DeDanaan

Tristan and Iseult / Isolde : The Tristan and Iseult/Isolde legend starts with Mark, uncle of Tristan. Tristan goes to Ireland to bring back a bride for Mark, the beautiful Iseult, but he falls in love with her himself. Most of the legends are to do with their efforts to remain together and the uncle’s determination to thwart them. In the end the story ends in tragedy. It is one of literature’s great love stories. Tristan and Iseult are second only to Lancelot and Guinevere as the great lovers of the Arthurian legends. The story of their tragic love has been the subject of numerous medieval and modern retellings.

Tristan and Iseult is a love story that a harper, or minstrel, tells at Camelot, the court of King Arthur. Tristan, nephew of King Marc of Cornwall, slays an Irish knight in a duel, thus averting a war. Later Tristan, shipwrecked in Ireland, kills a dragon that is scorching the countryside, and is forgiven for his victory over the Irish champion knight. He brings home the princess Iseult (Isolde, Isolt, Ysolt) to be the bride of King Marc in order to cement the peace between their two countries. But on the trip back to Cornwall, Tristan and Iseult fall passionately in love. Though Iseult becomes queen of Cornwall, the love affair continues until they are betrayed to King Marc. She is rescued from burning at the stake by Tristan wearing leper’s clothes, and they escape to live in the forest. In the end Marc forgives his queen and Tristan is banished. Then he comes to Arthur’s court and becomes a knight of the Round Table. When he dies, Iseult arrives too late to see him, and she dies of a broken heart. King Marc buries them together, and hazel and honeysuckle plants spring from the ground over their hearts and twine together over their grave.

There are many variations of this enduring love story.

From the Back Cover :
The first complete English edition, brilliantly translated….Throughout it retains the beauty and sense of fatality that have made it one of legendary literature’s most fascinating tales.” — Time

A tale of chivalry and doomed, transcendent love. The Romance of Tristan and Iseult is one of the most resonant works of Western literature, as well as the basis for our enduring idea of romance. The story of the Cornish knight and the Irish princess who meet by deception, fall in love by magic, and pursue that love in defiance of heavenly and earthly law has inspired artists from Matthew Arnold to Richard Wagner. But nowhere has it been retold with greater eloquence and dignity than in Joseph Bedier’s edition, which weaves several medieval sources into a seamless whole, elegantly translated by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld.

“A powerful rendition, an incomparable tale.”

– The New York Times

Tumulus : A tumulus (plural tumuli) is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or kurgans and can be found throughout much of the world. A tumulus composed largely or entirely of stones is usually referred to as a cairn.

The method of inhumation may involve a cist, a mortuary enclosure, a mortuary house or a chamber tomb. Examples of barrows include Duggleby Howe and Maes Howe.

Tuig, tuiscint : (Gaeilge-Irish) pron. “tig”
ag tuiscint pron. “uh TISH-kint” = to understand
1. Understand; comprehend
2. Know the nature of
3. Know the reason for
4. Have feeling for
5. Realize

Troll : 1. An unwelcome person; one who does not abide by common social mores; a trouble maker. Also known as a Fuckhead.

2. From Earth folklore, large underground-dwelling creatures that by legend have a taste for man. In certain fairy tales they live under bridges and other dark areas ready for the unwary traveller to come.

Trillian : See McMillan, Tricia “Trillian”

Tragula, Trin : Trin Tragula was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. “Have some sense of proportion!� she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she had in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a multiverse of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.

Towel : Just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitchhiker can carry. For one thing it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth on the cold moons of Jaglan Beta, sun bathe on it on the marble beaches of Santraginus Five, huddle beneath it for protection from the Arcturan Megagnats as you sleep beneath the stars of Kakrafoon, use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth, wet it for use in hand to hand combat, wrap it round your head to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and even dry yourself off with it if it still seems clean enough. It can be used for snaring birds whilst falling from a three-mile high marble statue. It can be used to signal temporally unstable spaceships by fossilizing them in planetary strata. More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the MultiVerse, rough it, slum it, struggle against mind-boggling odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with. Hence a phrase which has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” One of the first things that Ford Prefect did for Arthur Dent after the demolition of the Earth by the Vogons was to equip him with a towel. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is full of suggestions for successful towel deployment.

It is worth noting that a cup of white vinegar in a wash will help keep your towels fluffy and soft.

Total Perspective Vortex, The : The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. “Have some sense of proportion!� she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she haw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.

Titanic, Starship : The legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic was a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol. It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in history, but it had the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cursed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood. The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any part of the ship. They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was very likely to happen almost immediately. The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when it launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message - an SOS - before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.