of her
maidenhood, to connive in the amours of the lovers whom she had made;
how King Mark was deceived, and doubted, and was deceived again; how
Tristram fled to Brittany, but how, despite his seeming marriage with
another and equally lovely Yseult, he remained faithful to the Queen of
Cornwall. One version tells that Mark slew his nephew while he sat
harping to Queen Yseult; another that Tristram died of grief because his
scorned though wedded wife told him that the white-sailed ship, bearing
his mistress to meet him, bore the black sail which meant that she was
not on board; but all versions, I think, agree in ending with the fact,
that the briar-rose growing on the tomb of the one, slowly trailed its
flowers and thorns along till it had reached also the grave of the
other, and knit together, as love had knit together with its sweet
blossoms and sharp spines, the two fated lovers. The Middle Ages were
enthralled by this tale; but they were also, occasionally, a little
shocked by it. Poets and prose writers tampered every now and then with
incidents and characters, seeking to make it appear that, owing to the
substitution of the waiting-maid, and the neglect of the wedded princess
of Brittany, Yseult had never belonged to any man save Tristram, nor
Tristram to any woman save Yseult; or that King Mark had sent his nephew
to woo the Irish queen's daughter merely in hopes of his perishing in
the attempt, and that his whole subsequent conduct was due to a mere
unnatural hatred of a better knight than himself; touching up here and
there with a view to justifying and excusing to some degree the long
series of deceits which constituted the whole story. Thus the more timid
and less gifted. But when, in the very first years (1210) of the
thirteenth century, the greatest mediaeval poet that preceded Dante, the
greatest German poet that preceded Goethe, Meister Gottfried von
Strassburg, took in hand the old threadbare story of "Tristan und
Isolde," he despised all alterations of this sort, and accepted the
original tale in its complete crudeness.

For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had conceived this story as
a thing wholly unknown in his time, and no longer subject to any of
those necessities of constant rearrangement which tormented mediaeval
poets: he had conceived it not as a tale, but as a novel. Gottfried
himself was probably but little aware of what he was doing; the poem
that he was writing probably fell for hi