Tristan and Iseult

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tristan and Iseult, one of the most popular stories of the Middle Ages. From roots in Celtic myth, it passed into written form in Britain a century after the Norman Conquest and almost immediately spread throughout northern Europe. It tells of a Cornish knight and an Irish queen, Tristan and Iseult, who accidentally drink a love potion, at the same time, on the same boat, travelling to Cornwall. She is due to marry Tristan’s king, Mark. Tristan and Iseult seemed ideally matched and their love was heroic, but could that excuse their adultery, in the minds of medieval listeners, particularly when the Church was so clear they were wrong?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Laura Ashe 11 episodes
  Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, University of Oxford
• Juliette Wood 12 episodes
  Associate Lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University
• Mark Chinca 2 episodes
  Reader in Medieval German Literature at the University of Cambridge

Reading list

• Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer
  Laura Ashe (ed.) (Penguin, 2015) Google Books →
• The Romance of Tristan
  Beroul (trans. Alan Fedrick) (Penguin, 1978) Google Books →
• The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian legend in Medieval Welsh literature
  Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, Brynley F. Roberts (eds.) (University of Wales Press, first published 1991; 2008) Google Books →
• The Tristan of the Welsh
  Rachel Bromwich
• The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature
  Glyn S. Burgess & Karen Pratt (eds.) (University of Wales Press, 2006)
• The Tristan Legend in Old French Verse
  Tony Hunt & Geoffrey Bromiley
• Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan
  Mark Chinca (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
• The Lais of Marie de France
  Marie de France (trans. Glyn S. Burgess) (Penguin, 1999) Google Books →
• A Companion to Arthurian Literature
  Helen Fulton (ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Google Books →
• The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Dutch Literature
  W. H. Jackson & Silvia Ranawake (eds.) (University of Wales Press, 2000)
• Tristan Narratives from the High to the Late Middle Ages
  Mark Chinca
• Tristan with the 'Tristran' of Thomas
  Gottfried von Strassburg (ed. A. T. Hatto) (Penguin, 1967) Google Books →
• Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook
  Joan Tasker Grimbert (ed.) (Routledge, first published 1995; 2002) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b06sny88

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06sny88

Auto-category: 809.02 (History, description and criticism of medieval literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, the story of Tristan and Iseult was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages.