How deep is a man’s love for a woman? Many believe that this is best captured by the Orpheus myth, which dates back to the 6th century BC, but which artists have kept alive and relevant for more than two millennia by retelling and reworking it. For Orpheus, the son of the Thracian king Oiagra, the river god, and the muse Calyope, not only netted the hearts of the Greeks, but also of the generations that came after him. When he played the lyre given to him by the god Apollo and sang along, ‘birds from the air, fish from the water, animals from the forest, even trees and rocks came to listen to the magical sounds’, as Gustav Schwab wrote in his translation of Jože Dolenc’s poem. No one and nothing could resist them. His psychokinetic sounds penetrated every matter at the atomic and cellular level: they could change the course of a river, move rocks and trees, tame wild animals, persuade the sun to rise after it had set, or sprinkle a mountain peak with pearls. On the march to the Argonauts, he dictated the rhythm of the oarsmen’s rowing by singing, and saved them from the deadly song of the Sirens by restoring them to sanity with piercing, clear sounds.
It is not known how he met the water nymph Eurydice, a lovely young free spirit and child of the earth, but it is known that they were “bound by tender love”. It did not last long. Shortly after their marriage, Eurydice stepped on a poisonous snake, wrapped her arms around its ankle and stung it. Orpheus was left without a wife.
He cried, the animals mourned with him, but he found no comfort. He needed his Eurydice. The thought of having to go underground with her terrified him, but not as much as the thought of losing her. He took courage in the belief that his music was a peaceful weapon of such immense power that it would soften the hearts of King Hades and his wife Persephone.
He entered a cave that he had heard led to a world of shadows. All the way down, he played so sweetly and so shockingly that the dark spirits of the underworld took pity on him, Haron carried him across the River Styx without protest, and Kerber, the terrifying three-headed dog with snakes growing out of his head instead of hair, lay down in front of him and allowed him to enter through the underworld gate he was guarding. There he sang so long that the earth was soaked with his voice, and so beautifully that the hearts of the dead beat. The punished were given a day off, and even Sisyphus forgot his torment. The bloodless shadows wept and tears ran down the cheeks of the terrible erinyes.
His lawsuit also softened the hearts of pale Hades and fierce Persephone. “Look, I wanted to bear this immense pain. I have struggled long as a man, but love is tearing my heart out, I can no longer live without my Eurydice!” he sang to them, beseeching them with music to bring her back to life. “If that is not possible, accept me among the dead, for without her I will not leave this place!”
For the first time, the ruling couple felt mercy. Persephone returned Eurydice to him, but warned him: she would follow him all the way to the surface, but she must not look back until they had both entered the world of light. If he does, he will lose her forever.
Orpheus and Eurydice climbed the dangerous rocks quickly and silently through the darkness. Suddenly, Orpheus was seized by an irresistible longing. He could no longer overcome his fear and love. For a moment, he cast his gaze over her for whom he had longed. “Fixing her gaze on him, full of sorrow and tenderness, she begins to sink back into the terrible depths.” He lost her a second time. “Goodbye, goodbye!” echoed in the distance. When he had recovered from his terror, he ran back, but Haron refused to take him across the Styx.
After a week of fruitless waiting on the banks of the River Styx, Orpheus returned in despair to the forests of his native Thrace. For three years, he stalked around alone. He avoided women because they reminded him of Eurydice, became a priest and sang to animals and plants.
His song moved everyone, except the wild menandas, the wild worshippers of Dionysus. They hated him, for all existing and non-existent reasons, but especially because he despised them. His music was salt on their wounds and only made them angrier. One day they were all going crazy worshipping Dionysus when they saw him. They rushed at him with murderous force, stoning him and throwing sticks at him. The animals that had defended him at first fled in fright. Orpheus was condemned to death.
According to one version, the menorahs killed him with a stone that struck his shadow; according to the other, they tore him apart with their own hands and threw his head into the river Heber; and in both versions, when they had satisfied their murderous urge, they walked away satiated. The nymphs buried Orpheus’ body parts, and the waves of the Heber washed his head and lyre onto the island of Lesbos. The locals buried the head and hung the lyre in a shrine, which is why today they sing more soap than anywhere else.
And Orpheus? His soul went to the realm of the shadows, where he found Eurydice again and “there they live in blissful embrace, on the Elysian Fields, forever united”.
The cult of Orpheus is one of the most widely used myths, which is not surprising because it represents loving devotion, self-sacrifice and a love that has the power to survive anything, even death. Although the lovers die, the song of their love lives on. It has its own destiny, which, according to some, is a reminder that love is the only emotion in the world that can come alive again. It can lead a man into the depths of hell and lead him out again if he believes in it.
There is no return in love, Orpheus tells us, which is probably one of the reasons why he has become an indispensable inspiration for artists. His death was the subject of the tragedy Bassarai by Aeschylus, the motif of Orpheus and Eurydice has been shaped by the most famous sculptors and painters, and has been used by playwrights, poets, writers and composers. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote sonnets to Orpheus, Franz Liszt composed a symphony, Jean Cocteau made a film called Orpheus and Igor Stravinsky composed music for a ballet.
Choreographed by George Balanchine, the tragedy was perpetrated by Eurydice. As they were coming back to life, she kept clinging to him, pulling him, tugging him hard against her, desperate for him to look up. When she finally managed to turn him towards her, she tore the mask from his eyes. But to this day, no one has been able to answer the question of why Orpheus looked back. Why didn’t he wait a few more moments? There are countless interpretations, but the basic message – that love conquers even death – remains the same.
Two halves = whole
Plato also lived in the time of such myths, but he was trying to understand love. In the Symposium, in which Socrates talks to his friends, the oldest surviving attempt to understand love, he gave people a theory that has not died out centuries after his death – every man has his ideal other half.
In the Symposium we read, among other things, that love is a universal human need and an integral part of humanity, but that the most profound influence on human beings has been the words of Aristophanes, who began his meditations on love with a hymn to Eros, the most human of the gods, the helper of men and their physician in things whose cure is the greatest happiness for the human race.
He then explained that there used to be three sexes in the world: male, female and masculine – a combination of male and female. All of them were completely round. They had two heads, four arms and legs, two sex organs and so on. The three sexes existed because in the beginning the male sex was descended from the sun, the female from the earth and the hermaphrodite from the moon, because the moon has a share in both. But these people were too strong for the gods’ safety, so Zeus split them in two. Thus they were weaker and at the same time more useful because they were more numerous.
From the split female sex came the lesbians, from the male the homosexuals and from the hermaphrodite the heterosexuals, but what they all had in common was that after the intervention of Zeus, no one was perfect anymore. “After (human) nature was cut in two, it tried to come together, for each half longed for its own half. And with their arms they (the halves) embraced each other and clung to each other, desiring to grow together,” Aristophanes explained how it was, until the halves did not yet have sexual organs in the front and preferred to die of hunger and childlessness rather than live apart. Zeus corrected the mistake, moved the sexual organs forward, and now the halves could not only embrace but also join together to conceive a child.
Aristophanes then explained that when the two true, once-separated halves find each other, shaken by the miracle of love, friendship and intimacy, they refuse to separate even for a brief moment more. They spend their whole lives together, but they cannot explain what it is they actually want from each other. It is unlikely that they would coexist with such intense commitment and joy for the sake of sex, Aristophanes reflects. The soul of each of them clearly wants something else, but he cannot say what, he can only speculate and guess about it.
Suppose, he continued, that Hephaestus approaches them lying side by side with his tools and asks them, “What do you want from each other, human beings?” They would not be able to explain, so he would go on to ask them, “Is it that you want to be in the same place as much as possible, so that you do not leave each other night or day? If they wish it, I want to unite you and unite you in the same nature, so that the two of you, who are two, may become one, and as long as you both live, the two of you shall dwell as one and live together; but when you die, there in Hades you shall also be one instead of two, united in death. See then whether they long for this, and whether they will be satisfied if they have it!”
Aristophanes was convinced that no one would refuse such an offer, nor would it turn out that he wanted anything else. He would simply hear what he had always wanted to hear: to unite and melt with the beloved, and from two to one. “The reason for this is that this was our original nature and we were whole: the desire and aspiration for wholeness is called love.”
Or to put it another way, everyone has their ideal love waiting for them somewhere, they just have to find it. Freud noted that Plato took the romantic ideal of perfect love from India, where some gods were bisexual. In the Upanishads, the original man was as lonely as Adam in the Bible, like Adam, he asked for company and was happy when a woman was made from his body. According to Anton Štuhec, the fact that Eve was taken from Adam’s bones means that there will be a constant attraction between them, that they are called to communion, to each other, to unity.
The poet John Donne roams with his lover in his poem The Flea. First he drank the blood from her hand, then he drank his. He was delighted to think that now their blood was married in a fly.
Aeneas and Dido
Love changes all the known physical laws of human emotions and redefines the boundaries between what is real and what is possible, although of course we humans can never become one. In the Roman Empire, this was not what they aspired to. For the Romans, marrying for love was a scandal, just as today, social status was all that mattered. The Romans experienced their property in the same way as today’s man experiences possessiveness in its most manic form, including outbursts of rage. The more land, slaves, livestock and wealth a man had, the longer his shadow. And the length of the shadow was the only thing that interested him, even if Rome, the world’s first “great city” with a population of around 750,000, was founded on love, as the “divine singer” Virgil described in 12 songs in the poem The Aeneid, considered the greatest poem of antiquity until the Romantic era.
Aeneas, son of Aphrodite (Venus), wandered around after the fall of Troy and a storm threw his fleet onto the African coast, where the Tyrians were ruled by the prematurely widowed Queen Dido. Venus trusted neither her nor her mother Juno (Hera), the great enemy of Aeneas. As befits Greek and Roman gods who shared human weaknesses, she schemed a little and helped Queen Dido to fall in love with Aeneas, even though she had vowed at her husband’s murder that “he has taken my love with him, so may he have it forever in the grave”.
Dido fought with herself when she was reminded that she was not practical. A kingdom threatened from all sides is ruled by herself. She is still threatened by her brother. An alliance with the Trojans would come in handy, and the reputation of the Tyrians would grow with it. Dido, in love, has softened, and the scheming Juno has made her fall. Her husband Jupiter (Zeus) ordered Aeneas to found Rome, she wanted Aeneas to forget about her. Marriage to Dido would solve her problems.
She congratulated her daughter Aphrodite, Enea’s mother, on her brilliant victory. “Why argue any longer? Let us marry and with it eternal peace! Now you have what you have longed for with all your soul: Dido burning in love for Aeneas.” But Aphrodite knew her hypocritical mother well. She sweetly accepted her offer, because “how dare I be in eternal strife with thee? But I fear that Jupiter will not allow the Tyrians and Trojans to unite.” She kindly expressed her conviction that Juno would already have touched his heart and inwardly scoffed, knowing that he would not.
The next morning, Dido, Aeneas and company went hunting, a storm arose and Juno made sure that Dido and Aeneas found shelter from the storm in the cave alone. A distraught Dido confessed her love for him, Aeneas forgot about Italy, they became passionate and Aeneas gave her his vows, which for the Romans was equivalent to marriage.
Now Fama, the ugly goddess of rumours, is on her way. She slandered Aeneas throughout the cities of Libya, and slandered Dido, so that the reins of the kingdom were out of her hands because of her passion. Her gossiping about true and false events hurt and angered Aeneas so much that he resorted to prayer.
Jupiter heard him. Furious as to what Aeneas was doing among the Tyrians when he had sent him to found Rome for his son Askanius, he sent the god Mercury to him to “lead him on”. Aeneas dared not say no. He instructed his friends to prepare the ships secretly, and he would tell Dido the news just before now. Rumours had reached her before. In a slight delirium, she begged him to stay:
“But are you not bound by my love and my oath, and cannot my death hold you back? Art thou going away in the dead of winter, thou heartless one, and wilt thou cast thyself into the arms of the storm rather than rest in my arms? Why do you flee from me, Aeneas? By these tears, by the clasp of your right hand, by our marriage, I beseech you, have mercy on my decaying house, if I have ever done you any good! Change your decision, if you have tasted love with me, and stay with me!” She reminded him that all the people of Libya, even the Tyrians, hated her because of him, and she sobbed, “If only I had the son you begot in me before you left, little Aeneas, all like you, I would not consider myself a widow and a forsaken prisoner!”
Aeneas didn’t bat an eyelid either. He reminded her that they weren’t married and didn’t promise to marry her. If he could have chosen his life, he would have stayed in Troy and rebuilt it. “Therefore, do not torment yourself or me, do not cry and do not complain, because nothing helps! I must go to Italy, but not of my own free will!”
Dido was seized with rage: “If there are gods, righteous gods, my vengeance will strike you between the worms! Then I know that thou wilt call the name of Queen Dido. I will follow thee from afar with a black torch, and my shadow will follow thee, and if thou sufferest, I will hear with gladness that voice from the underworld!”
It hit Aeneas in the heart, but did not shake him. He went to the ships, she to the court. Without love, she fell to pieces. She wanted to die. She ordered the bed she shared with Aeneas to be burned at the stake in the courtyard, she threw on it the things he could not take and the sword she had given him. Meanwhile, the god Mercury warned Aeneas in a dream that he should leave as soon as possible because he was in danger. At the sight of the receding ships, Dido beat her chest with her hand, plucked her hair and shouted that the ships were leaving without being set on fire by her people. “Instead of giving him the scepter, I should have cut it into pieces and scattered them on the sea!” she roared, but the next moment she remembered that she had decided to die. She pulled Aeneas’ sword from the burning pyre and stabbed herself with it.
But they met again. When Aeneas got a safe passage to the underworld to visit his father, he saw her wandering shadow. He begged her to forgive him and cursed himself for not leaving her of his own free will, speaking to her gently and trying to soften her, but she ran away without forgiving him “and continued to hate him”.
But Aeneas did found Rome, and most Romans are familiar with the tale, and it has never had the same effect on people as Orpheus and Eurydice, perhaps because it is too commonplace. It was just as commonplace for Romans to worship phallic gods, to hold banquets and spectacles, to indulge in carnality, debauchery and other earthly pleasures, even though they were formally subject to many Puritan prohibitions.
While they were single, young men could enjoy homosexuality, prostitutes and live with mistresses; after marriage, they had to become model heads of families. Marriage was much like today. The wife wore the ring given to her by the man on her ring finger because the Egyptians, when dissecting bodies, found that a very delicate nerve led from it straight to the heart. When the man ‘accepted the hand’ of the bride, she was symbolically giving him the most important part of herself.
The wedding night was not romantic for her. Because men were used to prostitutes, they did not know how to arouse a woman and make love to her, so sex was what social historian Paul Veyne called “legal rape”. In any case, it was only intended to conceive children. That was also the purpose of marriage, and of course to establish alliances and blood ties. Love was a non-existent category. Happiness was not part of the deal, nor was pleasure, and their greatest expectation was that the spouses would get along.
Cheating and incest were taboo, as was sex with naked women. A prostitute was allowed to undress, a decent woman had to keep at least her bra on for discretion. Oral sex was tolerated between gay and lesbian couples, a man could pleasure a courtesan with his hand, but a man was never allowed to orally pleasure a woman. For the Romans, who were obsessed with machismo, this was disgusting and degrading, because it made the man subservient to the woman.
