skopia
Charlemagne's rearguard is ambushed in a Pyrenean pass, and Roland will not blow his horn for help until his temples burst. Four centuries later Italian poets were still writing epics about him.
Siegfried, invulnerable but for one spot the dragon's blood missed, is speared there by Hagen. Kriemhild's revenge for her husband runs through the rest of Germany's national epic and empties two courts.
Qays, an Arab poet, loves Layli so openly that his tribe calls him Majnun, the possessed, and her father marries her elsewhere. Poets from Anatolia to Mughal India rewrote Nezami's version for centuries.
Heloise wrote to Abelard, the Paris philosopher who had been her tutor and lover, years after her uncle's men castrated him. From her abbey she refused to call their love a sin.