A knight escorts his king's bride across the sea; on the voyage they drink the wrong cup — and the love potion binds them past loyalty, past honor, past any hope of stopping.
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Tristan and Iseult is the West's original doomed love triangle — the story that taught Europe what a love-death is. Béroul's version is the rawest: the lovers hunted through the forest of Morrois, the trials, the leper colony, the ambiguous oath.
Old French is the ancestor of half the English romance vocabulary, and glossed word by word it opens quickly. This is where courtly love's dark twin was born — read it at the root.
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