A Roman man was never allowed to be a slave to anyone or anything, not even love. In a society obsessed with dominance, passion was seen as social treason: it diverted a man’s attention away from everyday things; it made him dependent on a woman and thus morally inferior; it made his character bad because he had given up control of himself to passion.
He lost his social status, and for average Romans this was unthinkable. But not everyone was average. The poet Ovid, who moved to Rome in his teens, reflected in his playful and sensuous poems the scratchy morality of a Roman high society overwhelmed by all-encompassing boredom. Women had more freedom and self-confidence than before, but they were not allowed to participate in public life. Or as one scholar wrote: “They were allowed a great deal – as long as they did nothing constructive.” So they filled their time with beautifying, tidying up, select dinners and romantic intrigue.
The poet Ovid knew them well. He had been married three times, had many relationships, and wrote about the fertile flow of love from his own experience. In his debauched poems, he lasciviously cast his eyes on women, lusted after them, spoke obscenities, laughed, mocked and seduced. He spoke openly about his periods of impotence, his occasional fetishism and his jealousy.
He created the perfect anatomy of pleasure and became the witty darling of Rome with his Art of Love, a cleverly written “handbook for the seducer”. He delighted everyone except the Emperor Augustus. The Art of Love was published just when he was trying to raise the plummeting birth rate. No one thought that the cause might lie in a slow-onset lead poisoning. The Romans drank water from lead water pipes, lead was in women’s make-up, kitchen pans and the syrup used to sweeten cheap wine. Perhaps the cause of infertility lay elsewhere, but Augustus’ cure for it was all about human behaviour.
In 18 BC, he legislated to prevent illegitimate children from being born because their parents might kill them. Even in law, the father had the absolute right to do with the child as he pleased, for example, to expose it to death in the wild if it was a girl. Deceit was no longer a matter of private life, but a rebellion against the state. A man who discovered that his wife was cheating on him had to divorce her or face punishment. Wife and lover were deported, each in his own direction. They were never allowed to marry and half their property was confiscated. Husbands were allowed to go to prostitutes, but not to have a mistress. Widows had to marry within two years, divorcees within 18 months. Couples without children were discriminated against, those with three or more were rewarded. Promiscuity was punished.
Augustus tried to consolidate the family and, predictably, achieved the opposite: divorce skyrocketed because it was the only way to make love with impunity. Then there was Ovid’s handbook for seducers. It made him famous overnight and raised the pressure on Augustus overnight. He had to get his revenge, although it seems there was something more serious than The Art of Love in the mix.
No one knows which, because Ovid had to choose between death and silence, but it must have been bad: either Ovid was planning a coup d’état or he seduced Augustus’ wife. If the Empress really liked him, he had no right choice: he would have been in danger if he had refused her, and he would have been in danger if he had not refused her. In any case, whatever happened, it was serious enough for Augustus to banish Ovid to a remote and remote place.
The death of love
But he couldn’t. They live on today, as does Plato’s reflection that love is a common human need. But not everyone feels it. A neurologist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine reported an interesting case.
John lived a very ordinary life: a bookkeeper, a husband and a father. He had a brain tumour successfully removed at the age of thirty-five, but his personality had changed completely. He divorced his wife, got involved with a prostitute, lost his job and everything that followed, without feeling anything – anger, astonishment, concern, disgust. After ten years of this strange life, he saw a doctor.
An MRI scan revealed that the frontal lobe of his brain, between his eyebrows, was probably damaged during the tumour surgery. He was hooked up to a device similar to a lie detector. He was shown extremely emotionally charged images, played sounds and asked questions that should have provoked an emotional response – violence, pornography and unethicality – but nothing happened. For John, murder was like a flowering field.
When he lost his capacity to feel, he lost his humanity. But brain surgery is not the only trauma that can destroy it, anthropologist Colin Turnbull found in the 1970s after spending two years with the 2 000 remaining members of the Nabiral-Hunting Ik indigenous people living in the remote and isolated mountains of Uganda.
