Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain is not a locale that we normally associate with the Tristan legend, and yet Tristan and Iseult make their appearance in the cathedral there twice during the Middle Ages, at two different times and in two different media. In the cathedral museum can be found a marble column – one of three salvaged from the original Romanesque façade – containing sculpted images that one prominent art historian, Serafín Moralejo, has identified as Tristan (and possibly Iseult). These images predate the earliest extant Old French poems and testify to a very early penetration of the legend into Galicia. How and why these secular images came to be incorporated into the religious programme of the Romanesque façade of the cathedral is the subject of the first part of this essay.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the lovers make another appearance in the cathedral at Santiago, via the Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd (c. 1400). In that text, once Tristram leaves Cornwall, he departs for his homeland (Spain), becomes king and marries Ísodd the Dark. After incurring a mortal wound in combat in ‘Jakobsland’ (Galicia), he dies and is eventually buried with Ísodd the Fair in ‘the largest cathedral in the land’. The question of how and why Santiago de Compostela came to play such a significant role in the Icelandic version of the Tristan legend is explored in the second part of this essay.

Tristan and Iseult on the Romanesque Façade of the Cathedral

The column containing the images from the Tristan legend is from the twelfth-century Romanesque façade (c. 1105–10) that once graced the north portal of the cathedral. It depicts three scenes, the most evocative of which appears in the lower register. It shows a young man lying in a rudderless boat asleep or in a faint, grasping a notched sword in his right hand (Figures 1a, 1b). It was Serafín Moralejo who first proposed identifying the figure as Tristan.