Before Romeo and Juliet ever sighed on a balcony, Tristan and Iseult drank a potion that bound them in a love stronger than honor, marriage, or death. In this celebrated retelling, first published in 1900, the great French medievalist Joseph Bédier gathers the scattered fragments of the oldest Tristan poems and reweaves them into a single, luminous narrative: the fatal voyage, the dragon slain, the betrayal in the forest of Morrois, the leap from the chapel window, the ship with black sails. This edition presents the complete, unabridged original text, accompanied by a new introduction that traces the legend's medieval roots and Bédier's remarkable act of literary restoration, along with reader's notes illuminating names, places, and customs. Tragic, tender, and strangely modern, this is the love story that shaped centuries of Western romance. Part of The Founding Texts Library.