A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan

significant figures and episodes in the work

THE ESSAYS

(“Gottfried’s Adaptation of the Story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur,” by Danielle Buschinger;

Introduction: The Challenge of

Performances of Love:

Gottfried’s Tristan

“Duplicity and Duplexity: The Isolde of the White

Tristan and Isolde at Court

Will Hasty

Will Hasty

Hands Sequence,” by Neil Thomas; “Interpreting

Duplicity and Duplexity: The Isolde

the Love Potion in Gottfried’s Tristan,” by Sidney Johnson; “Performances of Love: Tristan and

Cultural and Social Contexts

Isolde at Court,” by Will Hasty; “The Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde,” by Ann

Humanism in the High Middle Ages:

Marie Rasmussen). All the essays contribute to a

Alois Wolf

comprehensive view of Gottfried’s revolutionary

Gottfried’s Strasbourg:

romance, which provocatively elevates a sexual,

Between Epic and Lyric Poetry:

The City and Its People

human love to a summum bonum.

The Originality of Gottfried’s Tristan

Michael S. Batts

Daniel Rocher

Will Hasty is Professor of German at the University of Florida. He is the editor of A Companion to Wolfram’s “Parzival,” (1999), and author of Adventures in Interpretation: The Works of Hartmann von Aue and Their Critical Reception (1996), both published by Camden House.

of the White Hands Sequence Neil Thomas

The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan

Gottfried’s Narrative Art

History, Fable and Love:

Figures, Themes, Episodes Gottfried’s Adaptation of the Story

Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain

of Riwalin and Blanscheflur Danielle Buschinger

Adrian Stevens

This Drink Will Be the Death of You: Interpreting the Love Potion in

The Medieval and Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan

Gottfried’s Tristan

The Medieval Reception of

Sidney M. Johnson

Gottfried’s Tristan Marion E. Gibbs

God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan Nigel Harris The Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde Ann Marie Rasmussen

The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde Ulrich Müller

The legend of Tristan and Isolde – the archetypal

A COMPANION TO GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG’S “TRISTAN”

The volume also contains new interpretations of

narrative about the turbulent effects of allconsuming, passionate love – achieved its most complete and profound rendering in the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg’s verse romance Tristan (ca. 1200-1210). Along with his great literary rival Wolfram von Eschenbach and his versatile predecessor Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried is considered one of three greatest poets produced by medieval Germany, and over the centuries his Tristan has lost none of its ability to attract with the beauty of its poetry and to challenge – if not provoke – on the basis of its sympathetic depiction of adulterous love. The articles in A Companion to Gottfried’s “Tristan,” written by a dozen Gottfried specialists in Europe and North America, provide definitive treatments of significant aspects of this most important and challenging high medieval version of the Tristan legend. They examine aspects of Gottfried’s unparalleled narrative artistry (“History, Fable, and Love: Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain,” by Adrian Stevens; “Between Epic and Lyric Poetry: The Originality of Gottfrieds Tristan,” by Daniel Rocher) and the important connections

A COMPANION TO

P.O. Box 41026 Rochester, NY 14604-4126, USA and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydell.co.uk or: www.camden-house.com

Edited by Will Hasty

ISBN 1-57113-203-1

Camden House

GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG’S “TRISTAN” EDITED BY WILL HASTY

between his Tristan and the socio-cultural situation in which it was composed (“Gottfried’s Strasbourg: The City and Its People,” by Michael Batts; “God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan,” by Nigel Harris; “Humanism in the High Middle Ages: The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan,” by Alois Wolf). Other essays examine the reception of Gottfried’s challenging romance by later poets in the Middle Ages (“The Medieval Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan,” by Marion Gibbs) and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, composers, and artists – particularly Richard Wagner (“The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde,” by Ulrich Müller). (continued on back flap) Jacket image: Tristan playing for the Welsh master, from manuscript R (99v). Reproduced from Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan: Ausgewählte Abbildungen zur Überlieferung (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1974) with the kind permission of the editors. Cover design by Anne Reekie

A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture Edited by James Hardin (South Carolina)

Camden House Companion Volumes The Camden House Companions provide well-informed and up-to-date critical commentary on the most significant aspects of major works, periods, or literary figures. The Companions may be read profitably by the reader with a general interest in the subject. For the benefit of student and scholar, quotations are provided in the original language.



 


   
   



 

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2003 by Will Hasty All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2003 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126 USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ISBN: 1–57113–203–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan / edited by Will Hasty. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–203–1 (alk. paper) 1. Gottfried, von Strassburg, 13th cent. Tristan. 2. Tristan (Legendary character) — Romances — History and criticism. 3. Arthurian romances — History and criticism. I. Hasty, Will. II. Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT1526 .C66 2002 831'.21—dc21 2002011219 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Challenge of Gottfried’s Tristan Will Hasty

vii 1

I. Cultural and Social Contexts Humanism in the High Middle Ages: The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan Alois Wolf Gottfried’s Strasbourg: The City and Its People Michael S. Batts

23 55

II. Figures, Themes, Episodes Gottfried’s Adaptation of the Story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur Danielle Buschinger

73

This Drink Will Be the Death of You: Interpreting the Love Potion in Gottfried’s Tristan Sidney M. Johnson

87

God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan Nigel Harris

113

The Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde Ann Marie Rasmussen

137

Performances of Love: Tristan and Isolde at Court Will Hasty

159

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CONTENTS

Duplicity and Duplexity: The Isolde of the White Hands Sequence Neil Thomas

183

III. Gottfried’s Narrative Art Between Epic and Lyric Poetry: The Originality of Gottfried’s Tristan Daniel Rocher

205

History, Fable and Love: Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain Adrian Stevens

223

IV. The Medieval and Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan The Medieval Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan Marion E. Gibbs

261

The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde Ulrich Müller

285

Notes on the Contributors

305

Index

307

Acknowledgments

I

all the contributors for their conscientious and congenial collaboration during the work on this volume. I would also like to thank Jim Hardin and Jim Walker of Camden House for the opportunity to work on Gottfried’s Tristan and for their encouragement and assistance during the preparation of the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the helpful staffs of the library of the University of Birmingham and the Taylor Institution Library of Oxford University, who were very helpful to me during the initial stages of planning for this volume. The cover illumination section of Tristan playing for the Welsh v master, from manuscript R (99 ), is reproduced from Gottfried von Strassburg ‘Tristan’: Ausgewählte Abbildungen zur Überlieferung (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1974) with the kind permission of the editors. My gratitude also goes to Victor Spink, who very kindly provided the reproductions of the scenes from the Tristan story as depicted on the Chertsey tiles, from Manwaring Shurlock’s Tiles from Chertsey Abbey, Surrey: Representing Early Romance Subjects (London: Griggs, 1885). My own work on this volume is dedicated, as always, to Barbara, Isabel, and Natalie, with love. WOULD LIKE TO THANK

Introduction: The Challenge of Gottfried’s Tristan Will Hasty

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HETHER IT IS CONSIDERED a myth that gives new expression to something fundamentally human (Wolf 1), the story of a passion stronger than life, social relations, and self which separates the magical East from the tragic West (de Rougemont 1956, 66–67), or “merely” the great ancestor and prototype of later literary depictions of passionate love as an individual experience at odds with social expectations (Wehrli 271), the emergence of the story about Tristan and Isolde in written form in the twelfth century was a signal development. Perhaps more than any other work or group of works in the flowering vernacular literatures of the time, this tale of adulterous love seems to have provided the possibility to test the limits of human love, along with religious and moral boundaries, with heroes and narrative events the likes of which had not been seen before in medieval literature (and perhaps not in any literature). These heroes and their actions set new standards, or points of reference, that were discussed, advocated or rejected according the predilections and preferences of different poets and audiences. Outside the handful of romances about Tristan and Isolde that have come down to us from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, this singular story of passionate adulterous love seems to be everywhere in high medieval literature. The story is a point of reference for lyric poets in Provence, France, and Germany who are interested in ideal love (see Wolf 8–18), but it is also expressive of a life given over to the emotions, which other poets believed needed to be qualified, criticized, or rejected. Both in the different ways that the story was told in the Tristan romances proper, and in the variety of positions taken to the Tristan material by other poets, we observe a narrative that was in the forefront of literary and cultural developments, a story that explored the range and possibilities of human love in this earthly life. In the specific manner in which it enabled the depiction of individual emotions at odds with social expectations, and beyond this the experience — even if literary rather than religious in a stricter sense — of a salvation and bliss that are experienced by means of

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love in this world and this life, and not first in the heavenly hereafter (a direction in which Gottfried arguably took the story the farthest), we observe both the extraordinary achievement and the seemingly immense provocation of the Tristan narrative, for both medieval and modern audiences. Though based on a French source, Gottfried’s romance fragment Tristan (fragmentary because it is unfinished, breaking off after some 19,500 lines) tested the potential of the Tristan material to explore boundaries to a greater extent than the source or any of the other medieval Tristan romances, for reasons we shall consider below. Gottfried’s Tristan needs to be seen not only as one of the most interesting renditions of a Tristan story that moved with great facility over geographic borders (by the end of the thirteenth century the Tristan story can be found from Italy to Norway, from Czech-speaking regions to Iceland), but also as one of the greatest literary achievements of the blossoming of literature in the German vernacular that occurred in the latter twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. However provoked many of them may have been by his treatment of the subject matter, literary scholars in Germanistik from the nineteenth century to the present have never been in doubt about Gottfried’s pre-eminence in formal artistry, and Gottfried’s Tristan has long been regarded, along with the romances of Heinrich von Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach, as one of the greatest achievements of the first Blütezeit of literature in the German vernacular. As a rule very little is known about the lives of significant poets in the High Middle Ages. This is certainly the case with Gottfried von Strassburg, who, in contrast to the other famous poets in Germany such as Hartmann and Wolfram, never explicitly identifies himself. It is only because he is named by later poets that it is possible to identify Gottfried as the author of Tristan. He may nevertheless have identified himself indirectly. The initials of the opening quatrains of Gottfried’s strophic prologue form the beginning of an acrostic that is continued throughout Gottfried’s romance. The beginning of the acrostic, contained entirely within the strophic prologue, comprises the letters GDIETÊRICHT. Although one cannot be completely sure about the significance of the acrostic, it has been postulated that the first initial, which is the very first letter of the narrative, is the first letter of Gottfried’s name, DIETÊRICH may be the name of Gottfried’s patron (about whom nothing is known), and the T — along with the I with which the stichic prologue begins in line 45 — begins an alternating spelling of the names of the two lovers. The acrostic is interesting for reasons other than what it might possibly

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say about Gottfried and his patron. The last initials that occur, L in verse 12503 and S in 12505, make it clear that Gottfried’s narrative was planned to be significantly longer than the preserved fragment. There is no way to know for sure why Gottfried did not finish his romance. His continuators tell us that death prevented him from doing so. Beyond suggesting how long Gottfried’s romance might have been, the acrostic also suggests reading as a mode of literary reception that, one might assume, was beginning to occur alongside the still predominant mode of oral performance (see Wenzel 261), perhaps particularly in the urban situation of Strasbourg in which Gottfried worked. Unfortunately, about this situation scholars know as little as they do about the life of the poet. Based on the ways in which the poet casts his audience (the edele herzen) as a privileged and exclusive group, it has often been assumed that Gottfried must have been working and performing for an aristocratic elite (Wehrli 267). Mark Chinca has recently suggested that patricians may have been only one group in a heterogeneous audience that may also have included ministerials of the bishop and clerics (11). However difficult it may be to establish any direct connections between Gottfried’s romance and the place in which it was composed, it seems to be no coincidence that such a complex and provocative narrative would have been produced in the lively urban setting of medieval Strasbourg. Gottfried is regarded as the most educated of the major medieval German poets. Later poets refer to him not with her, the form of address associated with knights and the lay nobility, but rather with meister, a title that may indicate Gottfried’s high degree of learning (meister = magister artium), though it might also simply have been an expression of admiration of his artistry, or even a specific designation of his social class (burgher rather than a noble her — see Chinca 7). Whatever academic significance the title meister may have, a high level of educational accomplishment is abundantly demonstrated by Gottfried’s poetry. His knowledge of Latin and French is impeccable, he is familiar with antique literary traditions, and his grounding in the liberal arts (septem artes liberales) goes beyond a “first rate” Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) to include knowledge in the more advanced and specialized areas of theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the arts of the hunt and music (Huber 23). On the basis of all this, it has generally been assumed that Gottfried was a cleric (clericus), at least in the broad sense of “someone with academic education and familiarity with Latin” (Chinca 7). It has long been considered that Gottfried does not seem quite so interested in the chivalric life as his famous contemporaries Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, though it is possible that his treatment of

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chivalry may have been more limited by the nature of his subject matter than by an aversion to or rejection of chivalry per se (see Jones 64–65). In the famous and incomparable passage in Tristan, referred to as the Dichterschau, or literary review, in which Gottfried assesses the major German poets of his time, we observe that the most important consideration shaping Gottfried’s relationship to Hartmann and Wolfram is not the status of chivalric deeds, but rather a rhetorical standard of stylistic clarity and formal elegance that Gottfried finds most perfectly represented by Hartmann and not at all by Wolfram. Gottfried spends much praise on the former (4621–37), and lambastes the latter, whose syntactically difficult verses and frequently obscure references and allusions he criticizes and whom he calls a “finder of wild tales” (4638–90 — though, as Marion Gibbs points out in her chapter, Gottfried never names Wolfram specifically, and a few scholars have contested the still prevalent idea that Gottfried specifically had Wolfram in mind here). These references, and some of the other statements made about poets living and dead, suggest that Gottfried was composing his Tristan at about the same time that Wolfram was working on his Parzival, which is to say the first decade of the thirteenth century. A dating of ca. 1200–1210 is also consistent with Gottfried’s depiction of the ordeal of the glowing iron, the outcome of which (Isolde is left unburned thanks to a Christ who is “pliant as a windblown sleeve”) has been construed as an ironic statement about the efficacy of such ordeals. Such a statement would have been consistent with ongoing debate about ordeals leading up to the fourth Lateran council in 1215, at which the participation of bishops in ordeals was prohibited (Chinca 9–10). Gottfried’s romance is preserved in eleven complete manuscripts, the oldest of which (M and N) date from the thirteenth century (Batts 16). There are also more than a dozen fragments of other manuscripts dating from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Among these is the Carlisle fragment of 154 verses discovered in 1995 (which depicts some of the action shortly after the lovers have drunk the love potion). Like much of vernacular medieval literature, the Tristan story was dormant during the age of Enlightenment, and a serious preoccupation with Gottfried’s romance is not in evidence until its publication at the end of the eighteenth century in Christoph Heinrich Myller’s Samlung deutscher Gedichte aus dem XII, XIII, und XIV. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1785). Editions of Gottfried’s work appeared throughout the nineteenth century, such as those of von Groote (1821), von der Hagen (1823), Massman (1843), Bechstein (1868–70), and Golther (1888). Despite these and other publications of Gottfried’s romance, the first philologically rigor-

