Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan – Maurer’s Einführung (Göschen edition) in translation.

Biographical aspects
There is little we can say with certainty about the externals of Gottfried’s life. We know that he composed Tristan and died before completing it because his successors and continuators, who held him in great esteem, have told us so. From the critical comments he makes about contemporary story-tellers and poets in his memorable literary excursus (Tristan, li.4621ff.) we deduce that he died shortly before 1210. This accords with the fact that Gottfried criticizes Wolfram’s Parzival in the excursus, and that, at a later time, Wolfram responded.

Gottfried was evidently not of aristocratic, i.e. knightly birth. It is striking that he is expressly referred to not as ‘her’, but as ‘meister’. We cannot say whether he was a member of the lesser clergy or whether he was a well-educated member of the citizen class who had profited (like Hartmann and Wolfram) from a standard clerical education. According to Rudolf von Ems, Gottfried also wrote (in addition to his Tristan) two identically-constructed poems on ‘glesîn glück’ and ‘mîn unde dîn’.

Contemporaries: Hartmann and Wolfram
If we approach Gottfried after first getting to know the work of Hartmann and Wolfram, we recognize that the latter two more or less belong together. They both adopt a clear Christian framework for their stories; both of them acknowledge the same goal and path through life under God’s Grace. Gottfried avoids reference to the afterlife: his thinking remains firmly in, and of, this world [diesseitig]. He too has high ideals; these too grew out of a knightly view of the world. But Gottfried nonetheless remains far distant from both Hartmann and Wolfram. There are profound and genuine grounds for his rejection of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s work. A whole world separates the two writers. Wolfram’s subject-matter – his struggle with the problem of original sin and his solutions to it – are miles from Gottfried’s thinking. And conversely, Wolfram must have sensed that Gottfried’s ideals and ideas were the opposite of his own.
[But why, then, did Gottfried so praise Hartmann and mock Wolfram, if Hartmann’s world-view was in essence no different from Wolfram’s?]

Gottfried's originality. His audience of edele herzen.
Gottfried introduced the realities of existence into his work in a manner which was completely new for his period. He too proposed social norms and presumed an ideal of behaviour. Yet his thinking remains far from any idealization of the world and human beings in the manner of Wolfram and Hartmann. There are certainly powers and events in the world which prevent men and women from living in an ideal or perfect way, but, for Gottfried, the culmination of all suffering and human failings and weaknesses through the intervention of miraculous and blessed [glückbringend] help from God is not an obvious solution at all. Yet in Gottfried’s thinking, too, human beings have to survive in a world full of suffering and disappointment. Indeed, in his work, it is precisely the ability to cope with suffering and bitterness which makes men and women special. Only such people as are capable of this belong in his company of edele herzen. For Gottfried as much as for any of his contemporaries, suffering is an unavoidable aspect of the world and our existence within it. There can be no joy, no success, no happiness without sorrow. The ideal person, who truly belongs to the company of edele herzen, is not only aware of the indissoluble unity of Joy and Sorrow, he also affirms it and consciously takes it upon himself. This ability to affirm suffering and to take it upon oneself is the very measure of human greatness and value.
[NB: Maurer’s own celebrated study of medieval German literature is entitled simply Leid (1951).]

In the story of the great, purifying love between Tristan and Isolde, Gottfried shows in exemplary fashion the happiness and sorrow of edele herzen. He shows how these edele herzen take sorrow and even death upon themselves for the sake of their great love. Gottfried has recognized that there is a love in this world which seizes human beings with such violence that they cannot withdraw from it, that they turn against what is right and loyal [Recht und Treue], they tell lies and deceive. Despite this, those great values still retain their validity for Gottfried; êre (i.e. der werlde hulde) – society’s respect and approval – remains a goal of high worth. As regards his heroes, Tristan and Isolde: they certainly may be driven by a great and pure love which forces them together on the one hand, but at the same time they are obliged to live under the law of êre, i.e. the unconditional obligation to live by the demands of courtly society. In a new form of mâze [= moderation] demanded by Gottfried, i.e. a life which shows balance and self-control, Tristan and Isolde attempt again and again, and over a long period of time, to do justice to the expectations of both minne and êre. Thanks to their wits, to trickery and deceit, by taking on periods of separation and renunciation of their love, the lovers repeatedly succeed in escaping from the watchers and King Marke’s jealous distrust and thus to preserve their êre, i.e. the respect of the court, and their status within it and at it.