He landed among them by force of circumstances, not expecting anything interesting. Life in hunter-gatherer societies was considered to be studied: women usually gathered and men hunted, and both were forced to participate if they wanted to survive. Members of hunter-gatherer societies were hospitable, generous, honest and giving, or possessed all those things that have no value in today’s world, but were once virtues. But not for them, for them it was just a survival instinct.
But the Iki have called everything known into question. Colin Turnbull spent two years watching them lose their capacity for love and turn into real monsters after the Ugandan government banned them from hunting in Kidepo National Park. Once successful hunters, they had to farm and forage for food in the neighbouring mountains to survive. But the mountains were so barren and rugged that they could not walk a hundred metres without risking falling into a chasm almost as deep.
After only three years of drought and famine, the Iki have changed completely: they have become hateful, selfish and evil. They simply could no longer afford love and all the other so-called virtues. Now it was just a matter of survival. They were constantly on the lookout for food, even in the toilet and during sex, however infrequent it was.
“Once, on a high mountain ridge in Kalymon, I watched two young men pleasuring each other. They were showing some sociability, but not much. There was no affection in their companionship. Each looked the other way and looked around for food …,” Turnbull wrote.
The struggle for food was constant, sadistic and cruel. People greeted members of their family, members of their indigenous people and strangers with the same phrase: “Give me food!” or “Give me tobacco!”
The highest form of humour has become mischief. They tried to harm others, to deprive them of something or to cause them misery in some other way, including children. They were dying of laughter. Lying and exploitation were among their favourite games. They enjoyed it immensely when they succeeded in their intrigue, and they enjoyed it even more when they told the victim that they had spanked them and could watch the pain they had caused.
They did not give food to the elderly because it would have been thrown away. They were left to die alone and in pain. “In the second year of the drought, it was more or less common for the young to prey on the open mouths of the very old, and to snatch the food from them as they chewed it and still failed to swallow it,” Turnbull reported. The children were sent away from home when they turned three and were expected to fend for themselves. They formed a children’s gang.
They no longer felt any sense of belonging or emotion towards their relatives, not even towards their immediate family. If a child died, the parents were lucky for them. Turnbull reported of a mother who put her baby on the floor and went about her business. She later found that a leopard had taken the baby. They were delighted, and so was the mother. She because now she no longer had to take care of him, Iki because there was an animal nearby. They assumed that after a big meal in the form of a baby, she would slow down and be easier to kill. They did indeed track down the leopard, kill it and roast it, “baby and all”.
Anyone who found food ate it quickly and secretly. The word want was also the word need. People only wanted what they needed. If they wanted to help someone, they helped them because they needed it for themselves.
All rituals have been abandoned. They included feasts, and they could not afford to splurge on food. They no longer faced the stares. If they sat together and relaxed, they looked at each other’s hands, not at each other’s faces. If their eyes met by accident, they looked away in embarrassment. “It was difficult to detect any emotion,” Trumbell wrote.
“I saw little of what I could ever call affection… There was simply no room in these people’s lives for the luxuries of family, emotion and love. So on the verge of starvation, such luxuries meant death. … Everything was more or less impersonal … Children are useless appendages, just like grandparents. Anyone who cannot look after himself is a burden and a risk to the survival of others.”
Turnbell left after two years and returned a year later. At that time, the floods meant that the harvest was good, the crops were rotting in the fields, but Iki remained the same. Life without love took root like a weed and uprooted almost everything else. Family had no value anymore, nor did friendship and respect for life, which, to tell the truth, made them very modern.
Love does not overcome all obstacles. It became a dangerous waste of energy for Ike in a very short time, and it was dangerous for the Church in the Middle Ages. At least erotic love, that trap that led to hell and even between spouses was not justifiable. A husband was allowed to kiss his wife, to caress her and to embrace her, but he was not allowed to enjoy it. Passion was unacceptable, sex was desirable, but only in the function of conceiving children. A man who was too attracted to his wife had already committed fraud. They had to live together as business partners who were dear to each other and who just happened to have children.