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ous edition based on an extensive study of the available manuscripts was that of Karl Marold (1906). Even this edition was considered inadequate, so the task of producing a critical edition was again taken in hand by Friedrich Ranke, who found numerous defects in Marold’s critical apparatus and also had different views about the relative importance of the extant manuscripts. Unfortunately Ranke’s work led to the publication only of a single volume in 1930 with no critical apparatus. As Rosemary Picozzi points out in her survey of the critical reception of Gottfried’s poem, Ranke’s edition, however incomplete, had the last word, as textcritical work gave way in the twentieth century almost completely to interpretation (77–78). The textual foundation of Gottfried scholarship is therefore far from ideal. In 1986 Huber wrote in his introduction to Gottfried’s romance that there was still no critical edition of Gottfried’s work that would satisfy modern philological standards. Because of its relative accessibility, the text cited in this volume is Rüdiger Krohn’s publication in three volumes of Friedrich Ranke’s edition along with Krohn’s modern German translation and textual explanations and commentary (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980). For English translations of Gottfried’s German verses, the elegant prose rendering of A. T. Hatto has been used in this volume when the contributors did not prefer to do the translations themselves. Despite his above-mentioned praise for Hartmann and his aversion to Wolfram, Gottfried might be seen as more different from these two poets than they are from each other, by virtue of the unique nature of his subject matter. With his Tristan, Gottfried participates in and must be seen in relation to an evolving narrative tradition, the historical origins of which reach back into an obscure past. The first stories about Tristan probably took shape in Britain in the early Middle Ages and may originally have had some basis in history. A Pictish prince named Drust, son of Talorc, lived at the end of the eighth and a Cornish king named Marke in the sixth century (see Batts 19), and other names from the story are documented in medieval Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany (Huber 12). However the story may have first taken shape, the geography of the fictional world depicted in it is recognizable as that of southwestern Britain and Ireland, and suggests that its provenance and modes of transmission were similar to those of the stories about King Arthur, the other main component of the so-called matière de Bretagne with which the Tristan story maintained close and lasting associations. It is assumed that the Tristan story first became a work of literature sometime around the middle of the twelfth century. On the basis of references in the extant romances, most scholars have assumed that there

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was an original Tristan romance (alternately called the Estoire, UrTristan, or poème primitif), now lost, upon which all the later verse romances were more or less directly based. Scholars then distinguish different manners of rendering this postulated original romance, a version commune and a version courtoise. The romances of Eilhart von Oberge and Béroul represent the version commune, or the spielmännische (minstrel) Version. Eilhart’s romance, dated ca. 1170, is the oldest completely preserved Tristan romance. Eilhart seems to have followed his source, to which he refers as the buoch (the Ur-Tristan?) in his prologue, very closely. The broad outlines of the story as told by Eilhart are similar to those that we see with Gottfried, but there are numerous striking differences. In Eilhart’s text, the story of Tristrant’s parents is told in only a few dozen lines, and it has not been transformed, as it has in the version courtoise, into a love story in its own right along the lines of the love of Tristan and Isolde. From the start the focus is on external (epic) action, not on internal (perhaps more lyrical) psychology or reflection, and the action is frequently not for the squeamish. Eilhart reports tersely that Blankeflur became violently ill and died during the sea voyage back to Rivalin’s kingdom and that the infant Tristrant was excised from her dead body. Later in Eilhart’s romance, the two journeys of Tristrant to the Ireland of Isalde simply happen. In the first case Tristrant has been wounded by Morold, and rather than torment the people around him with the stench of his wound, he asks to be placed in a boat so that he can die alone; a gale then carries his boat to Ireland and his healer Isalde. In the second case, Mark, pressured by his vassals to marry, finds a hair dropped by two swallows and states (because he prefers not to marry and to have Tristrant as his heir) that he will wed only the woman to whom the hair belongs; Tristrant volunteers to find the woman, and he and his party set out into the world in search of her. A storm again brings them to Ireland, so that the quest for Mark’s bride Isalde, to whom the hair naturally belonged, can be completed. (Gottfried, who explicitly mentions and criticizes the hair motif as nonsensical [8601–28], renders the second journey as a compelling and logical continuation of the first that follows upon Tristan’s memorable words of praise at Marke’s court about the younger Isolde’s amazing beauty and accomplishments.) The idea of a love that is embraced even as it leads inexorably to death, the potential of which was so fully realized by Gottfried, seems to be mitigated in Eilhart’s text when the strongest effect of the love potion is limited to a period of four years. The lengthy studies of the psychological and spiritual effects of love on individuals as we know them from Gottfried’s text do not seem to have been a matter of such importance in Eilhart’s text,

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which places much greater emphasis on action. Literary scholars today are inclined to regard Gottfried’s version as superior; medieval audiences seem as a rule to have had different ideas. The intensity and stark colors with which Eilhart rendered his depiction may explain why later versions of the Tristan story, such as the continuations of Gottfried’s romance by Ulrich von Türheim and Heinrich von Freiberg, returned to and continued in the spirit of Eilhart’s version rather than Gottfried’s, the intellectual and aesthetic demands of which may not have suited all authors and audiences. The other version commune of the Tristan story was Béroul’s Roman de Tristan. This romance, composed sometime between 1170 and 1190, has survived in two fragments that also provide glimpses of a medieval way of telling the Tristan story that is quite different from that of Gottfried. The following sequence of events in Béroul’s romance provides the most striking indication of how the so-called minstrel version of the story can differ from the more polished courtly version of Gottfried. After the bloodletting episode, in which Tristan’s desire has got the better of him and his guilt has been proven by the presence of his blood in the flour on the floor and in the bed of Isolde, Marke sentences the lovers to be executed. Tristan escapes execution, saves Isolde from lepers, to whom Marke has given his wife so that they can satisfy their carnal desires with her — “commuting” her death sentence to another that is worse than death — and escapes with her into the forest. So begins their rough and dangerous forest life. All of this is a clearly a far cry from the manner in which Gottfried renders the relatively amicable banishment of the lovers by Marke that precedes the Love Grotto episode. Though this is an extreme example, it illustrates the importance given by the version commune to dramatic events that make an immediate impact on the audience and do not require much reflection or empathy. Scholars have long considered that the minstrel strand of the Tristan tradition as present in the romances of Eilhart and Béroul is a more archaic and, as such, aesthetically and artistically inferior manner of rendering the story. Recently some scholars, pointing in particular to the ongoing importance of Eilhart’s version in the thirteenth century, have argued that the minstrel strand was merely a different and no less literary manner of rendering the story (see Schausten), thus suggesting that the differences between Gottfried’s version and that of the earlier romances of Eilhart and Béroul are not as great as has been traditionally assumed. While there is still little doubt among most scholars that Gottfried’s Tristan is a far more complex and artistically accomplished work than those of his predecessors and continuators, the study of the relationship between Gottfried’s “classical” romance and its “pre-” and “post-classical” relatives — itself

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part of a broader discussion of the relationship of the great works of the Blütezeit to the courtly works of earlier and later poets — continues to be a matter of lively scholarly debate. Gottfried says that he is telling the Tristan story in the same way as Thômas von britanje, an Anglo-Norman poet who composed a Tristan romance that has survived only in fragments. Gottfried’s Tristan thus becomes the most complete version of the courtly strand of the verse romances (the version courtoise, or höfische Version). This is because only about thirty-four hundred verses from the end of Thomas’s romance have been preserved, which coincidentally match almost exactly the part that is missing from Gottfried’s romance. It is thought that Thomas composed his romance for the court of Henry, duke of Anjou and future king of England, and Eleanore of Aquitaine not long after the middle of the twelfth century. This would make Thomas’s text older than those of Eilhart and Béroul, even if the manner in which he renders the story is generally considered to be more sophisticated or “modern.” The preserved verses of Thomas’s romance show, in contrast to the focus on dramatic action typical of the version commune, a more subtle and sophisticated treatment of love as an individual experience. As Paul Schach has written, “His greatest strength was his delicate and discerning psychological analysis of his characters. He was less interested in their actions than in the motives of their actions” (xv). When Gottfried says that he ascribes to Thomas’s manner of rendering the Tristan story, he announces that what is going on in the hearts and minds of his heroes will be more important to him than what his heroes do. Thomas and Gottfried, with their version courtoise of the story, “represent the lovers’ interiority more extensively, they develop it into a mode of loving in its own right” (Chinca 34–35). Corresponding to this realization of the potential of the Tristan story to explore interiority, the adulterous love itself — as the specific matter of this interiority — assumes both a greater complexity and a higher value in the version courtoise. Its primary function is not merely to hide its own tracks by means of epic action, as tends to be the case in the version commune, but rather to be a different, alternative way of living and feeling with a value of its own upon which Thomas and Gottfried linger at length and with relish. In the specific characteristics of their “courtly” treatment of the Tristan story, Thomas and Gottfried might be considered to be taking a position with respect to the moral and ethical implications of the love they are depicting (though it must also be conceded that it is not always easy to pin this position down). This position, as was suggested above, represents both a provocation and an achievement, or as Max Wehrli puts it (268–71), a “Verwirrung und

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Vertauschung der Ordnungen” (confusion and permutation of the order of things) on the one hand, and possibly a “Vorstoß zu einer eigenen Ethik” (a move forward to its own ethics) on the other, to which later authors and scholars would respond in a variety of ways. Given that the preserved parts of the romances of Thomas and Gottfried coincide for only a few hundred verses, it has been difficult to compare them and thus to assess Gottfried’s original contributions to the Tristan tradition. Fortunately, later romances that were also based on Thomas have provided some help. Thomas’s romance was also the source for the Saga af Tristram ok Ísönd, a prose rendering of Thomas’s romance in Old Norse produced in Norway by an author called Friar Robert (1226), and for a freer prose rendering in Middle English (before 1300) called Sir Tristram. Especially the former text has been used in endeavors to reconstruct the lost part of Thomas’s work, though it is evident that Friar Robert, while he generally seems to have been very faithful to the Anglo-Norman source, did not shirk from leaving out sections that he might have regarded as “excessive introspection and moralizing” (Schach xvi). Though it is by no means a perfect reflection of Thomas’s text, the Tristrams saga provides the best available idea about the content of the Anglo-Norman work, and it is frequently used as a point of reference in attempts to establish how closely Gottfried followed Thomas’s polished courtly rendition. Comparisons with the few preserved fragments of Thomas’s romance and with the Old Norse text seem to confirm what is already strongly suggested by Gottfried’s statements about his own narrative art and the narrative art of others in his literary review. One would not expect that Gottfried would have departed from his source in the same radical way as that “finder of wild tales,” Wolfram von Eschenbach, who seems in his Parzival to have denied his allegiance to his true source, Chrétien de Troyes, and to have invented a pseudo-source named Kyot to stand in for all the creative liberties he has taken with the French author’s Perceval. Gottfried indubitably would not have taken such great liberties with the source material, though the extent to which he too might have parted ways with Thomas (perhaps particularly in his employment of religious imagery in the depiction of love and its value) should not be underestimated. Max Wehrli, whose view might again be taken as representative, has posited that Gottfried followed Thomas very closely, diverging from the source only to make minor corrections in motifs, to shift accent and formulation, and to embellish with additional reflections. The result, for Wehrli, is a continuation and intensification (Steigerung) of the tendency that was already present in the version of Thomas (263). While Gottfried’s

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own contribution may not jump to the eye in the same way as that of Wolfram, his subtle modifications of the story as he found it — and subtlety of depiction might be regarded as one of Gottfried’s great strengths — doubtless transformed the Tristan story in a different, but no less significant way. The difference between Thomas and Gottfried is put very elegantly and insightfully by Schach: “If Thomas can be said to have refined and rationalized the ofttimes uncouth and fiercely passionate Tristan story, Gottfried von Strassburg must be credited with having spiritualized it and, through his formal artistry, with having marvelously transmuted it into a magnificent poem of surpassing beauty” (xvi). If the manner in which the Tristan story continued to be told in medieval Germany is any indication, one might venture to say that most poets and audiences were either unwilling, unable, or disinclined to adopt the “position” taken by Gottfried, though there is nothing comparable to the frequently pointed coupling of literary criticism and religious/moral condemnation that one finds in the modern critical reception of Gottfried’s romance. In the continuation of Ulrich von Türheim (ca. 1250), Gottfried is mentioned as the illustrious predecessor, his artistry is praised, and then Ulrich proceeds to tell the story to its conclusion — not in the spirit of Gottfried’s intellectually and aesthetically challenging conception, but rather in that of Eilhart’s version commune. Writing much later and in a different geographic and cultural situation, Heinrich’s continuation (ca. 1300) also follows the spirit of Eilhart’s text. But as Marion Gibbs points out in her chapter in this book, the reception of Gottfried is complex and multi-faceted. Next to cases such as Ulrich and Heinrich, which indicate that Gottfried’s conception of love may not have been preferable to all poets and audiences, there are numerous other cases (such as many of the works of Rudolf von Ems and Konrad von Würzburg) that show a sympathetic response and indebtedness not only to Gottfried’s formal artistry, but also to the great predecessor’s more provocative “position” with regard to the subject matter. In the later Middle Ages it was again the version of Eilhart, and not of Gottfried, that enjoyed the greatest popularity. The German chapbook Tristrant und Isalde (ca. 1350) was derived from Eilhart, and this chapbook in turn provided the material for five poems (ca. 1551) and a Tragedia mit 23 personen von der strengen Lieb Herr Tristrant mit der schönen Königin Isalden (1553) by Hans Sachs. Beyond Germany the Tristan story continued to be popular in the later Middle Ages, though this popularity was largely indebted to the thirteenth-century prose rendering of the material that became part of the French Vulgate Cycle (ca. 1225–1235; recast in German a few years later). The French prose

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Tristan served as the source of the Tristan sections of Malory’s Arthuriad, in which the complex relationships that are central to the courtly verse romances of Thomas and Gottfried recede somewhat into the background, and Tristan is transformed to an adventuring knight along the lines of Lancelot. Tristan and Lancelot are the two best knights in the world, and the depiction of their chivalric prowess eclipses, for large sections of the narratives, their love for their respective queens. The tragedy of Tristan as cast in the Vulgate and in the version of Malory is thus much transformed and becomes a small part of the broader turmoil that eventually engulfs the entire world of Arthur. Not until the nineteenth century did the reception of Gottfried’s romance, along with that of most of the other medieval German works that are known to us today, resume in earnest, both in the form of artistic renderings of the Tristan story based on Gottfried and other sources and in the form of literary scholarship (origin research, text-critical work, and interpretation, all of which are surveyed by Picozzi). Ulrich Müller’s chapter in this volume shows how the modern artistic reception of Gottfried’s Tristan, as that of other great medieval works (the Nibelungenlied, Wolfram’s Parzival), has been largely shaped by the musical art of Richard Wagner, whose opera Tristan und Isolde was first performed in 1865. In the scholarly evaluation of Gottfried’s poem and his “position” to the Tristan story, we observe an admiration of the poet’s formal artistry that is similar to, and doubtless to some degree influenced by the laudatory comments of medieval authors (who doubled, albeit in their own specific way, as literary critics). A generation after Gottfried, Ulrich von Türheim, one of Gottfried’s continuators, framed his tribute to his illustrious predecessor primarily in terms of formal artistry: er (Gottfried) hât sîner tage stunde mit künste erzeiget wol dar an: er was ein künstrîcher man. uns zeiget sîn getihte vil künstliche geschihte. ez ist eben unde ganz; kein getihte an sprüchen ist sô glanz, daz ez von künste gê der vür, der ez wiget mit wîser kür. (6–14) (Gottfried demonstrated very well in his day with his talents that he was a true artist. His poem shows us many a well-conceived story. It is wellcrafted and complete; if one considers the matter wisely, no other poem is more brilliantly composed. [My translation.])

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In the late nineteenth century Wilhelm Scherer’s appraisal stressed the same features of Gottfried’s romance, albeit with a nationalistic spin: “No French treatment of the story, as far as we know, attained to the artistic perfection of Gottfried’s Tristan; it was reserved for a German to give a classical form to this famous medieval legend” (158). Praise such as that of Scherer, of Gottfried’s skill as a crafter of beautiful verses, has been one of the prominent and abiding characteristics of the critical reception of Tristan to the present day. The critical assessment of Gottfried’s depiction of love, however, has been anything but uniformly positive. The scholarly assessment of Gottfried’s Tristan story in the nineteenth century is striking for the vehemence with which many scholars attacked, for its perceived religious and moral shortcomings, a narrative produced during the much more thoroughly Christian and presumably intolerant Middle Ages (during which time such vehement criticisms were notably lacking). The vehement criticism begins with the influential philologist Karl Lachmann (1820), who considered that Gottfried’s “soft, immoral” poem presented nothing more than “Üppigkeit oder Gotteslästerung” (voluptuousness or blasphemy). Heinrich Laube considered in 1839 that, when moral criteria are applied, Gottfried’s Tristan is “ein Gräuel” (an abomination, 113; cit. Picozzi 84). In his literary history (1843/44), August Vilmar considered Gottfried’s story the most despicable mockery of marital fidelity, a revolting work in which the laws of man and God are trampled underfoot, and suggested that the shamelessness went back to the profligate Celts, though the French also deserved some of the blame (177–78; cit. Picozzi 84–85). Closer to the end of the century, Scherer’s assessment is somewhat less fanatical, though its condemnation on moral grounds is clear: “He [Gottfried] adopts as gospel the easy-going tolerant view of life held by the nobility, defending it with the inexorable logic of a fanatical apostle, and actually declaring that without love no one can possess either virtue or honour. He recognizes no bounds for the desires of men, except the public opinion of refined society, which for its part allows everything that does not create a painful sensation. There is no hint of any higher code of morals than this” (160). To focus only on negative appraisals such as this, however prevalent and striking they are, would be to overlook the complexity of the critical reception, in which many scholars managed to see Gottfried’s position not merely as a blasphemous or immoral provocation. Early in the nineteenth century August Wilhelm Schlegel made allusions to the innocence of Tristan-love in his Berlin lectures of 1803–1804, and a few years later

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the philologist Bernard Docen saw in Gottfried’s romance a “noble simplicity” and also regarded the lovers as innocent (though his view of Gottfried’s art as childish and naive — a fixed notion in many of the early assessments of medieval literature — itself looks naive from today’s perspective) (see Picozzi 80). In the introduction of his publication of Gottfried’s work along with that of Eilhart in 1821, Franz Mone defended Gottfried’s poem against detractors and “damnators,” saying that it was free from all traces of immorality. For Mone, Gottfried’s chief purpose was to transform the Tristan story into a heroic song in which the German ideals of heroism and loyalty unto death found expression (see Picozzi 88–89). In the lengthy introduction to his translation of Gottfried’s Tristan (1847), Hermann Kurtz not only clears Gottfried of any charge of immorality, but even maintains that Gottfried made an immoral (French) tale more moral than it had been. Mone and Kurtz, along with other scholars who argued on behalf of Gottfried, tended to do so by stressing the bond they perceived between the Tristan and the Siegfried stories. By so doing, they provided an alternative view from that of Lachmann and other detractors that is perhaps welcome as such, but that is suspect on account of its more or less transparently political, nationalistic agenda (as we have already seen above in his appraisal of Gottfried’s formal artistry, even Scherer’s assessment was not immune from such political influences). Despite his reservations about the lack of a “moral code” (see the citation of him in the previous paragraph), Scherer nevertheless also makes out an achievement in Gottfried’s depiction of love: “It leads to deceit and immorality, and yet from a certain point of view it is a moral power, for though an egotistic passion it yet goes contrary to egoism. Such a passion makes a man endure all the agonies of longing and the most terrible dangers without flinching, and develops in him all the energy of devotion and self-sacrifice” (158). Here also it is not difficult to hear echoes of the “German virtues” stressed by Mone and Kurtz. The condemnation of Gottfried’s poem on moral grounds and the defense of it on the basis of its presumed expression of heroic (German) perseverance in the face of all obstacles, show in different ways how closely connected the critical appraisal of Gottfried’s romance was in the nineteenth century to the different values and interests of the critics themselves. Nationalistic interpretations of Tristan-love no longer carried any weight after 1945, and condemnations of the perceived immorality of Gottfried’s romance gradually gave way in the twentieth century, under the increasing influence of Geistesgeschichte, to interpretations of it in view of the historical and intellectual situation in which it was pro-

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duced. In the history of Gottfried criticism, the twentieth century has been regarded as a century of interpretation. Particularly important and influential was the interpretive work of Friedrich Ranke, especially his essay on the allegorical significance of the Love Grotto (1925). Following Ranke’s lead, other scholars examined Gottfried’s poem against the backdrop of religious currents in the Middle Ages, from mystical thought centering on the exegesis of the Song of Songs to heretical movements such as Catharism, and frequently arrived at quite different interpretations. In his succinct survey of the critical literature, Huber notes a shift in the 1960s away from attempts to arrive at an all-encompassing interpretation to analyses of more specific aspects of Gottfried’s romance. In the latter part of the twentieth century, and in the beginning years of the twenty-first, the whole gamut of interpretive approaches has been represented, and it is worthwhile to reiterate something that Huber states in his introduction: the scholarship dealing with Gottfried’s romance is “in allen Grundfragen der Interpretation uneins” (divided on all of the most basic questions). From the early thirteenth century to the present day, Gottfried’s challenging romance has made unusual demands on its audiences and readers. Although it has been suggested that the Tristan story may lose its vibrancy according to the extent to which the religious, moral, and social structures in relation to which Tristan-love defined itself become less uniform and more diffuse in contemporary modern (or postmodern) culture (see de Rougemont 1973, 15–16), it seems unlikely that Gottfried’s narrative, and the Tristan story in general, will lose any of their appeal to audiences and scholars in the twenty-first century, if for no other reason than their strikingly aesthetic orientation. In its numerous narratorial statements about the characteristics of its preferred audience, Gottfried’s romance evinces a mode of communal identity formation or construction that seems primarily aesthetic, rather than religious or feudal (however elitist the identity of Gottfried’s artistic community may be in its own ways). Even if this aesthetic mode of identity-formation is imbued with the authority and depth of religious elements, which distinguishes the medieval situation in which it was composed from antiquity and modernity, the religious purport of these elements seems to some extent to be undone by means of their artful employment in the context of this singular romance. At the plot level of Gottfried’s work, the identities of the lovers also seem to be constituted largely in aesthetic terms, which is to say in languages and the arts (that is, literature and music), media that are subject to manipulation by people with know-how, and not in truths that are authoritatively given and to which all are subjected

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(even if, as already suggested, Gottfried artfully employs religious forms to impart depth and seriousness to his narrative). Whether seen in terms of Gottfried’s poetic project as articulated in the prologue and literary review (see Haug 196–227), or in terms of the plot level of his narrative, Gottfried’s romance has largely to do with identities in and of love that are grounded aesthetically. The primacy of the aesthetic in Gottfried’s romance not only makes it a particularly striking landmark along the “weathered Roman road from antiquity to modernity,” as Ernst Robert Curtius designated the Middle Ages. It would seem to pose an obstacle to the evaluation of the course of literary and cultural history according to simple oppositions such as medieval-religious-communal versus modern-aesthetic-subjective. In view of its striking aestheticism, its audacious conception of passionate love, and the complexity of the individuals and social relations depicted in it, it seems likely that Gottfried’s Tristan will continue in the third millennium to speak to different readers and scholars with a variety of interests. It is hoped that the present volume will be of some help in this ongoing discussion, by presenting contributions that make important aspects of Gottfried’s romance accessible to nonspecialists (hence the translation of passages in Middle High German), survey some of significant areas of the scholarly discussion of Tristan, and chart some of the ways in which we might expect the scholarly discussion to go in future years. This volume has been divided into four sections that focus on different aspects of Gottfried’s work. In the first section, Tristan is viewed within the broader intellectual and social climate in which it was composed. The contribution of Alois Wolf shows that Gottfried’s Tristan represents a specifically medieval case of humanism, informed as no other German work of the High Middle Ages by the humanism of antiquity, but at the same time profoundly shaped by the potential of humanity within the framework of Christian salvation history. According to Wolf, Tristan is a work that manifests a uniquely medieval humanism and that anticipates, in many respects, the kind of humanism that one will see about a century later in Dante’s Commedia. Michael Batts turns his attention to the specific social, political, and religious currents of the medieval Strasbourg in which Gottfried composed his poem. Batts shows that this vibrant urban situation was characterized both by increasing prosperity and by “the developing consciousness of the uses of capital,” but that it was also strongly shaped by religious authorities such as the bishops of Strasbourg with their ecclesiastical court, and by new religious groups such as the Beguines. Batts’s chapter thus illuminates the specific social and political situation in which Gottfried’s romance was produced.

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In the second section, a half-dozen contributions concentrate on some of the most important figures, themes, and episodes in Tristan. The story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur is the subject of the chapter of Danielle Buschinger, who demonstrates that Gottfried, much as Thomas before him — though the German poet sometimes proceeded independently —, embellishes the story of Tristan’s parents with elements from the story of Tristan and Isolde and casts the former in typological terms as the “prefiguration” of the latter. As in the typology of biblical exegesis, the differences as well as the similarities between the pairs of lovers are crucial, and these form the focal point of Buschinger’s analysis. Sidney Johnson’s essay explores the nature and significance of an object that is of central importance in Gottfried’s romance, the love potion with which the fatal love unto death of Tristan and Isolde begins. Johnson surveys love potions in history, the rendering of the love potion in the other versions of the Tristan story, the manner in which the love potion has been understood in significant critical appraisals of Gottfried’s poem, and ends by suggesting that the concrete reality of love potions in the Middle Ages may be at least as significant for understanding Gottfried’s potion as the various symbolic functions with which the potion has typically been laden in the critical literature. The contribution of Nigel Harris explores the treatment of God and religion in Gottfried’s poem, a topic that has been of central importance in Tristan scholarship since Friedrich Ranke’s essay on the Love Grotto in 1925. Harris looks at some of the important critical assessments of God and religion in Tristan, undertakes a consideration of some of the important relevant episodes — such as that in which Isolde is saved during the ordeal of the glowing iron by a Christ who is as “pliant as a windblown sleeve” (to use the words of Hatto’s translation) —, and underscores the importance of ambiguity in the poet’s treatment of religious elements. Many of the important characters of Gottfried’s romance and the degree to which they enact assumptions about masculinity and femininity form the topic of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s chapter. Focusing in particular on important women characters — Blanscheflur, the elder Isolde, the younger Isolde, and Brangaene — Rasmussen demonstrates the degree to which these figures manifest both traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine attributes in order to deal independently with the many obstacles presented to them. In her analysis, Rasmussen shows the degree to which cultural assumptions about gender shaped the content and course of Gottfried’s narrative. In my own chapter, I have endeavored to draw attention to the relationship of Tristan and Isolde to Marke’s court as a dramatic performance, which is frequently appreciated as such by their

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courtly “audience” (i.e. Marke, Majodo, Melot, and others at court). The dramatic, performative aspect of Gottfried’s depiction of this relationship provides an understanding of events at the plot level of Gottfried’s romance that is consistent with the importance placed on transparent, elegant artistry in the poet’s “theoretical” conceptions of love and art in his excursuses and depiction of the Love Grotto. In the final chapter of the second section, Neil Thomas studies Gottfried’s fragmentary version of the story of Tristan and Isolde White Hands in view of other medieval authors’ treatment of this episode with which the Tristan story traditionally ends. Thomas finds that Gottfried, much as Thomas before him, casts Tristan as a man who, following the separation from his first Isolde, endeavors to rehabilitate himself as a knight, but who is “held back by deep, unfathomable forces, and his tortured awareness of the philter as a psychological force countermanding the rational part of his mind.” In the critical appreciation of a poem such as Gottfried’s Tristan, one is never far from the question of the poet’s narrative artistry. Many of the chapters in this volume address this question in one way or another, but the two contributions of the third section focus directly on central aspects of Gottfried’s narrative art. In his chapter Daniel Rocher draws attention to lyricism as an aspect of Gottfried romance that sets it apart not only from the other courtly romances in Germany, but also from the other current versions of the Tristan story. On the basis of an analysis of episodes in which the emotional intensity of Gottfried’s approach to his depiction of the lovers is manifest, and of rhetorical devices in Gottfried’s language (chiasm, oxymora, repetition, alliteration, assonance) designed to increase the audience’s identification with the lovers’ experiences, Rocher posits that it is the profound lyricism of Gottfried’s poetry that has lent his unfinished work the power to move its audiences to the present day. Adrian Stevens’s contribution explores the relationship of Gottfried’s romance to the version of Thomas and to episodes of the Tristan story in other, older texts belonging to the “Matter of Britain” (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Wace’s Roman de Brut), in order to shed light on the position of Gottfried’s narrative between history and fiction. On the basis of a consideration of Gottfried’s treatment of traditional parts of the Tristan story, Stevens shows that Gottfried’s romance, much like that of Thomas before him, was a hybrid of history and fable, and that Gottfried’s own contribution was to have recast the Tristan story as a symbolic “history of love.” In the final section, two chapters focus on the medieval and modern reception of Gottfried’s romance. The contribution of Marion Gibbs

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surveys the variety of different responses of medieval poets to Gottfried’s poem, which extend from Gottfried’s influences on other significant poets later in the thirteenth century such as Rudolf von Ems and Konrad von Würzburg, to the continuations of Gottfried’s unfinished work by Ulrich von Türheim and Heinrich von Freiberg, which despite all admiration of Gottfried are quite independent in their poetic conception, even if they were unable to match the artistry of Gottfried’s language and style. The volume concludes with Ulrich Müller’s chapter on the modern reception of Gottfried’s romance in particular, and of the medieval story of Tristan and Isolde more generally, in literature, opera, and cinema. Müller focuses in particular on the importance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the manner in which the Tristan story has been rendered in much of modern art, literature, and music.

