Gottfried von Strassburg

German poet

• Born: fl. c. 1210
• Birthplace: Alsace(?), Holy Roman Empire (now Alsace-Lorraine, France)
• Died: Unknown
• Place of death: Unknown

Gottfried was one of the great writers of the German courtly epic during the High Middle Ages.

Early Life

Little is known of the life of Gottfried von Strassburg (GAWT-freed fuhn STRAHS-buhrg). It is presumed that he was of middle-class origins, and since he was well educated perhaps he was also a member of the clergy. He may have been born in the Alsace region. He lived around 1200, the zenith of the European Middle Ages and the high point of German courtly culture. It was the era of feudalism, with society composed of the knightly class, the serfs, and the clergy. As the custodians of religious and secular heritage, the priests and monks were the most educated and literate of the three classes.

During this time, the court of the king and his knight-vassals was the center of worldly culture. It was the age of the courtly love lyric, a well-defined canon of poetry in which the knight proclaimed his love for his lady and pledged to do great deeds in her honor. Through such devotion, the knight was to be lifted to a higher spiritual existence. The great stories of love and adventure, the romances from the Provençal {I}romans{/I} also had their origin in this period of European culture.

Life’s Work

As one of the three greatest writers of the courtly epic in Germany (the other two being Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue), Gottfried was a master of the genre and told his tales with a perfected sense of verse forms and a brilliant command of imagery. He is best known for the epic {I}Tristan und Isolde{/I} (c. 1210; {I}Tristan and Isolde{/I}, 1899), one of the great romances of the period. Eleven manuscript copies of his text have survived, most of them written in Alsatian dialect. His tale was never completed, and two later writers, Ulrich von Türheim and Heinrich von Freiberg, completed other versions of the Gottfried text. The love story is legendary, a fictionalized account of a historical event the details of which have long been forgotten. The primary source for Gottfried’s version was that of the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas von Britanje. There had been an earlier German rendering by Eilhart von Oberge, composed around 1180, which certainly had some influence on Gottfried’s tale. The themes of Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde are the demoniac and transcendent, or healing, powers of love.

Told in thirty chapters, Gottfried’s epic relates the tragic tale of the fated lovers, Tristan and Isolde. Tristan was the child of the model English knight Rivalin and his love, Blancheflor. Their story foreshadows to a degree the later fate of their son. A knight at the court of King Mark of Cornwall, the young, inexperienced, and somewhat rash Rivalin meets the beautiful and equally youthful Blancheflor. In the typical manner of the courtly romance, they keep their love secret from the world. Their budding relationship is interrupted by the call to battle, and the brash Rivalin suffers a mortal wound. Disguised as a doctor, Blancheflor visits him on the battlefield, and they consummate their love. He is revived from his wounds by her kisses, yet after the two elope, he perishes in a battle. Blancheflor, unaware of her lover’s fate, brings a child into the world but dies of grief in the course of premature childbirth when she learns of Rivalin’s death. That child is Tristan whose name, from the French triste, suggests sadness. He was conceived in that moment of passion that had revived his father from the brink of death and that would later lead to the loss of his mother. Thus, the story of Tristan’s parents ironically establishes the association of love and tragic death that will be the theme of the son’s story.

Tristan is reared by Rual and Floraete. He develops into a model student and is skilled in the manly virtues of knighthood. Like his father, he eventually goes to the court of King Mark and impresses all with his skill and learning. King Mark further undertakes Tristan’s upbringing and becomes his most trusted friend. On one of his heroic adventures, Tristan visits Ireland and King Morold, who has been demanding large tributes from Mark. He engages in battle with King Morold and kills him. Wounded by the king’s poisoned sword, Tristan can be healed only by Morold’s sister. Disguised as a minstrel, he visits her and is healed. He then instructs her beautiful daughter, Isolde, in music and the social graces. When he returns to England, Tristan tells King Mark of Isolde’s great beauty and the king decides that he must wed her. He sends Tristan back to Ireland to claim Isolde. Tristan is recognized as the one who killed King Morold and is hated by Isolde for murdering her uncle, but after slaying a dragon that has plagued the kingdom Tristan is allowed to take Isolde back as King Mark’s bride.

Isolde’s mother has brewed a love potion for her daughter and King Mark. On the journey to Cornwall, Isolde’s servant, Brangane, confuses the potion with a drink of water she has given to Tristan and Isolde. The two fall madly in love. Tristan breaks his pledge of loyalty to Mark when he consummates his spiritual union with Isolde. The two lovers decide to deceive the king. Yet, discovered by Mark, they are banished from the court. Tristan and Isolde then seek shelter in a secluded grotto that is an enchanted domain of love. They are eventually discovered. Isolde must return to the king, and Tristan voluntarily leaves her so that she will remain safe. He goes to Normandy, where he serves as a knight and eventually marries another, Isolde Weisshand.

Gottfried’s version remains incomplete at this point; the conclusion was written by his followers. Tristan is severely wounded in battle and sends for Isolde so that she might heal him with her magic arts. A white sail on the ship is the signal that she is on her way. Tristan’s jealous wife, Isolde Weisshand, forces a messenger to lie and report the sighting of a black sail. Tristan dies in despair, and Isolde also perishes from grief on her arrival. In the end, King Mark has them buried side by side.

