west to the main Celtic world, the place where the Sun sets in the evening and where the Land of the Dead is situated. Queen Isolde, then, is not only a Mother figure, she is also the Killer figure who causes the Sun to die. But the domain of the Underworld is also the place where all wisdoms and crafts lie, and the Queen is a mistress of these crafts and wisdom – in this case, particularly of medicine. It is no wonder, then, that Tristan's would-be Irish killer also heals him of his poisonous wounds. The sad hero does not die at this stage, then. Instead, he takes the young bride, having desparately fallen in love with her, to her destined husband, the Sun King Mark. But occasionally, throughout the story, Tristan himself reverts to his initial function as the young Sun God; in those times Isolde joins him and the lovers spend some time on their own. One of the places where they find refuge is a forest, which is the realm of symbolic myth, outside human realistic habitation. Such episodes, though, cannot last, as Mark is Isolde's legitimate groom according to the Nature myth, even before the advent of Chrisian morality. Acknowledging this fact, Tristan takes Isolde back to court and continues with his wanderings throughout the Celtic world. But, while the myth is cyclic and never has a definite ending, the legend ends with the natural end of human life. Tristan goes back to Bretany, the place where he had been born, which symbolizes the Underworld for the Sun hero, the place where the sun goes in winter, which is the Kingdom of the Dead. In Bretany, Tristan meets and marries Isolde the White-Handed, who is called in the Icelandic balad Isolde the Black. Black is the colour of the Death goddess and here the Black Isolde is Queen. Having been wounded again by a poisonous arrow, Tristan finally dies in agony, as befits the Sun God who serves as sacrifice to the Goddess of Nature. Beside the outline of the legend of Tristan and Isolde, which presents a basic, ancient Sun myth, there are other, numerous, mythical elements in it. The first and one of the most important ones is the figure of Tristan's mother. Like many other mythological female characters, she is a princess – actually, sister to the Sun King Mark, in the same way that the (white) Moon GoodessArtemis was sister to the Sun God Apollo. (This kind of relationship shows a removal from an older stage in pagan religion, when the Goddess had no male relations beside her son/lover). The name of Tristan's mother is Blanchfleur, meaning "white flower". She is, in fact, the great Mother Goddess, of whom Robert Graves talks about in The White Goddess (see link above), and to whom all white flowers were sacred . Such Mother Goddesses were Hera, mother of the gods, and her pear blossom; Aphrodite, mother of Eros, and her myrtle flowers; Nana (again), and her almond blossom, and others like them. Blanchfleur, the mother of the Sun God, was a parallel to the Egyptian goddess Isis, who was the mother of the Sun God Horus. But the Goddess of Nature in her entirety takes the form of a Triad: she is the Sun's Mother born at the beginning of the year; she is his young Bride when the Sun gets strong in spring and summer; and she is his Killer when his time comes at the end of the year. This Triple Goddess is represented in the story of Tristan and Isolde in the triple figure of Isolde: the young Golden-Haired bride; her mother, Queen Isolde of Ireland; and his killer, Black Isolde of Bretany. Young Isolde is forever the Goddess of Love, even after years of marriage to Mark, and out of her love for Tristan she comes out to where he lies wounded to try and cure him. But she does not succeed in this last function, because it does not belong to her but to her mother, Queen Isolde who has cured him twice. In contrast, Black Isolde causes Tristan's death in the following fasion: though young Isolde has caused white (or blue) sails to be put on the mast of the boat in which she is coming to heal him, his traitorous wife tells him they are black, thus making him die, not of his wounds but of sorrow, as he should do according to his name and function. True to her nature as a figure of Love, young Isolde dies with him, even though she could not live with him; in this way she initiates a new outlook of the Goddess' funcion, for, although there is a Mother Goddess as the figure of Mary in Christianity, this new religion recognizes no Goddess of Love. Another mythological element in the story requires special attention. This is the dragon, which has devastated Ireland and which Tristan vanquishes and thus saves the land and its inhabitants. The dragon has been considered the enemy of European heroes since the Greek Perseus saved Andromeda opposite the shore of Canaanite Jaffa (or Ethiopian Joppa) – www.paleothea.com/Myths/Andromeda.html . Now, in the ancient Middle and Far East, the dragon was not the evil flame-thrower as shown by Medieval Europeans, but a figure of the mostly benevolent Mother Goddess, ruler of all waters in dry areas, where water is scarse and of prime importance. The first divine hero to vanquish that dragon was the Babylonian Marduch, who killed his own mother Tiamat (Tehom in Hebrew, meaning "the source of underground waters") and build the earth from her body; which is absurd, because Tiamat was herself Mother Earth who had given birth to all life on it. http://www.angelfire.com/tx/gatestobabylon/ladytiamat.html. The symbolic meaning of that ancient myth is the replacement of the old Mother Nature religion and the rule of female compassion with the new young god and the rule of male physical power. On these lines, Graves assumes the dragon Perseus killed was not going to devour Andromeda – who was a figure of the ancient Goddess as a young female – but was "an emanation of Andromeda herself as the ancient Mother Goddess." Here again is the young male vanquishing the old female for the sake of a new human social order, as happened when St. George killed his dragon, thus vanquishing the remnants of the old pagan religion from Christian Medieval Europe. The Tristan legend (not the ancient myth) acts here as a parallel to St. George's, repeating Marduch's action out of context. The old myth has turned into a legend when trappings of all kinds were attached to it, and the basic mythical symbolism was forgotten, together with the religious fertility rituals. Instead of giving meaning to the wanderings of the sun and the circular seasons of life, which is the essence of the myth, the central place was given to the hopeless love between hero and goddess, in the tradition of the French romance. The essence of the romance was the love of a humble knight to some courtly mistress (or "courtesan"), who was unreachable like a goddess because she stood high above him in society, and was married as well. Wagner's opera enhances this emotional conflict, while modern poetry sresses the beauties and misery of personal love, with no connection to the framework of the tale. So, although the meaning of the ancient myth has been forgotten, the greatness of the story of Tristan and Isolde is in the way it can speak in different languages in various places and times; and the way it presents different meanings to different people, always concentrating on the main theme which is Love.