Word: tristan
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...ROMANCE OF TRISTAN AND ISEULT-Joseph Bédier-Pantheon Books...
...more than a thousand years the legend of Tristan and Iseult has been one of the world's best-loved love stories. Medieval ladies embroidered scenes from the tale on fine linen and silk; medieval craftsmen enshrined the lovers on gold and ivory and wood. Tristan and Iseult were also favored by scores of poets, including Chaucer, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Tennyson, Hardy, Edwin Arlington Robinson and by Composer Richard Wagner, who built the legend into an opera...
...earliest version of the legend: around 800 A.D. there lived in northwest Britain a Pictish chief named Tristan, who slew a ravening monster and married a beautiful princess. From that point on, the story grew-with embroidery and embellishments...
Traveling minstrels sang Chief Tristan's praises so plausibly that his legend was adopted by the Welsh, who spiced it up with some fey lore and turned it over to the Irish. Irish harpists remodeled Tristan along the general lines of a fighting Irishman and changed his princess into a pretty colleen. The Vikings got wind of the story and decided that so beautiful a woman must, of course, have had golden hair...
Meanwhile, in France and Germany, troubadours packed the swelling legend with local heroism, heart-interest, a couple of Greek legends and an anecdote from the Orient. Finally, Britain's 15th-Century poet-knight, Sir Thomas Malory, conferred a Round Table knighthood on Tristan and made him and the lady now known as Iseult part of his famed Morte d'Arthur...