Works Cited Primary Sources Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Ulrich von Türheim. Tristan. Ed. Thomas Kerth. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979.

Secondary Sources Batts, Michael S. (1994). “Gottfried von Strassburg.” German Writers and Works of the High Middle Ages, 1170–1280. Ed. James Hardin and Will Hasty. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol.148. Detroit: Gale. Chinca, Mark (1997). Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1990). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP. Haug, Walter (1997). Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages. Trans. Joanna M. Catling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Originally published in Darmstadt, 1985. Huber, Christoph (1986). Gottfried von Straßburg: Tristan und Isolde. Eine Einführung. Munich: Artemis. Jones, Martin H. (1990). “The Depiction of Military Conflict in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 45–65. Picozzi, Rosemary (1971). A History of Tristan Scholarship. Bern: H. Lang.

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Ranke, Friedrich. “Die Allegorie der Minnegrotte.” Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, Geisteswissenschaftliche Klasse 2/2: 21–39. de Rougemont, Denis (1956). Man’s Western Quest. New York: Harper & Brothers. de Rougemont, Denis (1973). Preface. Tristan et Iseut. By André Mary. Paris: Gallimard. Schach, Paul (1976). Introduction. The Saga of Tristram and Ísönd. Ed. and trans. Paul Schach. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Schausten, Monika (1999). Erzählwelten der Tristangeschichte im hohen Mittelalter. Munich: Fink. Scherer, Wilhelm (1886). A History of German Literature. Ed. F. Max Müller. Trans. F. C. Longbeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wehrli, Max (1980). Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Reclam. Wenzel, Horst (1988). “Gottfried von Straßburg.” Deutsche Literatur: Eine Sozialgeschichte. Vol. 1. Ed. Albert Glaser. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Wolf, Alois (1989). Gottfried von Straßburg und die Mythe von Tristan und Isolde. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Tristan. A depiction on the Chertsey Tiles.

I. Cultural and Social Contexts

Humanism in the High Middle Ages: The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan Alois Wolf

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UMANISM AS A MODERN CONCEPT,

first used around the middle of the nineteenth century to designate a historical period, is integrally connected to the literature of antiquity. In the works of the Greeks and Romans, it was thought, the studia humanitatis (Cicero) had reached such a degree of accomplishment that they could provide a model for all human education. Beyond the purely literary aspect, humanism as an intellectual movement also involved an emancipatory potential. The humanism emanating from Italy in the early modern period was seen to mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of a new epoch. In the meantime developments in historical research have suggested that humanism made a much earlier appearance. The critical discussion of humanism, which has increasingly shown itself to be a very complex historical phenomenon, was stimulated especially by Charles Haskins’s book The Renaissance of the 12th Century, but this discussion continues to the present day to be largely shaped by Jakob Burckhardt’s problematical conception of the Renaissance, and Gilson’s contribution on medieval humanism in 1926 could do very little to change the traditional view of humanism as a post-medieval development (see Gilson 171–96, Leclercq 69–113, and Southern 29–135). In the secularized thinking of today, people find their reason for being within themselves and consider the development of one’s inner potential as the goal of humanity. Neither Greco-Roman antiquity nor Christianity is necessary for self-realization. The Middle Ages of course had a different conception of humanity, according to which man had been created ad imaginem Dei. To be sure, this imago had been corrupted by original sin, but it had not been completely destroyed. It was in the Creator, rather than in themselves, that medieval people found their reason for being, but with its basic idea of the Incarnation of the divine, Christianity did include the possibility of a grand view of humanity and the world, even if this possibility was not generally realized in a humanism in the proper sense of the word. One can observe how theo-

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logians in the High Middle Ages increasingly trusted their own reason, instead of depending on the authority of tradition. One need only think of Abelard, who wished to formulate his credo in his own words, rather than merely to rehearse the traditional formula (Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, 88): “Cum autem ego ad profitendam et exponendam fidem meam assurgerem, ut quod sentiebam verbis propriis exprimerem, adversarii dixerunt non aliud mihi necessarium esse nisi ut symbolum Athanasii recitarem, quod quisvis puer eque facere posset” (When I then stood up to make a full profession of my faith and to explain it in my own words, my adversaries declared that it was only necessary for me to recite the Athanasian Creed, as any boy could do).Or one only need think of Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose hero Parzival, inspired by unverzaget mannes muot (the courage of a steadfast man) and love, achieves his lofty goal of the grail and whose romance Willehalm depicts heathens as creatures of God and therefore as human beings worthy of respect. These would be examples of a humanism that is not based directly on antiquity. Of course, the European Middle Ages are unimaginable without the literary presence of Latin antiquity. Views of antique literature from early Christianity onward fluctuated between mistrust and rejection, on the one hand, and instrumentalization on the other. The wish to employ antique literature was based on the idea that valuable and useful aspects of antique culture should not be conceded to paganism. This fluctuation between acceptance and rejection continued with changing accentuations through the centuries. In the second century Tertullian questioned the relevance of Athens for Jerusalem, Jerome followed suit in the fourth century when he asked what Horace has to do with the Psalter, and so on. Despite problems with its pagan origins, the bulk of antique literature was not forgotten in the Middle Ages, but rather became the foundation of education. Later on, with the early modern Humanists, the turn to the literature of antiquity for its stylistic value and its humanistic orientation did not mean a break with religion, as is clear in the cases of Petrarch, Pope Pius II, Erasmus, and others. Earlier, in the Middle Ages, the relationship to antiquity was a different one. However impressed one was with the achievements of the ancient world, the basic superiority of Christianity was considered the point of departure for any, even remotely humanistic orientation. The weakening and ultimately the dissolution of the medieval conviction that Christianity is superior to antique culture can be seen as a consequence of the intensive activity of the early modern Humanists. At the end of this preoccupation in Germany stand Goethe and Schiller, the latter writing: “Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! sie lächelt auch uns!”

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In the development of the vernacular literatures during the Middle Ages, humanity increasingly occupies the foreground. What sort of a humanity is this, and can the increasing interest taken in human nature as such be seen as the expression of a humanism with specific characteristics? Gottfried emphatically states that he wants to relate a story about a man unde wip as lovers. He is thus concerned with two people involved in a relationship of fulfilled erotic love. Such a programmatic turn to humanity, with its exaltation of Eros, looks strongly humanistic, at least in its basic orientation. Since late antiquity the literary scene has been populated with martyrs, saints, sinners, and penitents, beyond this with kings and other rulers. In the late tenth century, Odo, the second abbot of Cluny, considered the vita of an aristocratic miles, Giraldus of Aurillac, worthy of literature. Although Abbot Odo excluded all things military and erotic from his account, it is nevertheless noteworthy that Giraldus, who was merely an exemplary layman, belonged to none of the aforementioned traditional groups. In the Ruodlieb, a romance fragment from the eleventh century, the position of humanity has already become much more prominent, even if the ultimate goal is still the exemplary rulertype. In the twelfth century a new type appears whose qualities are no longer bound to heroic actions, royal power, or religious systems that justifies them, but rather serve to demonstrate the worth of an individual. An exemplary case of the increasing importance of humanity in medieval literature is a passage in the Anglo-Norman cleric Wace’s reworking of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, composed just before 1150 (see Arnold’s edition of Wace, and Wolf 1986, 295– 96). Wace’s vernacular verse rendering of Geoffrey’s Historia shows, despite its closeness to the Latin source, significant changes. Whereas Geoffrey of Monmouth casts the historiographical elements of his account in the high style of the heroic epic, his vernacular reworker takes — to put it very simply — the additional step to romance, at the same time humanizing his source to a great extent. This is visible particularly in Wace’s treatment of the figure of the knight. While Arthur himself continues, analogous to Alexander, to be the conquering king of the traditional material, Wace also makes room for a new perspective that is no longer content with the warlike action of the heroic epics. The victories of Arthur, it is already said in Geoffrey’s history, bring about a peaceful time that lasts for twelve years. We discover that the court of King Arthur has become the exemplar of refined manners and sophisticated tastes. Wace adds that it was in this period of peace that those wondrous events, the merveilles, and the strange incidents and intrusions into the normal life of the court, the aventures, began to

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occur. Next to the world of raw war and conquest as portrayed in the heroic epics, a new realm of activity in merveilles and aventures is opened up for the knight — who now needs to be seen also as a courtly, increasingly cultured human being. A figure at Arthur’s court, who will later be a central figure in the romances — the knight Gawein — is portrayed by Wace in a way that goes programmatically beyond his source and in a new direction. During a great festival of Arthur’s court, messengers arrive from Rome bearing the demands of the Roman emperor, which are justified with a reference to Caesar’s conquests and legal rights connected to them. With Geoffrey of Monmouth we have a scene in the grand heroic epic style. A count jumps up, as might happen in the Rolandslied, and responds with uncompromising warlike utterances: finally the time of testing oneself with war and heroic deeds has returned! Arthur, who speaks next, continues in the same vein. At this point of the vernacular reworking, Wace breaks apart this fixed epic conception. None other than Gawein, who might already have assumed a fixed role in extra-literary narrative traditions, speaks in the vernacular version between the count and Arthur. This divergence from the Latin source disrupts the heroic-epic depiction. Gawein draws attention to the advantages of peace, which have caused the land to flourish and provided the opportunity for gaberies and drueries, for gallant jests and adventures of love. Gawein concludes with a new determination of the chivalric life, por amistiez et por amies font chevalier chevaleries (for love and their beloved knights perform chivalric deeds; Arnold ed., 10765–72). If compared with the conventional scene in the heroic epics in which council is sought and considered, Gawein’s intervention is consistent with the role of the traitorous Genelun in the Rolandslied! But the attitude has clearly changed. Hero and traitor are no longer the only alternatives. To this new type of humanity, which shows itself programmatically in Gawein’s intervention, Gottfried will add significant new aspects. The theme of worldly power, even if it plays no role in Gawein’s pronouncements, nevertheless remains quite significant in the Arthurian romances. Erec qualifies himself for the office of king that awaits him no less than Parzival, for whom even kingship over the grail kingdom has been predetermined. In Iwein, as well, worldly power is important in the adventures of the hero. In the adventures of the Knight of the Cart, however, a kind of humanity becomes tangible that is not at all concerned with power and that is entirely in the service of love. Gottfried follows this tendency and intensifies it by depicting Tristan as a human being who, even if still a knight and warrior, quite consciously renounces worldly power. Tristan has no interest in taking possession of the land of

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his father Riwalin, but rather ostentatiously hands rule of it over to Rual. Given the status of political power in the literature and reality of the time, this is a act of considerable symbolic force. Instead of kingship or feudal authority, the issue for Tristan is a künecrîch des herzen (kingdom of the heart) — a formulation that is much more than a sentimental rhetorical ornament. Besides this it is of special significance that Gottfried makes of Tristan and Isolde a pair of artists (see Mohr 153– 74). In the Tristan romance of Thomas, the main male figure — and not so much the female one! — possesses all sorts of extraordinary abilities. With Gottfried these abilities are all related to art, especially to a musical art of a kind that has not yet been heard. With Gottfried, the main female figure not only participates in this musical art, but even comes in unexpected ways to embody it. All of these aspects are immediately relevant to the kind of humanism Gottfried represents, the specific features of which we need to examine more closely. Gottfried’s portrayal doubtless opens up a domain of human experience that was not previously accessible to German narrative literature, and to this extent it is justifiable to speak, however generally, of humanism. Compared with the stereotypes customarily employed in hagiography and the highly conventional character-types of the heroic-epic traditions, the work of Gottfried manifests a stunning degree of psychological subtlety. The poetry of the troubadours and Minnesang had helped pave the way for this, but beyond the self-reflection expressed in the lyrics of the Minnesänger, Gottfried disposes of a broad palette of colors with which to render the inner life of his characters. His descriptions, monologues, and dialogues bear witness to an understanding of psychology that is nothing less than modern. This is evident in banal situations, such as the one following Tristan’s musical debut at Marke’s court. Having impressed his audience with an initial display of his polyglot talents (3691ff.), Tristan’s listeners wish to test the full extent of his knowledge of languages. Everyone who knows a few foreign words produces them in order to see if Tristan really commands the language in question — just as tourists today might produce a few words in the language of the country in which they find themselves in order to see if they will really be understood. Gottfried also shows himself to be a perceptive psychologist when he has the primitive huntsman, who relates Tristan’s expert carving of the stag to the court, use the very same specialized terminology that Tristan had used — somewhat like a salesperson today might endeavor to use the latest terms from the cutting edge of the computer industry. Gottfried’s ability to give expression to subtle stirrings of the mind shows itself above all in matters of love, its origins

