Tristan is a story full of both medieval and prevailing themes: a boy becoming a man, the chivalry of a knight, the greatness a noble-born man can achieve, the fealty to one’s lord, and the battles of the ancient world. However, the theme most remembered throughout the story is love. The love of Tristan and Isolde, though forged by a love potion in the story, is true, faithful, and everlasting. In the time Tristan was written by Gottfried von Stassburg, a love such as theirs would have been more likely to be a form of distant courtly love, with the untouchable woman and the devoted man. Yet this is not the case; Tristan and Isolde do consummate their love many times and would have married had Isolde not been betrothed to King Mark. The reactions of King Mark and other nobles of that court at the knowledge of the couple’s carnal love reveals the incongruencies between Tristan and Isolde’s love and the propriety and concepts of love in the courtly society in which they lived.
On pages 202 and 203, after Tristan and Isolde have lain together for the first time, the poet writes about the ways of love. He, the poet, disapproves of the “courtly love” and its strictures that are smothering “the unending marvels that a man would find in love” (202). He writes,
“…joy there would be in love for those who would practice it sincerely, then…I pity love from my heart when I see that almost everybody today clings and holds fast to her, and yet none gives her her due.” “We do not look facts in the face: we sow seed of deadly nightshade and wish it to bear lilies and roses!” (202).
This passage illustrates how the concept of courtly love is “in fashion” in the poet’s day, but that it is also merely a weak and shriveled form of love compared to true love in every sense of the meaning. He calls courtly love “deadly nightshade,” a poisonous plant that the people of his day are embracing and practicing, expecting to get great happiness and fulfillment from. Yet, where there is a tale of courtly love, rarely does it end in happiness. More often than not it ends in tragedy as the story of Tristan does. Yet his story could have ended happily had chance and/or fate, and courtly society not intervened. Their strictures put Tristan’s love to death, and both Tristan and Isolde as well.
On page 203, as if to make sure that any reader of his work should not take his previous paragraphs on love to mean everyone should be promiscuous and free with body and pleasure, the poet then talks about fidelity. He mentions how, even in courtly society, fidelity is tossed aside for fleshly pleasures rather than be something to be included between those who love each other. Tristan and Isolde did this. They were faithful to each other till the end, and though Isolde had to, for the ruse’s sake, sleep with King Mark, it was only for love of Tristan that she kept up the ruse and not for any love of King Mark. In standing with this same idea, the poet writes on page 206 about the importance of keeping honor. He writes, “When we are unwilling to seek anything but the body’s delight it means the ruin of honour” (206). In the same paragraph it is mentioned that Tristan had this awareness of honor, and did not forsake it for carnal pleasure. The mention of fidelity and honor leads one to believe that the carnality itself was not the greatest aspect of the couple’s relationship that was a odds with the world around them and its ideals, but that the standards of love itself held by courtly society are what balked against their love. Life and limb were not their utmost concern either. It is a reflection of the ideals of the time that both Tristan and Isolde had “fear for their reputations and standing” more than their lives (204).
The time period itself, and not just the ideal of courtly love, is in a good way responsible for the reaction to Tristan and Isolde’s relationship. In a time of arranged marriages-usually young women to old, wealthy men-and a time when a marriage alliance meant more than if one actually loved the person, the strength of love that Tristan and Isolde had for each other was nearly unheard of-except in tales like these-and, most probably, envied by those of Tristan’s time and those who read this story afterwards. Marks’s feelings toward the couple’s relationship are exemplary; he grows envious and bitter over their happiness as he is not happy himself. The theme of “if I can’t be happy then nobody will” is an apt theme for the way King Mark acts toward the couple in the latter part of the poem.
Mark’s unhappiness draws a parallel to what the poet wrote before about people sewing poison and expecting it to bring happiness instead of death. So Mark expected happiness from a loveless arranged marriage when such a marriage rarely has love, and if it does, it grows over a long period of time.
King Mark is not the only one who becomes jealous of Tristan. Before Tristan goes to win Isolde’s hand for Mark, the barons see Tristan’s prowess and success. Their envy prompts them to speak slanderously of Tristan and eventually to threaten his life (150-158). The barons, too, were probably not the only ones envious of Tristan’s good luck and skills, but they were probably the only ones notable enough to be mentioned since the story rarely mentions anyone of lowly standing.
The resulting tragedy of Tristan happens because of an incongruity between the true love Tristan and Isolde have for each other and the courtly love façade as well as time period norms of society. Through the cultivation of a love “fashion” that bears false fruit and a society that provides no place for true love, Tristan and Isolde are outcasts in love among their own people. They try repeatedly to reconcile these two opposing forces within themselves and among others but are unable to do this. Truly, there was no place in Strassburg’s Tristan‘s era for a love like the love between Tristan and Isolde.
