He reveals his identity to King Mark, who promotes him to captain of the guards. Tristan goes to war with Mark’s troops and singlehandedly defeats the Irish champion Morholt.

Impressed by Tristan’s skill, King Mark employs him as a soldier. When he arrives in Cornwall, Tristan goes to his uncle’s castle at Tintagel, forbidding his companions from telling anyone who they really are and where they are from. Tristan leaves Lothian with Gorvenal and some of his other companions. When Tristan expresses a desire to see his mother’s homeland of Cornwall, his father the king agrees to give him a ship so he can travel there. By the time he is a teenager, Tristan is an accomplished and handsome prince. Tristan is brought up by Gorvenal, a courtier who teaches him to hunt, fight, ride horses, and play the harp. His mother, the princess of Cornwall, dies giving birth to him, and his father, King Rivalin of Lothian, is unable to raise his son due to his grief. The story begins with the birth of Tristan.

Sutcliff was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Anderson Medal in 1974. Tristan and Iseult received the Boston-Globe Horn Book Award in 1972 and was a runner up for the Carnegie Medal. And they were so close that each saw their own reflection standing in the other one's eyes and in that moment it was as though something of Iseult entered into Tristan and something of Tristan into Iseult, that could never be called back again for as long as they lived.Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s novel, Tristan and Iseult (1971), retells the story of the twelfth-century romance in a manner suitable for young readers. And standing hand in hand, they looked at each other, and for the first time Tristan saw that the Princess's eyes were deeply blue, the colour of wild wood-columbines and she saw that his were as grey as the restless water out beyond the headland. Now this was the first time that ever they had touched each other, save for the times when the Princess had tended Tristan's wounds, and that was a different kind of touching and as he set her down, their hands came together, as though they did not want it to be so quickly over. “Tristan held up his arms to the Princess as she came out over the side, and carried her up through the shallows so that when he set her down on the white wave pattered sand, not even the soles of her feet were wet.

Tristan and iseult by rosemary sutcliff