Tristan & Iseult’s Hazel & Honeysuckle, Marie De France’s ‘Chevrefoil’ (12th Century)
He cut a hazel in half there,
Shaped and trimmed it, neatly square.
When he had prepared this staff,
He autographed it with his knife.
If the Queen saw this invention,
She would pay it great attention;
For this had all happened before–
She’d realized thus that he was there.
She’ll recognize it, easy, quick,
As soon as she sees her lover’s stick.
This is the gist of what he wrote,
The message he sent her, as he spoke:
That he’d stayed there for quite a while,
Waiting, lingering in exile,
Spying, trying to learn or hear
How he could find a way to see her,
For without her he cannot live.
For those two, it’s just like with
The sweet honeysuckle vine
That on the hazel tree will twine:
When it fastens, slips itself right
Around the trunk, ties itself tight,
Then the two survive together.
But should anyone try to sever
Them, the hazel dies right away,
And the honeysuckle, the same day.
“Dear love, that’s our story, too:
Never you without me, me without you!”
In the twelfth-century Breton lay ‘Chevrefoil’, by Marie de France, the hazel and the honeysuckle serve as a metaphor for the famous star-crossed lovers of medieval romance: Tristan and Iseult. In this short lay, Marie offers a brief snapshot or fragment of the popular Tristan legend; in this case, Tristan has been exiled from Cornwall, and Iseult is made to marry Tristan’s uncle. Marie tells of how the two lovers meet secretly in the forest, after communicating through symbolic plants. Tristan carves his name on a hazel branch and leaves it as a sign for Iseult to interpret; we are told that he has left similar signs before, so she knows what to look out for.
The lay depends upon a wider system of intertextuality – it assumes that we already know the stories about these lovers from the broader Arthurian tradition, and as readers we can therefore interpret the covert signs they leave for one another based. It’s also a text about how we generate meaning. In this case, the hazel plant becomes the messenger or sign bearer. The carver, Tristan, encodes it with meaning, but the hazel comes to stand in for Tristan.
But what about the honeysuckle? Tristan and Iseult’s love is compared to the intertwining of the hazel and the honeysuckle. It is said that if anyone should attempt to separate the two after they have been bound together, the hazel quickly dies, as does the honeysuckle. Indeed, in the wider tradition of the Tristan and Iseult legend—spoiler alert—the two lovers die of broken hearts on the same day. The implication is that their relationship is a natural and symbiotic one, and to live apart is to go against the law of nature. But how romantic is this really? Aside from the glaring red flags, botanically speaking, the relationship between hazel and honeysuckle is one of host and creeper. The honeysuckle is in fact parasitic to the hazel and can smother it, and the hazel does not actually die if the honeysuckle is removed from it. Might we then imagine that Marie invites an ironic reading of her central arboreal metaphor? While the separation of the lovers may seem tragic, familiarity with the wider legend and/or the plants themselves will in fact tell us that staying together is never going to end well.
Rebecca Field
PhD Candidate, Faculty of English
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
rf429@cam.ac.uk