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and its crises. With tact and knowledge Gottfried composes his way into the minds and hearts of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, relates how Tristan and Isolde find their way to one another, and how both respond to their separation from the time when the adultery is discovered to the beginning of Tristan’s relationship with Isolde White Hands. Gottfried’s empathetic and psychologically accurate depictions of the hearts and minds of individuals, as interesting as this is in its own right, is only one aspect of the humanity that is at the heart of his romance. At a deeper level this humanity is sustained by true love, which resides in the heart and emanates from there. It is important to realize that herze (heart) is not the same hackneyed metaphor that has been familiar to us since the nineteenth century (see Ertdorff’s discussion of the biblical background of the employment of herze in court literature). Gottfried’s conception of herze cannot be seen as a reiteration of any antique model. Never before has a storyteller so programmatically placed herze and minne at the center of the actions and identities of his main characters. Already at the beginning of his work, Gottfried masterfully devotes hundreds of verses of the Riwalin and Blanscheflur story to this theme and allows his development of it to reach an initial climax in the künecrîche des herzen, as it is portentously called, as the relevant domain of existence (728, 816, 874). Correspondences with the prologue are established by means of the oxymora developed in lines 1073ff. and 60ff., which show that the Riwalin/Blanscheflur story is being developed in a way that is consistent with Gottfried’s artistic conception. In a long monologue Blanscheflur reaches the liberating insight that it is not some inscrutable zouberlist (spell; 1003)) that has filled her mind with Riwalin, but rather his tugende (fine qualities; 1073), which have set her aflame in minne, the süeze herzesmerze (sweet suffering of heart) of which now lies in her heart. A humanity that has nothing to do with magic is exalted in this episode, which points ahead to the love potion and suggests that an understanding of the later episode in terms of magic would be inappropriate. The court of Marke is of course still captive to such primitive beliefs and does not have access to the enlightenment provided by true love. Consequently, at Marke’s court, Tristan’s art and his successes are misconstrued as magic. Even the elder Isolde, who brews the Minnetrank, and Brangaene see things this way. But the humanity of the main characters goes beyond such beliefs in the power of magic. This tendency, which is already striking in the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, is fully developed in that of Tristan and Isolde (see Wolf 1989 for a detailed treatment of this development). After the Minnetrank has been drunk, der werlde unmuoze (arch-disturber of tranquillity;

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11710) begins to act in the lovers Tristan and Isolde. In this episode, and in the excursus on love that follows, Gottfried employs no less than seven different verses about Minne — almost as a refrain-like leitmotif — that convey its true nature and its growing power over Tristan and Isolde (11711, 11721, 11765, 11867, 11908, 12164, 12176). The story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, which manifests an early form of this type of Minne-verses (diu gewaltaerinne Minne [Love, the tyrant; 961]), is thus by far outdone. People with some religious education would have been able to hear in these laudatory Minne verses, which are intensified almost to invocations, undertones of Marian poetry. When, for example, Gottfried speaks of süenaerinne Minne (Love, the reconciler; 11721), one would have been familiar with this phrase as a circumlocution for the Virgin Mary (see Ohly’s edition of the St. Trudperter Hohelied). These and other comparable associations, of which a few more will be mentioned later, result in a compelling network of correspondences. A related and noteworthy feature of Gottfried’s narrative art is that the distinction between commentative depiction of action and theoretical excursuses of the author is often effaced, as one sees with the climax of the excursus on love, or Minnerede: Minne, aller herzen künigîn! (Love, the queen of all hearts; 12300). At the turning point, when Minne enters irresistibly into the lives of Tristan and Isolde, it is designated as der werlde unmuoze, as the primal force that moves the world. This is not a casual formulation. The corresponding formulation of Boethius was “amor caelum regitur” (Book II, 222), and Dante’s Commedia ends with a variation of the same idea: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. In view of the idea of love as a cosmic force, or unmuoze, that animates everything, Gottfried’s words about his narrative art have an added significance. In his prologue he has stressed that he is concerned with unmüezekeit and that the right kind of audience has to be unmüezic. This does not mean simply to pass away the time, but rather to share in the energy that drives the cosmos — which is none other than amor! Gottfried thus has to be seen in a great tradition that goes back to Boethius. Especially with his depiction of the Minnegrotte, Gottfried makes an original, vernacular contribution to the discussion of love in the High Middle Ages. In the portrayal of the Minne-hermitage Gottfried is not content with merely appropriating elements of religious architectural allegory (see Ranke), but rather imparts to his descriptio a dynamic that is based on Platonic thought. The allegorized edifice calls upon us to make an upward movement: diu hoehe deist der hohe muot, / der sich ûf in diu wolken tuot (Height is Aspiration that mounts aloft to the clouds; 16939f.). This dynamic is then made more

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tangible by means of the ancient mystical image of the wings of the soul (see Ohly): die ob uns in den wolken swebent und uns ir schîn her nider gebent die kapfe wir ze wunder an. hie wahsent uns die vedern van, von den der muot in vlücke wirt, vliegende lob nâch tugenden birt. (16957–62) (Those who float in the clouds above us and send their refulgence down to us! — we gaze at them and marvel! From this grow the feathers by which our spirit takes wing and, flying, brings forth praise and soars in pursuit of those Virtues [With the exception of a few more literal renderings, which are indicated, the English translations of Gottfried’s text are based on Hatto])

The architecture thus opens up above us and causes the muot to climb aloft to the heavens. In such a passage, clouds (wolken) are not a mundane meteorological occurrence, but rather suggest in the same way as biblical testimonies the presence of the divine. This passage acquires additional significance by virtue of the fact that Gottfried returns to these images in his excursus on love, von guoten minnen (on worthy love; 12185). In this excursus Gottfried says that when he empathizes with the fate of the lovers in his herze, sô wahsent mîne trahte / und muot, mîn hergeselle, / als er in diu wolken welle (my yearning grows, and my comrade, Desire, grows too, as if he would mount to the clouds!; 12206ff.), and his heart opens up groezer danne Setmunt (larger than Setmunt; 12216). Assuming that the somewhat obscure term Setmunt can be understood in terms of septem montes (see Levy), Gottfried’s heart must encompass a domain greater than mighty Rome itself in order to comprehend the love of Tristan and Isolde! No other vernacular author before Gottfried depicted the possession of hearts by the omnipotence of love with comparable intensity, with ever new forms of poetic expression that increase the sense of excitement and anticipation and the desire to empathize. A case in point is the passage leading up to the mutual declaration of love of Tristan and Isolde, which Gottfried depicts in a manner that is consistent with his own artistic conception, but that also employs the traditional idea of love entering into a person through the eyes and other traditional symptoms associated with love. The placement of this long passage is very important. We have just heard the reaction of the loyal Brangaene, for whom the drinking of the Minnetrank is a catastrophe. This reaction corre-

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sponds to the negative view Marke’s court has, and must have on the basis of its more limited intellectual/spiritual constitution, of Tristan’s achievements as magic elsewhere in Gottfried’s work. But then the author turns to the lovers in line 11707, diu maget unde der man, which proves itself to be a bracket that encloses the section extending from the drink to the kiss. The emphasis placed on maget can also be seen in relation to the deception during the wedding night. Step by step Gottfried leads his reader from what for Brangaene is a drink of death (11706) to the blissful drink of a couple that has become conscious of its love (12042f.). First the author tells of the initial condition of both lovers (11707–40). Then he concentrates on Tristan’s growing awareness that there is nothing in him, but Îsôt unde minne (11788). The poet now turns to Isolde, who also eventually realizes that there is nothing within but minne unde Tristan (11818). These statements, which lead toward the names of the lovers, are quite intentionally stylized. Thirty verses lie between the names, and positioned between them is Minne, which shows that Gottfried arranges his words not unlike a sculptor chisels his plan into stone. Also relevant to the humanism represented by Gottfried is the way in which he manages the traditional topoi concerning the origins of love and love’s typical symptoms. Special care is devoted to sight, from line 11758, and by gently implying an association of seeing with the heart, Gottfried allows the traditional religious image of the eyes of the heart to assert itself next to the physical eyes of the traditional psychology of Minne (for a study on the eyes of the heart topos, see Gewehr 626–49). The author lays claim to this image in the prologue (der werlde in die min herze siht [literally: the world into which my heart sees; 49]), in order to foster a secret intimacy between himself and the lovers. With respect to the lovers, sight with the physical eyes and sight with the spiritual ones of the heart do not correspond in the beginning: sîn herze sach si (Isolde) lachend an, / und nam sîn ouge der van (literally: his heart looked smiling upon Isolde, but he turned his eyes away; 11773f.). The same is true with Isolde: ir herze unde ir ougen, / diu missehullen under in (her heart and her eyes were at variance; 11820f.). But Gottfried then discretely develops the manner in which herze and ouge increasingly become one. It is not coincidental that the process begins first in Isolde: ir herze und ir ougen / diu schâcheten vil tougen / und lieplîchen an den man (secretly and lovingly her heart and eyes darted at the man rapaciously; 11845ff.), a process that is then carried through in Tristan (11856ff). Gottfried now employs further Minne-topoi in a way that is consistent with this depiction. Since the eyes of the heart and body have

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become one, there is a movement towards external revelation of internal events, first by means of pallor and blush, and then by means of dialogue. Gottfried continually has the whole process in view, rather than allowing the different stages to follow one another mechanically. He thus crafts an image of Isolde before the final confession of love that culminates in subtle gestures; ougen and herze are no longer merely static physical designations, but rather begin to overflow: ir spiegelliehten ougen / diu volleten tougen./ ir begunde ir herze quellen, / ir süezer munt uf swellen (the bright mirrors of her eyes filled with hidden tears. Her heart began to swell within her, her sweet lips to distend; 11973ff.). In the avowal of Tristan we observe an energy that is directed internally, before which everything external sinks away into nothingness: mich müejet und mich swaeret, / mir swachet unde unmaeret / allez, daz mîn ouge siht. / in al der werlde enist mir niht / in minem herzen liep wan ir! (all that I see irks and oppresses me, it all grows trite and meaningless. Nothing in the wide world is dear to my heart but you!; 12023ff.). All of this culminates in the first kiss, which was already metaphorically present in the joint drinking of the Minnetrank — the crass materiality of which has been transformed during the depiction of these events. Delving into psychological aspects of his characters and their feelings — an endeavor that is clearly humanistic in its basic interest — was doubtless an important aspect of Gottfried’s artistic project. We have seen that the employment of elements of antique culture played an important role in this exploration of the psychological domain, but we have yet to determine whether antique models sufficed for the elaboration of Gottfried’s specific kind of humanism, or whether the medieval poet envisioned an ideal of humanity that took him beyond antiquity. An analysis of poetological aspects of Gottfried’s romance, which were anchored in antique traditions by way of medieval poetics, is not possible here (see Sawicki). We need only mention that Gottfried’s literary review, or Dichterschau — for the first time since the ninth-century harmonization of the Gospels by Otfried von Weissenburg — transfers an impressive conceptual and poetological arsenal into the German language from the Latin. The crowning of poets with the laurel wreath that Gottfried depicts here is a theme that brings us close to humanism as traditionally understood (see Schulze 285–310). Consideration of this part of Gottfried’s romance calls upon us to think forward to Petrarch and his coronation at the Capitol in 1341. In no medieval vernacular language before Gottfried is there a comparable reference to antique literary culture. An understanding of art that is based on antiquity has already shaped the prologue, even if it is evident that the significance of the prologue

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goes beyond the antique influences it contains. This unusual prologue — 244 verses of the highest intellectual and artistic quality — is clearly intended to have a programmatic significance. Some of its elements are well known from antiquity. The verse Êre unde lop diu schepfent list (praise and esteem bring about; 21), for example, has an exact correspondent with Cicero, and Augustine later employs a similar formulation in de civitate Dei 5/13: honos alit artes omnesque incenduntur ad studia gloria (Honor nourishes the arts, and all are stimulated to the pursuit of studies by glory; verses 29f. of Gottfried’s prologue are similar to Isaiah 5:20: “vae, qui dicitis malum bonum et bonum malum” [Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil]). But Gottfried is not content with reproducing a series of established exordial topoi in a mechanical way. His much more dynamic approach involves a variety of elements in the consistent articulation of an artistic conception, the formulation of which the prologue reveals itself to be in an unforeseeable way. Gottfried begins with the memoria topos, which was very familiar to the antique imagination. The Middle Ages however was also familiar with the devotional memoria of liturgy (see Ohly). The memoria theme, manifest in the first word of the prologue (gedaehte man . . .) is associated with two other concepts, guot and werlde, resulting in a triad not previously present in the tradition of this topos. The general statement made in the first four verses and its elaboration are followed by the somewhat condescending reference to the work of earlier poets who occupied themselves with the Tristan story: sî sprâchen wol / und niwan ûz edelem muote / mir unde der werlt ze guote. / binamen si tâten ez in guot (they wrote well and with the noblest of intentions for my good and the good of us all. They assuredly did so well-meaningly; 140–43). With the concluding source information regarding Thomas (163ff.), the prologue could conceivably be at an end. Instead, the most decisive section now begins. Gottfried begins to speak of his own contribution, according to the logic of the Biblical “But I say unto you,” and he proceeds to connect the abovementioned triad to his work, replacing werlde with edele herzen and intensifying guot by mentioning it no less than three times: waz aber mîn lesen dô waere von disem senemaere, daz lege ich mîner willekür allen edelen herzen vür, daz sî dâ mite unmüezic wesen. ez ist in sêre guot gelesen. guot? jâ, inneclîche guot. (167–73)

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(And now I freely offer the fruits of my reading of this love-tale to all noble hearts to distract them. They will find it very good reading. Good? Yes, profoundly good.)

