History of Christian names

by Charlotte M. Yonge

Again, he is one of the three heralds of Britain, also one of the three diademed chiefs, also one of the three knights who had the conducting of mysteries.

Besides, the three unchaste matrons of Britain are Penarwen, Bun, and Esyllt Fingwen.

And the tale told by the Cymric race in Cambria and Armorica has resounded throughout southern Europe. There the mighty swineherd is the son of Roland and Blanchefleur, sister of Mark, king of Cornwall. Almost at the moment of his birth, she hears the tidings of his father’s death, and expires from the shock, calling her babe Tristan, or the sad. He grows up to be an accomplished knight, and after various adventures, is sent by his uncle, King Mark, to Ireland, to bring home the promised bride Ysolt the fair.

The mother of Ysolt gives her maid, Brengwain, a magic draught, which was to be administered to the pair on their bridal day, to secure their mutual affection. A storm rises on the voyage, and, intending to refresh her lady and the knight after his exertions and her alarm, Brengwain, in her confusion, gives them the fatal draught, and their passion for one another became the theme of the storytellers who preferred guilty love to high aspirations. Tristrem was married to another Ysolt called of the white hands, or of Brittany; he was dangerously wounded, and lay sick in her castle in Brittany. Nothing could cure him but the presence of Ysolt of Cornwall, and to her he sent his squire, with his ring, entreating, like the father of Theseus, that if she came to him the sails of the ship might be white, if she refused, the squire should hoist a black sail.

She came, but the wife, Ysolt of the white hands, falsely told the sick man that the sails were black; he sank back in despair and died, and Ysolt died of grief beside him.

Such is the story told by Thomas of Ercildoune, in the thirteenth century, as well as by hosts of romances.

Trust was really a Cymric name, and was called among the Picts Drust, or Drest. There is a Trust or Drust, MacTallaghi among the Pictish kings, who possibly may be the origin of Tristan, since many of the legends are common to Strath Clyde, Wales, and Cornwall. The Pictish Pendragon, who was elected at the time the Romans quitted Britain, was called by his countrymen Drust of the Hundred Battles, and many of his successors bore the same name, which means din, tumult, or loud noise, and thus may poetically be translated as a proclaimer or herald. Trwst ap Taran (tumult the son of thunder) was the poetical name of another of the line. The influence of Latin upon Welsh, however, made trist really mean sad, so that it was there accepted as suited to the melancholy circumstance of the hero’s birth; and Tristram, or sad face, became identified with the notion of sorrow; so that the child of St. Louis, born while his father was in captivity on the Nile, and his mother in danger at Damietta, was named Jean Tristan. Never would the cheerful Greeks have accepted such a name as Tristrem, Tristan, Tristano; but in Europe it regularly entered the ranks of the names of sorrow, and it was, no doubt, in allusion to it that Don Quixote accepted the soubriquet of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance. The earliest form of the name was Adsalutta, a Keltic goddess, whose name occurs in two inscriptions, one at Laybach and the other at Ratschöck in Istria. It is identified by the learned with Esyltt, and connected with Suraya, the Sungod of the Vedas.

Esyltt was the French Yseulte, or Ysoude, the Italian Isolta, and English Ysolte, Isolda, or Izolta, and in all these shapes was frequent in the families of the middle ages; recurring again and again in registers, down to the seventeenth century: indeed, within the last fifty years a person was alive who bore this romantic name in the form of Izod.

Tallwch is the torrent, and seems to have been translated into Roland, from the sound of rolling, when the Armorican bards laid claim to the great Paladin of Charlemagne’s court, on the score of his having been Warden of the Marches of Brittany, and wanted to make out that Roland was a name of their own. They had thus caused Rowland to be considered as a regular Cymric name.

King Mark himself was most probably a compromise between the Roman Marcus and the native march, which belongs to all the Kelts—nay, Pausanias tells us, meant a horse, in the dialect of the tribe who tried to take Delphi. Its fellow, mar, passed into Teutonic; named Marshalls, as Marskalk, or horse servant; and lives among us as our mare, in the feminine. Indeed, Marcus may itself be another instance of the Keltic element in Latin.