Iseult

(by Zou)

The wife of King Mark of Cornwall and tragic lover of Tristan, often called “Isolde the Beautiful” or “Isolde the Blonde” to distinguish her from Isolde of the White Hands. Although married to Mark, she engaged in an adulterous affair with Tristan because the two lovers were unable to resist the affects of a love potion.
An early form of her name, Esseylt, is found in a list of ladies in the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen, and her character may be Celtic in origin. Her counterpart in Irish folklore is called Gráinne. The origins of the Tristan and Isolde legend is covered under the entry for Tristan.
The daughter of the King of Ireland (either Anguish or Gurmun), she first met Tristan when he arrived in Ireland incognito to be healed of a wound given by Isolde’s uncle or brother, Morholt, whom Tristan slew in a combat between Ireland and Cornwall. The legends disagree as to the extent of Tristan and Isolde’s attraction prior to the consumption of the potion: in Gottfried’s version, for instance, she hates Tristan for slaying her uncle, while in the Prose Tristan, they both feel an initial attraction.
Tristan made his second visit to Ireland to bring Isolde back to Cornwall to marry King Mark, Tristan’s uncle. On their voyage from Ireland to Cornwall, Tristan and Isolde accidentally drank a love potion that was intended for Isolde and Mark and had been entrusted to Isolde’s servant Brangain. They fell helplessly in love and began their affair. On her wedding night, Isolde substituted Brangain in Mark’s bed in order to hide her loss of virginity. She later tried to have Brangain killed to hide the secret, but the attempt failed and she and Brangain were able to reconcile. (Malory omits this episode.)
King Mark suspected the two lovers, having received intelligence from his vassals, but through a number of tricks and ruses, the lovers managed to instill in the king a sense of doubt as to their guilt, which created an uncomfortable situation at court but managed to keep them together. Though Mark often banished them or sentenced them, he was generally persuaded to receive Isolde as his queen again before long.
In the traditional version of the story, Tristan, having been banished from Mark’s court, marries another woman named Isolde of the White Hands. He receives a mortal wound and sends for Isolde of Cornwall to heal him. Isolde sails to Brittany, but Tristan’s wife, jealous of their love, tells him that Isolde is not coming, and Tristan dies. Isolde perishes of sorrow upon finding him.
In the revised version of the legend, found in the Prose Tristan and Malory, she eventually flees from Mark’s court and lives with Tristan in Joyous Guard, Lancelot’s castle, until Tristan is slain by Mark. As in the original tale, she dies on top of his body and is buried in the same grave.
In the Prose Tristan, Isolde is also loved by Palamedes the Saracen, who abducts Brangain to get close to her. Other than Palamedes, competing suitors included Kahedins, who died for her love, Dragan, who was killed by Tristan, and the King with a Hundred Knights. The prose cycles say that she was a close friend of Queen Guinevere, whose situation was similar to Isolde’s.