Tristan and Isolde are now introduced as the true embodiment of this triad, and the topic of death, which is inherent in the memoria theme, is also broached (223ff.). At the same time the narrator, who has dominated to this point, and the werlde are transformed to wir and uns (from 229ff.) — the recipients and beneficiaries of Tristan memoria. The introductory topos involving memoria — gedaehte man — which makes a harmlessly conventional impression initially, is eventually connected to Tristan and Isolde in a manner that is analogous to the Eucharistic memoria of the Last Supper. In this artistic conception, the metaphor of nourishment has been transformed in a bold way. The death of the protagonists has not been entrusted to fame as something merely of the past, but rather becomes life-sustaining bread, now and in the future. The impressive climax of the theme of death that Gottfried achieves in his development of the memoria topos thus goes far beyond the humanism of antiquity. The prologue also needs to be seen in relation to Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, for it manifests a conception of literature that involves a new legitimation of vernacular verse narrative beyond the initial achievements in this domain by Hartmann von Aue and Heinrich von Veldeke (see Wolf 1988, 397–425). In contrast to Gottfried’s lovers, the action surrounding Arthur and Iwein, which is depicted as belonging to the past, must content itself with the status of laudatio temporis acti, whereby Hartmann quite boldly gives the present day a privileged status by saying it is better to be alive now than to have lived in the past, for now one can take delight in the stories about the past. In Hartmann’s conception, the present maere stand de facto above the werc, the poetry over the past reality. The word genesen from Hartmann’s prologue takes on a new significance in Gottfried’s romance (line 66). Gottfried promises not merely a story about lovers of past times; his romance pretends to be the embodiment of the fate of Tristan and Isolde. The end of the romance fragment contains passages that underscore the importance Gottfried gives to this issue. After the final separation Isolde reflects, with an intensity that is reminiscent of the prologue, about her own existence. It becomes clear to her what she is. When Isolde watches Tristan sail away, she recognizes that her beloved is about to try something impossible, for she is Tristan’s life (“wan iuwer leben daz bin ich” [= I am indeed your life; 18499]), just as Tristan carries Isolde’s life away with him (18506). Medieval literature typically employed the convention of the exchange

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of hearts for situations like this, but Gottfried was not satisfied with this. Instead, he employs personification when Isolde designates herself as Tristan’s life. The model on which this kind of personification is based, in my view, is given only in the New Testament, where Jesus says of himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” If this is the model, then another significant correspondence to the prologue is established, where it is said: Ir leben ir tot sint unser brot! (their life, their death, are our bread; 237 — emphasis added). Isolde’s reaction to the separation from Tristan can also be understood as a medieval response to the most famous scene of separation in Roman literature, the parting of Aeneas from Dido. The allusion to Aeneas and Dido in the songs of Friedrich von Hausen is one indication among others that the episode was familiar to authors and audiences, independent of Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit. The ancient pair was not united in true Minne, Dido cannot be the life of Aeneas when she commits suicide. Isolde is different. Unlike Dido, she cannot die, which the poet stresses in two different ways, first from his own perspective (18470ff.), and then in a more dynamic way from the mouth of Isolde herself (18491f.). Isolde’s posture, based as it is on the abovementioned method of personification, aims at surpassing corresponding cases in antique literature. A humanism exclusively based on antique models clearly could not account for Gottfried’s depiction of the lovers’ separation. But there is certainly no dearth of direct references to myths and figures of antiquity in Gottfried’s romance, of which Dido is obviously an example. Many of these references are made in an artistic context that is not present in the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur. Tristan’s first musical performance on the ship of the Norwegian merchants (2293ff.) still remains somewhat unspecified, but this changes with his appearance at Marke’s court. Here Tristan appears at first as master hunter and brilliant horn player, and when the Welsh minstrel performs his songs, Tristan immediately speaks knowledgeably about them. When Tristan takes the harp in his own hands, he is already designated as der niuwe spilman (the new minstrel; 3563) in anticipation of what is to come. He begins with the Celtic lay von der vil stolzen vriundîn Grâlandes (Graland the Fair’s Proud Mistress; 3586f.), and then performs the Lay of Thisbe as an encore, thus showing antiquity to be an important part of his repertoire (Ovid’s tale of Piramus and Thisbe was available already in the twelfth century in an Old French translation). In another artistic context — the lovers’ life in the Love Grotto — antique love stories are employed in a contrastive manner to underscore that Tristan and Isolde themselves are

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the true essence of love. At first it is tragic, hopeless stories — about Phyllis, Canace, Biblis, and Dido — in which Tristan and Isolde absorb themselves (17187ff.). These stories, however, are merely a step in the direction of the higher love that Isolde and Tristan embody. Notably, the lovers leave these stories from antiquity in the area outside when they enter into the interior of the Grotto (17200ff.), where they produce their own lays and notes of love with harp and voice. As suggested by the ambiguous word spil (literally: play; 17233) instrumental music, song, and the consummation of love here become one. The bittersweet love stories of antiquity are left far below. The lovers’ spil of music and love amounts to a realization of the principle of love inherent in the ancient Minnegrotte. Gottfried may be suggesting here that the Eros of antiquity was not able to generate a redemptive power that is capable of transforming even death, and that only his maere of Tristan and Isolde is capable of achieving this. Involved in Gottfried’s relationship to and transcending of antiquity is the typology of Biblical exegesis. Gottfried confronts alter âventiure (tales of old; 17226) with the activity of Tristan and Isolde, bemaeret (rumoured) corresponds to bewaeret (borne out; 17227f.). It is also said that the wâre wirtinne (true mistress) only now carries on her spil, placing everything of the past in the shadows. The lady of the Grotto was once the love goddess Venus, but who is now the wâre wirtinne? Consideration of later passages provides further information. The description of the pair sleeping in the Grotto that the hunter conveys to King Marke may contain an important clue. The trustworthy hunter notices nothing special about Tristan, but the woman makes a much stronger impression, appearing to him as nothing less than a goddess or fairy. The designation fee (fairy) is still evocative of Celtic fairy tale, familiar from the lays of Marie de France and other works. The word gotinne (goddess) is reminiscent of the pagan Venus, once lady of the Grotto, who has now clearly been replaced by Isolde. When Marke himself looks into the Grotto, Isolde shines with an incomparable brilliance that is expressed with a sun metaphor (17572ff.). The light symbolism associated with Isolde is programmatic. When Tristan returns from Ireland the first time, everyone asks about Isolde. There has been no previous motivation for this in the romance, in which to this point only Queen Isolde, sister of Morold, and her knowledge of healing have been mentioned at Marke’s court. From a modern perspective the sudden introduction of the concern with the younger Isolde at the court of Marke could be seen as a compositional lapse, but this is not the case. Gottfried’s medieval compositional technique places itself beyond logical connections in the action, when

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necessary, in order to draw attention to major themes. Such a theme is the beauty of Isolde. The returning Tristan responds to the questions about her correspondingly (8253–300). Isolde is the niuwe sunne (new sun; 8280 — the term niuwe here suggests the novus of Christian typology) who follows the dawn, her mother Isolde. This association is likewise instructive with regard to Gottfried’s narrative art. Later in the story, when the two Isoldes appear at the Irish court on the occasion when the machinations of the deceptive steward are exposed, we actually have such a sequence — dawn/sun, mother/daughter (10885, 11021) — which Tristan has therefore anticipated. This is not merely a comparison, but rather a personification. Isolde is the new sun! Two important passages have prepared the way for Tristan’s ecstatic hymn of praise of Isolde on this occasion. The education of Isolde is presented first from the perspective of the narrator, then from the perspective of Tristan as the one who has been most immediately affected (8253–300). In the former passage, the narrator ostentatiously excludes an appraisal of the medical achievement of the mother Isolde that her cure of the wounded Tristan represents (7935ff.). Instead, he turns to a description of the singular artistic phenomenon that is embodied in the person of the young Isolde. The narrator first praises the singular education of Isolde, which reaches its highest level under Tristan’s tutelage. Similarities to the case of Abelard and Heloise are obvious (see Fromm 196–216). He then goes on to speak of her singing and skill with musical instruments, culminating with moraliteit (good manners; 8002–20). Following upon this is a description of the effect of Isolde’s beauty, clearly an intensified version of the description of Tristan’s effect on people when he first arrived at Marke’s court. At this point antique models are employed. When Isolde sings, the narrator first suggests that the effect is comparable to that of the Sirens, and he productively develops this comparison by connecting Isolde with the sirens and their lodestone: Wem mag ich sî gelîchen die schoenen saelderîchen wan den Syrênen eine, die mit dem agesteine die kiele ziehent ze sich? [. . .] alsô zôch sî gedanken în ûz maneges herzen arken, als der agestein die barken mit der Syrênen sange tuot. (8085–111)

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(To whom can I compare the lovely girl, so blessed by fortune, if not to the Sirens, who with their lodestone draw the ships towards them? [. . .] Isolde drew thoughts from the hearts that enshrined them as the lodestone draws in ships to the sound of the Sirens’ song.)

The bewildering, seductive power of Isolde’s music makes the audience lose all points of orientation (corresponding to the effects of Tristan’s music at Marke’s court, though the earlier case lacked references to antique culture; see 3584ff.). The Middle Ages attached a variety of associations to the Sirens (see Rahner). In their association with the lodestone they were perceived to be negative and destructive. But it would not fit the broader laudatory context in which the Sirens are mentioned if we were to conclude here that we are supposed to regard Isolde and her music negatively, nor would it be consistent with the depiction of Isolde in other parts of Gottfried’s romance (in the Love Grotto episode, for example, where song, music, and love become one and Isolde’s music achieves its fullest realization). It would be more accurate to see this reference as an initial reaction to Isolde’s music, upon which the truly correct insight into its essence follows. The decisive assessment of the essence and effect of Isolde is provided subsequently by Tristan. Tristan, who is able to speak of Isolde on the basis of an inner affinity, is not content with the standard set by the Sirens and their lodestone. Instead, he mentions the greatest beauty that antiquity produced — Helen, in the Middle Ages still the non plus ultra of beauty, only to outdo this standard in a wonderful passage that takes advantage of Christian light-symbolism: “diu lûtere, diu liehte Îsolt, diu ist lûter alse arâbesch golt. des ich ie waenende was, alse ich’z an den buochen las, diu von ir lobe geschriben sint, Aurôren tohter unde ir kint, Tyntarides diu maere, daz an ir eine waere aller wîbe schônheit an einen bluomen geleit: von dem wâne bin ich komen, Îsôt hât mir den wân benomen ine geloube niemer mê, daz sunne von Mycêne gê. ganzlîchiu schoene ertagete nie

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ze Criechenlant, si taget hie. alle gedanke und alle man die kapfen niuwan Îrlant an. dâ nemen ir ougen wunne, sehen, wie diu niuwe sunne nâch ir morgenrôte Îsôt nach Îsôte, dâ her von Develîne in elliu herze schîne! diu liehte wunneclîche si erliuhtet elliu rîche. daz s’alle lobes von wîben sagent, swaz sî mit lobe ze maeren tragent, deist allez hie wider ein niht. der Îsôt under ougen siht, dem liutert’z herze unde muot, reht als diu gluot dem golde tuot: ez liebet leben unde lîp.” (8261–93) (“Dazzling, radiant Isolde, she shines like gold of Araby! I have abandoned the idea I had gained from reading books, which praise Aurora’s daughter and her glorious offspring Helen, namely, that the beauty of all women was laid up in her one flower. Isolde has rid me of this notion! Never again shall I believe that the sun comes from Mycene. Perfect beauty never shone forth over Greece — here is where it dawns! Let all men in their thoughts gaze only at Ireland, let their eyes take pleasure there and see how the new Sun following on its Dawn, Isolde after Isolde, shines across from Dublin into every heart! This dazzling, enchanting maiden sheds a lustre on every land! All that people say and discuss in praise of woman is nothing compared with this. Whoever looks Isolde in the eyes feels his heart and soul refined like gold in the white-hot flame; his life becomes a joy to live.”)

The authoritative model of Helen as the incomparable ideal of feminine beauty in the literary culture of the Middle Ages is here boldly rejected and replaced with something new. By means of the employment of terminology — ertagen, tagen (dawn) — that is reminiscent of the dawn song, and of the typological manner of seeing — ganzlîchiu and niuwe (perfectly, new) — the Middle Ages surpass antiquity and undermine its authoritative status. Isolde is the light that illuminates elliu rîche (every land), a capacity that Marcabru had once ascribed to fin’amors (see the sixth strophe of Song 40 in the edition of Dejeanne; the theme of light also calls to mind the beginning of the Gospel according to John: “and

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the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness”). Isolde is the sun; the purifying, ennobling effect she has corresponds to the true Elicon mentioned in Gottfried’s literary review, which suggests an inner affinity between, if not identity of, Isolde and poetic inspiration. This attitude toward antiquity is all the more striking if one considers a famous passage from the prologue of Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès. Basing himself on a claim to truth grounded in the authority of books, Chrétien discusses livres that teach us about les fez des anciens (the deeds of the men of the ancient times) (25ff.). A particularly important piece of information that these ancient books have taught us is that chevalerie and clergie first stood in high regard in Greece, that they then passed to Rome, and that they have now and forever established themselves in France, even as their living spark irretrievably died among their original patrons, the Greeks and Romans. Chrétien thus represents the traditional idea of the translatio from East to West, whereby the superiority of the latter asserts itself in the end. Gottfried takes a more radical approach. He has Tristan dispense with his book learning altogether in having Isolde, the new sun, rise in the west! It is difficult to imagine a more specifically medieval form of self-awareness. Another relevant testimony from the twelfth century, not coincidentally taken from the history of Abelard and Heloise, underscores the exciting novelty of Tristan’s description of Isolde. In his Historia Calamitatum, Abelard writes about the events subsequent to his castration: Ambo itaque simul sacrum habitum suscepimus, ego quidem in abbatia santi Dyonisii, illa in monasterio Argenteoli (And so we both donned the religious habit, I in the Abbey of St. Denis, and she in the Convent of Argenteuil). During her investiture, Heloise broke down in tears, ran to the altar, and cited the lament of Cornelia, wife of Pompey, from Lucan’s Bellum civile (Lucan 8,94ff; see Clanchy 350). For Heloise, well-versed in Roman literature and one of the best-educated women of the twelfth century in the humanities tradition, the Roman woman was an exemplary model with which she could orient herself during a difficult moment in her life. In Gottfried’s vernacular Tristan romance, antiquity has lost this function of serving as the primary exemplary model. For an understanding of the kind of humanism that is at the core of Gottfried’s romance, a consideration of the lover’s life in the wilderness, in the middle of which the Love Grotto stands, is particularly important. In this isolated domain, or wüeste, a love that cannot be fully developed at court, and even appears to be questionable at times there, achieves its fullest realization. The fossure de la gent amant (the grotto of courtly love), which goes back to pagan times (16689ff.) and is dedicated to

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Venus (16723), is transformed into a quasi-religious space, the depiction of which is based on medieval commentaries about the allegorical significance of church architecture. Here again we have a specifically medieval surpassing and perfection of something with antique origins. The value of the lovers’ life at the Love Grotto cannot be relativized with reference to episodes such as the attempt to murder Brangaene, or the deceptions that life at court necessarily involves, which were imposed by the source material. This great episode is by no means an exceptional obstruction in the flow of the narrative, but rather is carefully prepared in a variety of ways in the prologue, the narratorial excursus on love, and the literary review. Gottfried transforms the old pagan love grotto into a quasi-sacred Minnegrotte, and he calls what transpires within wertlîche âventiure (earthly bliss; 17070). With regard to this worldliness, the prologue already contains some important signals. Medieval authors typically divided the audience into wîse and tumbe, intelligent and ignorant, and naturally directed themselves toward the former. This topos, according to which the listeners can presumably align themselves fairly easily with the wîsen, is transformed by Gottfried in a way that places great demands on his ideal audience. Gottfried maintains that he has taken upon himself an unmüezekeit der werlde ze liebe (a labour to please the polite world; 45f.). This striking phrase leads one to expect a resolute preoccupation with worldly matters. Such a preoccupation indeed becomes manifest in the compositional technique employed in the prologue. The strophic section of the prologue places the concept werlde at the beginning and at the end (44), where Gottfried employs the neologism gewerldet (literally: world-ed), thus giving the worldly orientation added emphasis. The stichic prologue that follows builds on this orientation. At the beginning Gottfried employs the Biblical image of the eyes of the heart (49), which is associated with the “other world” of the edele herzen. Gottfried here energetically engages the high medieval discussion about the herze, a discussion that had received impetus from the troubadours and that had even made a mark on heroic narratives such as the Nibelungenlied. The specific characteristics of werlde are then examined (46, 50, 55, and 58) and it becomes clear that Gottfried is concerned with another world. This other world is not the Christian heavenly kingdom, even if religious images and ideas were important in its formulation (not surprisingly, given the influence of religion on the thinking and language of the Middle Ages). In his avowal of this other world, Gottfried tirelessly sets forth its distinctiveness in different ways, and culminates with four oxymora:

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ein ander werlt die meine ich, diu samet in eime herzen treit ir süeze sûr, ir liebez leit, ir herzeliep, ir senede nôt, ir liebez leben, ir leiden tôt, ir lieben tôt, ir leidez leben. dem lebene sî mîn leben ergeben (58–64) (I have another world in mind which together in one heart bears its bitter-sweet, its dear sorrow, its heart’s joy, its love’s pain, its dear life, its sorrowful death, its dear death, its sorrowful life. To this life let my life be given.)

