Sir Tristram (Tristan) had brought La Beale Isode (Isolde) from her parents, the King and Queen of Ireland, to marry his uncle King Mark of Cornwall. Tristram and Isode had already fallen in love, and on their journey by sea the couple drank a potion that ensured their love for one another would never end.

King Mark and La Beale Isode were soon married, but it became common knowledge that she and Sir Tristram were lovers. When Sir Andret caught Tristram and Isode together and told Mark, the king immediately flew into a rage and accused the knight of being a traitor.

Edward Burne-Jones captures the couple’s relationship in his watercolour of King Mark and La Belle Iseult from 1862.

In time, Tristram was visiting Isode by day and night, and one night Sir Andret set upon the couple with a dozen knights, and bound the naked Tristram hand and foot until the king could see him in the morning. As Andret prepared to kill Tristram with his sword, the prisoner broke free and slaughtered Andret and another nine knights before descending onto some rocks far below the chapel where he had been held.

Tristram took Isode away to a manor in a forest, where they lived together until she disappeared one day. He then travelled to King Howell in Brittany, where he fell in love with that king’s daughter, Isode White Hands, and married her. While Tristram felt able to embrace and kiss his wife, he couldn’t bring himself as far as “fleshly lust” while he still remembered his love for La Beale Isode.

Eventually, King Mark and Sir Tristram were reconciled and the knight returned to court, but he became mad over his lost relationship with Isode, and wandered naked in the woods for three months. It was rumoured that Tristram was dead, which drove Isode to try to kill herself, and King Mark had her confined to a tower for her own safety.

Edward Burne-Jones’ watercolour of The Madness of Sir Tristram from about 1892 understates the knight’s distraction, showing him playing the harp for his lost love.

One day, when Isode was in the castle garden with the lapdog that Tristram had given her when she had first arrived in Cornwall, the dog recognised Sir Tristram there and wouldn’t leave his side. King Mark spared his life on condition that Tristram was banished from Cornwall for ten years.

Isode’s lapdog makes an appearance in the only known easel painting of the Pre-Raphaelite designer William Morris.

Painted in 1858, it shows Jane Burden, whom Morris married in April the following year, wearing mediaeval dress. For many years this was assumed to represent Guenevere, as it coincided with Morris publishing his first volume of poetry titled The Defence of Guenevere (1858). Recent research has shown this to be incorrect: this is no Guenevere, but Isode mourning the exile of her lover from Mark’s court, with her small dog curled up on her bed in Tristram’s place.

Curiously, Malory only describes the death of Sir Tristram indirectly, towards the end of his book. The knight had agreed with King Mark to bring La Beale Isode back to his court. One day as Tristram was playing on his harp to Isode, King Mark stabbed him through the heart from behind with a halberd, a type of spear with a sharpened blade.

Edmund Blair Leighton’s painting of this climax in the story, The End of The Song (1902), is his strongest link with Pre-Raphaelite themes. Tristram here plays his harp for Isode, as King Mark (right) attacks him with the enchanted lance.

Ford Madox Brown’s Death of Sir Tristram from 1864 shows King Mark at the left, the fearsome blade on his spear covered with blood, as Isode cradles the dying Tristram. Her lapdog looks up at the evil king.

N. C. Wyeth’s illustration to the text “King Mark slew the noble knight Sir Tristram as he sat harping before his lady la Belle Isolde,” painted in 1922, shows Mark taking a huge swing at Tristram with his halberd.

Rogelio de Egusquiza, in the second painting in his pair, Tristan and Iseult (Death) (1910), shows the two lovers lying dead together, according to a different version of the legend.

Reference

Dorsey Armstrong (translator and editor) & Sir Thomas Malory (2009) Morte Darthur, a new modern English translation, Parlor Press. ISBN 978 1 60235 103 5. (A superb translation based on the Winchester manuscript.)