Gottfried’s epic epitomizes many of the virtues of German knighthood: Tristan’s prowess and courage in battle, his proper bearing at court, and his skill and learning all suggest a vision of the ideal knight. Ultimately, he is even loyal to King Mark and fights on his behalf for Isolde. It is a magic love potion that robs him of his will and causes his betrayal of his king. The breaking of the oath of fealty to one’s liege lord was a serious offense within the culture of knighthood, but Tristan is clearly at the mercy of powers beyond his control. Gottfried’s theme is thus very much about the irrational as it is manifested in human love. Although Gottfried lived during the great era of the courtly love lyric, a highly stylized genre that dealt with the ennobling aspects of a knight’s idealized devotion for his chosen lady, his work concentrates on the more secular dimensions of love. Passion (and the irrational) is a kind of demoniac power that disrupts the normal course of society; it causes the individual to ignore its rules and prohibitions. Tristan and Isolde are therefore fated for a tragic end; those who live outside society must finally pay the price.

Yet the theme of passion is not to be interpreted solely in this negative fashion. Tristan and Isolde’s love is also a transcendent power; it raises them above the everyday world into what is clearly an exalted realm of harmony and unity, into the oneness and bliss of the love experience (as in the famous episode in the grotto). Thus, love is also a spiritually healing power that abolishes the loneliness and suffering of the individual. It “cures” the ultimate sense of separateness that plagues all human beings. Isolde’s healing of Tristan’s wounds, for example, suggests this in a symbolic fashion. Gottfried’s story of the fated lovers revolves around universal contradictions of the human experience.

Significance

As one of the great authors of the courtly epic during the Middle Ages, Gottfried von Strassburg will surely retain his place not only within German literature but also within world literature. Along with the writings of Wolfram von Eschenbach, which Gottfried abhorred, his work represents the zenith of the courtly epic genre within the German tradition. A master storyteller, his narrative style is flowing, and his verse forms are musical and well constructed. The epic foreshadowing of Tristan and Isolde’s fate in the story of Tristan’s parents, Rivalin and Blancheflor, suggests a writer who is in full command of the skills of his trade.

In contrast to Wolfram, whose major epic, Parzival (c. 1200-1210; English translation, 1894), deals with the spiritual issues of absolute truth and man’s proper relationship to God, Gottfried’s text treats the earthly and secular themes of beauty, passion, and love. If the Wolfram text revolves around the theme of divine love, then Gottfried’s focuses on profane passion. Even when his narrative deals with aspects of physical love, it does so with circumspection and stylistic distance. He depicts these thematic concerns with a degree of elegance and grace that raises his work far above the works of his contemporaries.

Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde certainly remains one of the greatest love stories ever told. The intensity of the characters’ passion and their tragic fate captures the mysteries and sufferings inherent in the human capacity to love. The power of his story has exerted its influence on subsequent centuries. The nineteenth century German writer Karl Immermann composed a version in 1841 that remained uncompleted, the great composer Richard Wagner wrote an opera based on the legend in 1859, and in 1903 Thomas Mann wrote a novella, Tristan (English translation, 1925), which incorporates themes from both Gottfried’s and Wagner’s versions.

Bibliography

Batts, Michael S. Gottfried von Strassburg. New York: Twayne, 1971. An excellent introduction to Gottfried’s life and times with an interpretive focus on his Tristan and Isolde and on the legend in general. Contains a bibliography.

Bekker, Hugo. Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan”: Journey Through the Realm of Eros. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1987. An analysis of the the medieval concept of love in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde.

Chinca, Mark. Gottfried von Strassburg: “Tristan.” Chinca, a professor of medieval literature, has published several books and essays on Gottfried. This concise introduction for students compares Gottfried’s approach to literary tradition with that of previous writers and examines the reception of Tristan and Isolde by contemporaries and later writers.

Chinca, Mark. History, Fiction, Verisimilitude: Studies in the Poetics of Gottfried’s “Tristan.” London: University of London, 1993. Close readings of Tristan and Isolde.

Hall, Clifton D. A Complete Concordance to Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan.” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Jackson, W. T. H. “The Role of Brangaene in Gottfried’s Tristan.” The Germanic Review 27 (1953): 290-296. A brief essay on the pivotal position of Isolde’s servant. Contains notes with bibliographical information.

Jackson, W. T. H. “Tristan the Artist in Gottfried’s Poem.” PMLA 77 (1962): 364-372. This scholarly essay examines the title character and the talents he exhibits at court. Contains notes with bibliographical information.

Jaeger, Stephen. Medieval Humanism in Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan and Isolde.” Heidelberg, Germany: Winter, 1977. Jaeger, a professor of comparative and Germanic literature and social/intellectual history, considers Tristan and Isolde in the light of the humanist tradition in Europe.

Loomis, Roger, ed. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. An important collection of essays on medieval literature with several on Gottfried’s epic. Contains a bibliography.

Schultz, James A. “Teaching Gottfried and Wolfram.” In Approaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradition, edited by Maureen Fries and Jeanie Watson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992. A brief but useful article for teachers.

Stevens, Adrian, and Roy Wisbey, eds. Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 1990. Papers from a symposium held at the Institute of Germanic Studies, London, March 24-26, 1986. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Sullivan, Robert G. Justice and the Social Context of Early Middle High German Literature. New York: Routledge, 2001. A history of the Holy Roman Empire hinging on an examination of High German literature and its authors’ focus on social, political, and spiritual issues during a time of transformation. Bibliographical references, index.

Thomas, Neil E. Tristan in the Underworld: A Study of Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan” Together with the “Tristran” of Thomas. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. An analysis of the legend from its Celtic roots to its proliferation by European poets. Gottfried’s source for the Tristan legend is the rendition of the French poet Thomas, to which Gottfried’s work is compared. Concludes that Gottfried’s work defends rather than condemns feudal order.

Willson, H. B. “Vicissitudes in Gottfried’s Tristan.” The Modern Language Review 52 (1957): 203-213. This essay discusses the narrative structure of Gottfried’s text. Contains notes with bibliographical information.