The conventional oxymora süeze/sûr, liep/leit (sweet/sour, joy/pain) are setting the stage for the life/death theme toward which the entire prologue leads (238ff.), a theme that resonates powerfully throughout Gottfried’s romance. It underlies the scene in which Tristan and Isolde drink the Minnetrank, and the reflections of Tristan and Isolde continually return to it after their separation at the end of Gottfried’s unfinished romance. This theme even extends to the method of personification mentioned above, when Isolde is depicted as Tristan’s life and death. For his passionate avowal of a world and a life that is able to grasp the totality of love, Gottfried utilizes the neologism of line 44, gewerldet: der werlt wil ich gewerldet wesen / mit ir verderben oder genesen (literally: I want to be ‘worlded’ into this world to perish with it or to be redeemed; 65f.). The “other world” of the edele herzen is not completely comprehended with traditional exordial topoi, but rather draws its power from the analogy to religious traditions, among which especially the commentaries on the Song of Songs are worthy of mention (see Ohly 524 and Schwietering 338–62). There is nothing superficially mundane about Gottfried’s werltlîche âventiure. As a case in point, it is said of the lovers, after they have drunk the love potion and the conventional symptoms of love of Ovidian provenance have appeared, that they cease nourishing themselves, which fills the carefully observing Brangaene with dread (12073ff.). At this point in time they are still in ir aller werlt and bound to the conventions of courtly life. The situation is quite different in the Love Grotto, where Gottfried spends substantial time and effort to show that the lovers need no earthly nourishment (16807–922). The analogy to miracles of nourishment in religious traditions is indisputable, but the mutual nourishing gaze of the lovers, at Marke’s court a sign of their forbidden affection (16494f.), has a very different value in Gottfried’s Minnegrotte:

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si sâhen beide ein ander an, dâ generten sî sich van. der wuocher, den daz ouge bar, daz was ir zweier lîpnar. (16815–18) (They looked at one another and nourished themselves with that! Their sustenance was the eye’s increase [literally: the eye’s harvest/fruit].)

From the eye flows life-sustaining abundance, wuocher, which corresponds to fructus in the language of the mystics. Gottfried comes back to this when he refers to Eros as the nourishment of the couple: waz soltin bezzer lîpnar ze muote oder ze lîbe? dâ was doch man bî wîbe, sô was ouch wîp bî manne, wes bedorften si danne? (16902–6). (What better food could they have for body or soul? Man was there with Woman, Woman there with Man.)

In the context of the nourishment miracle it is made completely clear by means of the emphasis placed on wîp/man (which also refers back to the programmatic passage in the prologue; 129) that the issue is the consummation of love, something fundamentally and thoroughly human. The lovers bear within themselves the best lîpgeraete (nourishment) that one can have in the world. Walter Haug has maintained that the bed, and consequently sexuality, is what is decisive in the Love Grotto. In view of the Platonic tradition of upward striving out of the corporeal, which is evoked in the same context, Haug considers that this would have amounted to an “immense provocation” (Haug 34). The Middle Ages apparently did not see it quite this way in view of the fact that no critical or outraged assessments of the Love Grotto episode have been preserved (is it possible that vernacular literature was too marginal for potential monastic or clerical critics?). One must be careful about strictly equating Eros with sexuality. The troubadours distinguished very clearly in this regard with their term fin’amors, even if the sensual-physical dimension was by no means missing from their conception of love. In the Love Grotto episode Gottfried leaves no doubt that the bed is not merely a bed, and underscores this compositionally by contrasting the episode in the Grotto with the bed scene in Marke’s garden that follows, where there is no mention of wings of the soul. The crystal bed in the Grotto is, by means of its analogies to religious architecture, the

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elevated antitype of the purely sensual bed of luxury that Isolde arranges in Marke’s garden. In the latter case, associations with the Fall from paradise set the tone, and the graceful abundance of sunlight at the Grotto has become the ruinous heat that accompanies the daemon meridianus. With hundreds of verses that are rich with associations, Gottfried makes it clear that the Love Grotto represents a higher kind of love. Herein lies Gottfried’s original contribution to the Tristan story, and to its unresolved and probably unresolvable problem (16836ff.): he unites herze, ouge, and lîp (heart, eye, body) in a new triadic harmony, thus adding lîp to the corporeal organs that were most deeply embedded and privileged in religious-mystical traditions. This is obviously not a humanism of antiquity. Even if lîp is employed in the sense of erotic fulfillment, it is only fully realized in its connection with a spiritual way of seeing. The extent to which this represents a departure from other contemporary conceptions of lîp, which were based on Ovid, becomes evident if we consider a text such as the so-called “Remiremont Council of Love” (listed in the works cited as “Das Liebesconcil”). This parodistic text participates in what must have been a lively contemporary discussion about who is the better lover, the miles or the clericus. Other texts such as “Phyllis and Flora,” which draw heavily on Latin erotic traditions and mythology, have the same concern. In the “Remiremont Council of Love,” Ovid’s Ars amatoria replaces the Gospel in what amounts at times to a parody of the liturgy, in which religious terms such as concilium, interdict, and excommunicatio receive a new parodistic value and are joined with elements of pagan mythology (see Waitz ed., 160–67). Gottfried does not employ religious-mystical language in a parodistic way, but rather takes a third path that has been prepared by the troubadours with their fin’amors. Given the authoritativeness of Ovid in literary circles of the time, it is remarkable that Gottfried was able to distance himself from the Roman master to such an extent (see Ganz 397–413), for example in his detailed references to the Remedia amoris, against which he advocates his own artistic conception. In order to overcome love sickness, Ovid’s Remedia state that one must shun otium (Lenz ed., 139). Gottfried takes this up in his prologue when he insists on unmüezekeit (unrest/activity; 77ff), but this unmuoze is not directed against love. On the contrary, the unmuoze results from absorbing oneself completely in the love fate of Tristan and Isolde, which is itself the true and inspirational unmuoze. Another reference to Ovid’s Remedia is visible in the passage in which Tristan falls temporarily away from his love for Isolde in the Isolde White Hands episode. Here Gottfried makes Ovid’s argumentation his own and brings the love of Isolde down to the same

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level of that harmful love against which Ovid gives his advice. Struggling with the confused feelings that Isolde White Hands has caused in him, Tristan considers that he might be helped with vremdem liebe (the love of another; 19429ff.), for he has often read that ein trutschaft benimet der andern ir craft (one love saps the strength of another), upon which the comparison with the water of the Rhine follows. It is exactly this council that Ovid gives to his lovers (445, 462). What Ovid praises as a remedy, however ironically, is a crass failure in this episode of Gottfried’s romance. Against the Remedia of Ovid, which have nothing in common with Gottfried’s conception of true love as a totality that encompasses joy and pain, Gottfried puts forward his own senemaere as a remedium (71ff.). Ovid, the antique and medieval authority in amoribus, might properly be regarded as dethroned, not by means of a praise of chastity, but rather by the story of the fulfilled love of Tristan and Isolde. In this love, which is a love of sexual fulfillment, something deeply human about man and wip becomes tangible. Antiquity was not the principle source of the kind of humanism that shows itself here. Even if Gottfried unreservedly advocates the physical aspect of Tristan-Minne, one observes an overriding tendency to internalize and to spiritualize. This tendency is visible in the episode that includes the knighting of Tristan, the literary review (Dichterschau), and the invocation of the Muses. The Tristrams saga, and perhaps also Gottfried’s source, placed the conferral of arms and armor in the foreground of this episode. Gottfried also explicitly mentions sword, spurs, and Marke’s speech, and thus follows the source to some extent. But hundreds of verses have preceded that go in a completely different direction and are completely independent of the source. Gottfried begins his description of this momentous occasion by stressing very intentionally the external events, but only to distance himself decisively from them, a move that is already suggested by the brevitas topos (4555ff.). External pomp does not interest him. He turns instead toward another kind of rîchheit which is internal and based on muot, guot, bescheidenheit, and höfischer sin (mettle, affluence, discretion, courtesy). Gottfried returns some four hundred verses later (4961ff.) to his unique version of the conferral of arms upon Tristan and his companions, and when he does so he amplifies it rhetorically. Gottfried is concerned with an interior wât, / die von des herzen kamere gât (clothes that come from the wardrobe of the heart; 4993f.). We observe here the same tendency to internalize that was also visible in the “profane” miracle of nourishment in the Minnegrotte. Such overarching similarities show that Gottfried consistently follows an encompassing new conception. Between these two points, line 4555 and line

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4963, Gottfried positions his carefully crafted literary review and the revelation of his source of inspiration. The question of a depiction of the conferral of knighthood that is worthy of the Tristan story is the cause of the Dichterschau. Medieval poetics had taken over from antiquity a very elaborately developed art of depiction, which Gottfried very confidently trumps with his own conception of a poetry that aims at the interior and opens up des herzenkamere (the chamber of the heart). In a single masterfully executed passage of over thirty verses of unparalleled stylistic talent, Gottfried distances himself from the manner of depiction that was typical in the narrative poetry of his day. He begins with the example of the armor, which Vulcan himself had forged, and then returns triumphantly to the manner of depiction mentioned at the outset (4961). Just as the antique Helen has no chance with the medieval Isolde, the antique depiction of armor also falls short. In order to outdo antiquity, one must have recourse to a special source of inspiration, and Gottfried takes care of this by developing his singular invocation of the Muses out of his feigned inability to adequately portray the knighthood ceremony (4859ff.). The invocation of the Muses actually belongs in the prologue, but antiquity — Virgil for example — allowed for the possibility of appealing to the Muses later in the text in cases of need. By taking advantage of this possibility, Gottfried shows his close familiarity with antique poetics. But the medieval poet does not leave it at this. Gottfried does not content himself with the old Helikon, but rather claims the true Helikon as his inspiration (see Wolf 2000). Although the exegetical associations of the language look suspiciously Christian, one should hesitate before seeing in the true Helikon the Holy Spirit as fulfillment and perfection of the antique Helikon, just as one should not see the niuwe sunne (new sun), Isolde, who puts the antique Helen in the shadows, as a real figure of Christian salvation history. What Gottfried ascribes to the true Helikon and claims for his poetry goes in the same direction as what he says about Isolde and Tristan. With a poet such as Gottfried, similarities in wording have to be taken seriously. Gottfried expects that his words will be fused together ze vremedem wunder (most wondrously; 4893). Blanscheflur, as she is beginning to become aware of her love for Riwalin, calls the transformation occurring in her vremedez wunder (strange marvel; 1004). The younger Isolde, when she appears at the Irish court like the sun following her mother the dawn, is designated as the wonder of Ireland (10888). In the same scene Tristan is characterized in a singular way: sîn dinc was ze wunder ûf geleit (he was marvelously blessed; 11093). Vremede (wondrous/marvelous; 11104) is more generally an epithet for the excep-

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tional nature of Tristan, and it also applies to the strange stag, whose trail becomes one with the footsteps of the lovers (see Rathofer 27–42). Gottfried also makes vremede an aspect of his poetry, and the same is said of Isolde’s art: si videlte ir stampenîe, / leiche und sô vremediu notelîn, / diu niemer vremeder kunden sîn (she fiddled her “estampie,” her lays, and her marvelous tunes which could not be rarer; 8058ff.). Beyond this, Gottfried’s wort, inspired as they are by the true Helikon, are similar to Arabic gold; they laugh into the herze, and make the narrative durchliuhtec (transparent; 4902). Tristan will pronounce about Isolde that she shines into all herzen (8284), and that she purifies herze and muot in the same way as gold is purified (8290ff.). A special kind of Eros is realized in Tristan and Isolde, which Gottfried makes recognizable as the source of strength of his poetry. It might not be an overstatement to say that Isolde becomes the muse of Gottfried, just as she is the new sun and the wâre wirtinne. By way of conclusion, we might consider another episode that is superbly crafted and rich with associations, that of the rendezvous in Marke’s garden that leads to the lovers’ separation. This episode is, as already suggested, conceived as a correspondent to the love existence of the Love Grotto, and it sheds light retrospectively on the earlier episode. The garden at Marke’s court, in which Isolde prepares the fateful bed, is a questionable parallel of the paradisal place in the woods and the crystal bed of the Grotto. One is now among ir aller werlde (the world of the many; 50) at court, where true Eros cannot develop itself fully, but necessarily becomes a perversion of itself. But things do not have to remain this way, as one can gather from the concluding reflections of the author and the dialogues and monologues of Isolde. Instigator of depravity is Marke’s crude sensuality, which already manifested itself during the wedding night (im duhte wîp alse wîp [= To him one woman was as another; 12666]). It is symptomatic of the ambivalence concerning sexuality in Gottfried’s romance that Marke is inflamed at the sight of the sleeping Isolde in the Love Grotto, the very place where Gottfried’s Eros reaches its fullest realization for a short while. Isolde, shining in the Grotto in the purest light, kindles in the purely sensual Marke the irresistible sensuality that eventually moves him to fetch the lovers back to court — niht z’êren wan ze lîbe (not in honour, but only for sensual pleasure; 17727). Gottfried calls Marke’s blindness, which prevents him from admitting to himself that Isolde does not love him, herzelôse blintheit (literally: heartless blindness; 17739), thereby denying him herze, the thing that is central in Gottfried’s conception of Eros. At the same time, he distances the lovers from any kind of guilt (17759). Marke