The conflict between the demands of society and the demands of love
Gottfried affirms this love with its sorrow-filled consequences. He extols it for its purity and power, declaring it free of all baseness. At the same time, ‘Love’ and ‘Nature’ are accorded rights of their own, valid alongside those of ‘Honour’ itself, and which, under ideal circumstances, can be brought into harmony with both Honour and Gottfried’s new concept of mâze. In the end, though, this attempt at harmonization turns out to be a failure; the requirements of mâze are broken and, with it, everything – minne and êre – is destroyed. But, through their endurance of this destruction too, through their sorrow-filled concern for the preservation of mâze, and even in their final failure, the ideal of edele herzen which Gottfried had propounded is preserved.

From this brief outline it will be clear just how different Gottfried and Wolfram von Eschenbach are in their conception of the problems of the ‘courtly world’. The difference and contrast [Gegensetzlichkeit] between these two poets is equally evident in their metrical skills and in their conception of the task and work of an artist. Indeed, Gottfried’s critical comments about Wolfram relate obviously in the first instance to just these aspects. Wolfram’s dark and heavy diction [dunkle und schwere Sprache], his willfully personal style, his way of following his own imagination rather than his source: these are the targets of Gottfried’s criticism.

Aspects of style, form and structure
The ideal of Form which Gottfried strove after, and which, of his predecessors, Hartmann had come closest to, is the exact opposite: i.e. maximum transparency and crystalline clarity of diction, extreme smoothness, musicality and sweetness of the lines. Gottfried brought these to the highest level of perfection in his Tristan. Language and rhythm flow together in apparently effortless unity; they merge into one another so magically that the sequence of lines appears to have no end. Gottfried has both designed and structured his poem in perfect balance and, at the same time, brought out this structure by means of rhyming skills (the quatrain sections) [Vierreimpartien] and the embellishment of acrostics. If we give due weight to these skills, we perceive a structure for the work as a whole which strikes true both for its beauty of form as well as for its meaning, as follows:

The Prologue (ca. 250 lines) is followed by the preliminary story (ca. 1,500 lines long). Then comes the introduction to the main story, ca. 3,000 lines long, and this is followed by the two parts of the main story, comprising some 6,500 lines. Shortly after the beginning of the main story’s final section the surviving version of the tale breaks off. We may assume that it was again intended to comprise some 3,000 lines, whilst a shortish conclusion (an epilogue?) would have rounded off the whole work appropriately, bringing Gottfried thus to the completion of his work. At all events, it seems to me beyond dispute that the poet consciously and deliberately intended his quatrain sections to have a structural function. Furthermore, these quatrain sections have special importance from the fact that, in them, basic themes of the novel are discussed: here Gottfried expresses fundamentally important ideas concerning edele herzen, liep and leit, leit and linge, êre, triuwe, minne, compulsion/necessity [Not] and death.

The present 'Auswahl'
Given these presuppositions, the choice of passages from the story which follows here picks out precisely those quatrain sections and, therefore, the poet’s most significant reflections. Furthermore, it seemed preferable to select a few important excerpts rather than many short extracts from the story as a whole. Thus we have here in full the Prologue and a portion of the preliminary story, the literary excursus, the Ordeal, then principally those decisive sections containing the lovers’ banishment from court, the Minnegrotte, down to their discovery and final separation.

NB: in this Introduction there is no discussion of Gottfried’s evocation of the Gottesurteil. That episode is, for what it implies about Divine Justice and for its evident condemnation of the practice of ‘Trial by Ordeal’, an astonishingly bold piece of writing.

Likewise there is no comment on the love-potion’s power. Was it magical – which implies an outside power preventing the lovers from coping with their mutual attraction (‘love’)? Or is the potion just a symbol to represent an all-consuming, ‘fatal’ attraction?

Likewise, although the Minnegrotte is mentioned briefly, there is no hint of the fact that it could be interpreted in terms of mystical religion in the tradition of St Bernard’s teaching about divine love.

Nor is anything made of the fact that the story contains no children – neither children in general, nor children who might possibly have been born to Isolde and Tristan or to Isolde and Mark (other than, of course, the entirely realistic, and fatal, birth of baby Tristan to Blanscheflur and her lover – later husband – Riwalin).

(There is no reference to the tale of Abelard and Heloise.)

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