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Introduction:
Tristan and Isolde has been in the background of much of what we have seen in the course, an obsession for Chrétien: Tristan is the subtext and anti-type for Erec, Cligés, Yvain; Lancelot is a type of Tristan, who falls in love with a queen and never becomes husband-lord. The medieval story was widespread in a variety of versions and vernaculars and is popular again in the modern period.

1. Elements of the Legend:
   1. Tristan the giant-killer (i.e., Morholt)
   2. The Surrogate Wooer
   3. The Potion (real/emblematic)
   4. The Triangle: Tristan (individual, passionate lover)---Isolde---Mark (representing feudal societal hierarchy with the Church)
2. Béroul's "primitive" version vs. Thomas of Britain's "courtly" version.
3. Theme: The creative and the destructive power of erotic love:
4. Tristan the conflicted anti-hero to Chrétien's Arthurian heroes.
   1. The knight of erotic desire
   2. The Orphic musician
   3. The young hunter, hunted
   4. The lovers in the garden, forest, and cave: locus amoenus and arduous exile
   5. The disguises of Tristan the trickster:
      1. Narrative function
      2. Disguise as metaphor:
         1. role as vilain (cowardice, ill breeding, ugliness, poverty, stupidity), more humiliating than Lancelot's degradation in Knight of the Cart.
         2. Abasement in the service of his lady: Isolde, like Guenevere, demands the ultimate.
         3. Leper: medieval outcast and emblem of carnality: "lepra corporis, luxuriae imago".
         4. Tristan, triste et fou : the fool, jester and madman (cf. Yvain).
         5. the Black Knight of the Mountain.
   6. The ailing hero, beneficiary of great joy, victim of intense pain: his wound (real and symbolic)
      1. at the beginning;
      2. the sexual wound revealed to Isolde of the White Hands;
      3. at the end of the romance.

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