A vassal is sent to woo a beauteous princess for his lord.  While he is bringing her home the two, by accident, drink a love potion, and ever thereafter their hearts are fettered together.  In the midday of delirious joy, in the midnight of deepest woe, their thoughts are only of each other, for each other.  Meanwhile the princess has become the vassal’s queen.  Then the wicked love of the pair is discovered, and the knight is obliged to seek safety in a foreign land.  There (strange note this to our ears) he marries another princess whose name is like that of his love, save for the addition With the White Hand; but when wounded unto death he sends across the water for her who is still his true love, that she come and be his healer.  The ship which is sent to bring her is to bear white sails on its return if successful in the mission; black, if not.  Day after day the knight waits for the coming of his love while the lamp of his life burns lower and lower.  At length the sails of the ship appear on the distant horizon.  The knight is now himself too weak to look.  “White or black?” he asks of his wife.  “Black,” replies she, jealousy prompting the falsehood; and the knight’s heart-strings snap in twain just as his love steps over the threshold of his chamber.  Oh, the pity of it! for with the lady is her lord, who, having learned the story of the fateful potion, has come to unite the lovers.  Then the queen, too, dies, and the remorseful king buries the lovers in a common grave, from whose caressing sod spring a rose-bush and a vine and intertwine so curiously that none may separate them. {1}

Upon the ancient legend which has thus been outlined Wagner reared his great tragedy entitled “Tristan und Isolde.”  Whence the story came nobody can tell.  It is a part of the great treasure preserved from remotest antiquity by itinerant singers and story-tellers, and committed to writing by poets of the Middle Ages.  The first of these, so far as unquestioned evidence goes, were French trouveres.  From them the tale passed into the hands of the German minnesinger.  The greatest of these who treated it was Gottfried von Strasburg (circa A.D. 1210), who, however, left the tale unfinished.  His continuators were Ulrich von Turnheim and Heinrich von Freiberg, whose denouement (not, however, original with them) was followed by Hermann Kurtz when he published a version of Gottfried’s poem in modern German in 1844.  This, unquestionably, was the version which fell into Wagner’s hands when, in the Dresden period (1843-1849) he devoted himself assiduously to the study of Teutonic legend and mythology.  In English the romance has an equally honorable literary record.  In 1804 Sir Walter Scott edited a metrical version which he fondly believed to be the work of the somewhat mythical Thomas the Rhymer and to afford evidence that the oldest literary form of the legend was British.  The adventures of Tristram of Lyonesse (who is the Tristan of Wagner’s tragedy) form a large portion of Sir Thomas Malory’s thrice glorious “Morte d’Arthur.”  Of modern poets Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne have sung the passion of the ill-starred lovers.