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Hello, the story Tristan and his old was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages.

From its roots in Celtic myths, it passed into written form in Britain a century after the

Norman conquest and almost immediately spread throughout Northern Europe. It tells of a Cornish knight and an Irish

Queen Tristan and Isalt, who accidentally drink a love potion at the same time, on the same boat,

traveling to Cornwall where she is to marry someone else. They have no choice,

they consummate their love at sea and from that point must navigate the physical and moral

dangers that follow. In one version he'd slain a dragon, she had saved him from certain death.

They were a perfect match. Their love was heroic.

But could that excuse that adultery in the minds of medieval listeners,

particularly when the church was so clear they were wrong.

With me to discuss Tristan and his old are Laura Ash, associate professor of English at Worcester College

University of Oxford, Juliet Wood, associate lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University,

and Mark Kincher Reader in Medieval German Literature

at the University of Cambridge.

Juliet Wood, we've said the roots of the story are Celtic.

Will you tell us where you think the origins of it are?

Well, the origins are really in the international story patterns

that you find in Celtic tales.

And one of them is Irish, the story of Deirdre, Deirdre of the Sorrows, who is forced to marry a king, an older king, and falls in love with someone else.

And she puts her lover under Gesh. She approaches him and they escape periodically from the king and in the

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