The path to perfection
At that time, the Church was a system embedded in the foundations and supports of medieval society, but it was completely dissolved until the first half of the 13th century, when heresy set in. Then the time of the troubadours was slowly coming to an end, and in the 12th century, when one of the world’s most famous myths, Tristan und Isolde, was being written, there was still the so-called courtly love, in which a man not only lusts after a woman, but also loves her, and in that love finds self-improvement.
A true knight was in love with his lady and Tristan was a true knight. The original myth has not been preserved, so there are several versions of the story, but the basic premise is the same: the beautiful Blanchefleur fell in love with an attractive knight, he died, and she clung to life, without crying or screaming, just long enough to give birth to a baby boy. She named him Tristan or Sorrow.
He was raised by her brother, King Mark, in his castle of Tintagel. He grew up to be a brave young man, slaying the monstrous Irish giant Morholt and becoming a knight. But Morholt wounded him with a poisonous barb. Convinced he was going to die, Tristan asked to be put alone on a sailless boat and rowed away. He was lucky. The sea carried him to the Irish coast. The Queen of Ireland had the power to heal, as did her daughter Isolde Plavolasa. He told them his story, kept silent that he had killed the Queen’s brother Morholt, and Isolde cured him.
A few years later, King Mark sent him to find the owner of a beautiful golden hair that a bird had brought to his window. It was caught in a storm at sea and carried back to Ireland. This time he told Isolde about Morholt. She grabbed the sword. Tristan got up from the bath and stunned Isolde with his naked body enough to tell her about the task he had been given. Isolde explained that she was the woman he was looking for and that she really wanted to be queen.
The pair set off for Tintagel. On board, she became thirsty. Isolde’s maid filled their canteens and they emptied them. They did not know that the maid had mistakenly taken a very strong love potion brewed by the Queen as a gift for the wedding night of Isolde and King Mark. According to one of the most famous versions, the potion wore off after three years, in others it had unlimited power, but in all of them Tristan and Isolde were perfectly united in love, inseparable in heart, mind and body.
But Tristan was bound by his knightly oath to carry out the task he was given. He took Isabella to the king, but on the wedding night her maid crept into his bed, and the next day the king learned that Tristan and Isolde were lovers. He banished Tristan, but he and Isolde continued to see each other in secret. Finally, the king sentenced Tristan to death on the torture stake and Isabella to death at the hands of lepers. Tristan escaped, rescued Isabella and they fled into the forest.
This might have been a stroke of luck, had the myth not pointed out that their life together was “hard and difficult”. One day, King Mark found them asleep. When he saw that Tristan’s sword rested between them and that they were apparently enduring, his heart softened: he put his own sword in Tristan’s place and quietly withdrew.
After three years, the potion stopped working. They felt guilty and started to have doubts. They returned to court. Isolde became Queen and Tristan was knighted again. He sailed the sea again, but he did not forget Isolde. Convinced that she no longer loved him, out of desperation he married a beauty of the same name, Isolde of Belorca, but he could not sleep with her because of his Isolde.
One day, a spear pierced him and he stood on the brink of death. He sent for his Isolde to come and save his life. He wanted to see her again. She told him that her ship would have white sails and immediately set sail. His wife was filled with jealousy: she would rather see her husband dead than happy in the arms of another woman. When she saw a ship with white sails, she told him they were black. He died when Isolde disembarked. In agony of heart, Isolde lay down beside his body and she died too.
When passion overcomes reason and legal considerations, the myth of Tristan and Isolde is born. It represents the state of mind of the 12th century, when people were torn between the chivalric ideal, according to which a knight always and first served his lady, and therefore Tristan’s elopement with Isolde was perfectly justifiable, and the courtly ideal, according to which he had to serve his lord, which is why Tristan returned Isolde to King Mark. The myth scholar D. de Reugemont thought that the story expressed the love of love and the love of death, while the philosopher Sören Kirkegaard saw it as a drama of the becoming of the self, a walk towards one’s true Self, or the path to perfection.