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forbids the inneclîchen blicke (ardent looks) and every intimacy between the lovers (17712ff.). By having Marke use the terms gebôt and verbôt (command, interdict), Gottfried establishes parameters for understanding the events to come. The term huote (surveillance) is also employed, which makes possible an important reference to “High Minne” with its kernel of fin’amors. Beginning with the psychological effects of gebôt, verbôt and huote, Gottfried completes the portrayal with a carefully considered depiction of the fateful rendezvous in Marke’s garden. With respect to psychology, Gottfried follows Ovidian conventions. Underlying this episode is the insight nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata! (We eternally strive to do what is not allowed and desire whatever is forbidden). For Gottfried’s criticism of Marke’s prohibition there is also support in the New Testament (in Romans 7), and the thistle and thorn comparison that is used three times at this first stage of the narratorial excursus (17861, 17885, and 17931) also points to a biblical background. Not coincidentally, the reference to the prohibition in paradise follows immediately upon the third and final use of the word dorn. This language, which is rich with biblical associations, opens up a new dimension. We leave Ovid behind and suddenly and unexpectedly we are with Eve in paradise as she breaks God’s commandment. There is no mention of Adam at the beginning of the depiction of the rendezvous, for Isolde, the conveyor of the new Eros, has to dominate this scene. Gottfried cannot spend enough time with Eve, the prototype of all women, and he has Isolde now emerge as a second Eve. The formulation geevet (literally: Eve-ed; 17962), which comes to the list of other significant neologisms such as gewerldet (cited above) and g’îsotet (Isolded; 19006), suggests that important correspondences are being established here that require a new terminology. It belongs to the nature of women, the poet tells us, to be moved to transgression by prohibition (17961). Gottfried pays those women respect who are able to act against their nature, but makes it clear that in so doing so they act against something essential, their wîpheit (womanliness). The poet then turns around and praises that kind of woman who affirms her own nature unreservedly (18051ff.), adding that whoever enjoys the affection of such a woman is fortunate indeed (18063f.). In all of this Gottfried continues the biblical associations and intensifies them. The general considerations about prohibition and transgression reach their culmination in a passage of some thirty verses that is positioned before the depiction of the events continues:

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an swen ouch diu genendet, an den si gâr gewendet ir lîp unde ir sinne, ir meine unde ir minne, der wart saelic ie geborn, der ist geborn unde erkorn ze lebenden saelden alle wîs, der hat daz lebende paradîs in sînem herzen begraben. der darf dekeine sorge haben, daz in der hagen iht ange, so’r nâch den bluomen lange; daz in der dorn iht steche, sô er die rôsen breche. da enist der hagen noch der dorn. dan enhât der distelîne zorn mitalle niht ze tuone. diu rôsîne suone diu hât ez allez ûz geslagen: dorn unde distel unde hagen. in disem paradîse dâ enspringet an dem rîse, engruonet noch enwahset niht, wan daz daz ouge gerne siht. ez ist gâr in blüete von wîplîcher güete. da enist niht obezes inne wan triuwe unde minne, êre unde werltlîcher prîs. Ahî, ein so getân paradîs, daz alsô vröudebaere und sô gemeiet waere, dâ möhte ein saeliger man sînes herzen saelde vinden an und sîner ougen wunne sehen. (18059–93; italics added) (On whomever she takes courage to bestow her love and person, that man was born most fortunate [literally: blessed]! He was altogether destined for present bliss, he has the living paradise implanted within his heart! He need have no fear that the thorns will vex him when he

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reaches for the flowers, or that the prickles will pierce him when he gathers the roses. There are no thorns or prickles there: thistly anger has no business there at all. Rose-like conciliation has uprooted them all — prickles, thistles, and thorns! In such a paradise nothing buds on the twig or puts on green or grows but what the eye delights in — it all blossoms there by grace of a woman’s virtue. There is no other fruit there but love and devotion, honour and worldly esteem. Ah me, in such a paradise, so fecund of joy and so vernal, the man on whom Fortune smiles might find his heart’s desire and see his eye’s delight [the words saeliger and saelde in the last three verses also have the religious connotation blessed].)

The key word paradîs, along with saelic and the crucially important concept herze — here joined by the ouge — form a frame (18066– 18093), and in the middle of the passage the word paradîs appears again (18079). By the time this happens, the biblical thorn-thistle metaphorical language is present only negatively, and Marian associations are being established: rose without thorn! The intensive employment of Biblical elements in this passage cannot be dismissed as decorative flourishes. The intention is to bring to expression the happiness of one to whom a woman — who der werlde zuo gefalle (to please people; 18053) is true to her wîpheit — gives her love. When Gottfried mentions saeligen man in this context, he takes up a phrase that plays a significant role in Minnesang, especially with Reinmar and Walther von der Vogelweide, though in the context of Minnesang this is scarcely more than a wish, while in Gottfried’s romance it is a real possibility. The connection of saelde and paradîs with the term leben, which already shaped the prologue, is now personalized in Isolde and in her relationship to Tristan (der ist geborn . . . / ze lebenden saelden alle wîs, / der hat daz lebende paradîs / in sînem herzen begraben [he was altogether destined for present bliss, he has the living paradise implanted within his heart]). The repetition of the term lebend (present/living) is important. The somewhat general sounding lebenden saelden (present bliss) becomes more specifically the lebende paradîs im herzen (living paradise implanted within his heart). The biblical Eve once caused the exile from paradise by breaking a commandment, but for Gottfried the lebende paradîs comes back into being in the heart of a man through the love of a woman who is true to her nature (which is to say, who sets herself beyond huote and verbot). This is an amazing claim, which, in view of the very unusual prologue, again appears as very consistent. Across from the lost material paradise of Genesis, Gottfried places nothing less than another paradise, which is hidden in the heart, within the human interior, and which is

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redefined and personalized in the image of the loving woman by virtue of which it comes to life. Gottfried assures us that this new paradise does not refer to unchangeable events in the past, but rather — as suggested by the phrase saeliger man — is a powerful possibility in the present and the future. Here Gottfried goes significantly beyond Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein prologue. Whereas Hartmann assures us, not without humor, that he gains more from tales about an ideal Arthurian past in the present than he would gain from actually living in that ideal past, Gottfried promises not only a pleasing literary experience, but a principle of living for the present and future. Gottfried here engages himself in the great discussion about love that was occurring in the twelfth century in Minnesang, theology, and the courtly romances, and even in works such as the Nibelungenlied. Gottfried’s artistic conception might properly be seen as a bold experiment, in which the attempt is made to articulate a specifically medieval humanism of love that is not based primarily on antiquity, but rather on the Bible and theological writings — despite its enthusiastic affirmation of worldly sensuality. The remainder of the romance shows just how strong the presence of the Bible is. The living paradîs, which we have just considered, is followed by the depiction of the sinful Fall of the lovers as a ruinous consequence of the huote (18115). Here Gottfried quite deliberately establishes an analogy to the behavior of Adam and Eve. Tristan, it is said, follows the urging of his Eve, Isolde, to share her bed in Marke’s garden: daz obez, daz ime sîn Êve bôt, / daz nam er und az mit ir den tôt (he took the fruit which his Eve offered him and with her ate his death; 18163f.; for a detailed analysis of this episode, see Wolf 1989). Of course, the Fall of Adam and Eve by no means meant the impossibility of salvation. On the contrary, in the New Testament it became the felix culpa quae meruit talem redemptorem habere (happy fault, that merited such a Redeemer!! Similarly, the discovery of the adultery and the separation of the lovers does not mark the end because, as we have seen, Tristan carries the lebende paradîs in his heart, and so in this regard he is superior to the Old Testament Adam who was driven from paradise. Just as Adam and Eve in the Bible became the ancestors of humanity, we have to see in Isolde and Tristan the ancestors of true lovers in the new humanity of the edele herzen. For Adam and Eve the promise of redemption came from beyond, from God, but Tristan and Isolde carry the possibility of redemption in themselves, and Gottfried comes back to this point repeatedly during and after their final separation. The spectacular lovers of the matière de Bretagne are thus newly conceived, and Gottfried’s romance claims for itself the status of a Novum Testamentum

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amoris — not caritatis. The burden that Gottfried has placed on Eros is enormous, and there is no way to know whether this was a great burden with which he struggled, or a playful game with which he diverted himself and his audiences. Even if it were only the latter, this would be interesting enough. Translated by Will Hasty

Works Cited Primary Sources Abélard. Historia calamitatum. Ed. J. Monfrin. Paris: J. Vrin, 1962. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Ed. H. F. Stewart. London: Heinemann, 1953. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans.(German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Gottfried von Strassburg. ‘Tristan’ With the Surviving Fragments of the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. A. T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Das Liebesconcil. Ed. G. Waitz. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 7 (1849): 160–67. Ovid. Heilmittel gegen die Liebe. Ed. and trans. (German) Friedrich Walter Lenz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969. Publius Ovidius Naso. Liebesgedichte. Amores lateinisch und deutsch. Ed and trans. W. Marg and R. Harder. Munich: Heimeran, 1968. Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes. Vol. II: Cliges. Ed. Alexandre Micha. Paris: Champion, 1957. Marcabru. Poésies complètes du troubadour Marcabru. Ed. J. M. L. Dejeanne. Toulouse: 1909. Das St. Trudperter Hohelied. Eine Lehre der liebenden Gotteserkenntnis. Ed. Friedrich Ohly. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998. Wace. La partie Arthurienne du Roman de Brut. Ed. I. D. O. Arnold and M. M. Pelan. Paris: Klincksieck, 1962.

Secondary Sources Clanchy, Michael T. (1997). Abaelard: Ein mittelalterliches Leben. Darmstadt: Primus. Ertzdorff, Xenia von (1958). Studien zum Begriff des Herzens und seiner Verwendung als Aussagemotiv in der höfischen Liebeslyrik des 12. Jahrhunderts. Dissertation. Freiburg.

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Fromm, Hans (1973). “Gottfried von Straßburg und Abälard.” Festschrift für Ingeborg Schröbler zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Dietrich Schmidtke and Helga Schuppert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 196–216. Ganz, Peter (1971). “Tristan, Isolde und Ovid. Zu Gottfrieds Tristan v. 17182ff.” Mediaevalia litteraria, Festschrift für Helmut de Boor. Munich: Beck. 397–413. Gewehr, Wolf (1972). “Der Topos ‘Augen des Herzens.’ Versuch einer Deutung durch die scholastische Erkenntnistheorie.” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 46: 626–49. Gilson, Etienne (1955). “Humanisme médiéval et Renaissance.” Les idées et les lettres. By E. G. Paris: J. Vrin. Haskins, Charles Homer (1963). The Renaisssance of the 12th Century. Cleveland: Meridian Books. Haug, Walter (2000). Der Tristanroman im Horizont der erotischen Diskurse des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Freiburg/Schweiz: Universitätsverlag. Leclercq, Jean (1961). “L’humanisme des moines au moyen âge.” Studi medievali 3,10: 69–113. Levy, Harry L. (1968) “Setmunt in Gottfrieds Tristan 12216.” Modern Language Notes 83 (1968): 435–36. Mohr, Wolfgang (1959). “Tristan und Isolde als Künstlerroman.” Euphorion 53:153–74. Ohly, Friedrich (1984). “Bemerkungen eines Philologen zur Memoria.” Memoria: Der geistesgeschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter. Munich: Fink. 9–68. Rahner, Hugo (1964). Symbole der Kirche: Die Ekklesiologie der Väter. Salzburg: Müller. Ranke, Friedrich (1925). “Die Allegorie der Minnegrotte in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft. Geisteswiss. Kl. 2. 21–39. Rathofer, Johannes (1966). “Der ‘wunderbare Hirsch’ der Minnegrotte.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 95: 27–42. Sawicki, Stanislaw (1932). Gottfried von Straßburg und die Poetik des Mittelalters. Berlin: Ebering. Schulze, Ursula (1967). “Literarkritische Äußerungen im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 88: 285–310. Schwietering, Julius (1943). “Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg und die Bernhardische Mystik.” In: Julius Schwietering, Philologische Schriften, ed. Friedrich Ohly and Max Mehrli. Munich: Fink, 1969. 339–61.

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Southern, R. W. (1970). Medieval Humanism and Other Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. Wolf Alois (1986). Deutsche Kultur im Hochmittelalter 1150–1250. Essen: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion. Wolf, Alois (1989). Gottfried von Straßburg und die Mythe von Tristan and Isolde. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Wolf, Alois (1988). “Gottfrieds Dichterschau als Versuch einer Neubegründung der deutschen Literatur aus dem Geist der Mythe von Tristan und Isolde.” Festschrift für Ingo Reiffenstein zum 60. Geburtstag. Göppingen: Kümmerle. 397–425. Wolf, Alois (2000). “Venus versus Orpheus. Reinmar, Walther, Gottfried und die ‘Renaissance des 12. Jahrhunderts’ in Sprache und Dichtung in Vorderösterreich.” Ed. Guntram Plangg and Eugen Thurnher. Innsbruck: Wagner. 75–98.

Gottfried’s Strasbourg: The City and Its People Michael S. Batts

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Y CITING “THÔMAS VON BRITANJE” AS HIS SOURCE

and by taking issue, so it seems, with Eilhart von Oberge, Gottfried von Strassburg deliberately situates his work in a literary tradition. That is to say, he views his version as one of a succession of treatments of a given material, and there is no reason to doubt that he expected there would be others in the future. He gave for his time the appropriate interpretation of events in the past, and there is also no reason to doubt that he saw Marke, Tristan, and Isolde as historical figures in that past, no matter how indefinite that past may be. However, it must also be borne in mind that Gottfried is himself a historical figure at a particular point in time, and he must therefore be seen, if one is to understand fully the background to the writing of his epic poem, within that historical context. What I propose here is a depiction of the political, social, economic, and cultural situation at the time at which Gottfried was writing, that is, the social and intellectual climate in Strasbourg in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. In this chapter reference is occasionally made to events after the supposed date of death of Gottfried, on the grounds that existing customs only found formal expression at a much later date, for “traditional practices were later legally confirmed” (“herkömmlich Bestehendes [wurde] nachträglich rechtlich bestätigt,” Winter 28), and also to events that preceded Gottfried’s lifetime and were the basis for the intellectual climate in which he lived. However, I make only passing reference to the remoter history of the city, since one must distinguish, as far as the historical Strasbourg is concerned, between what we now know of its history and what Gottfried may be assumed to have known at the time. Gottfried would not, for example, have had access to the information, scanty as it is, that has become available in the centuries since his death about the Roman occupation of the city, and he would presumably have accepted one of the legends about the founding of the city, such as that

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incorporated into Jakob Twinger von Königshoven’s chronicle (ca. 1400). According to that chronicle, Trebata, the son of Ninus and Semiramis, fled to Germany after the death of his father in order to escape the amorous advances of his mother. He founded Trier, and in that city later murdered his mother, who had followed him there. From Trier were founded the Rhenish cities of Cologne, Mainz, Strasbourg, and Basel, all of this about two thousand years before the birth of Christ. This is fiction, of course, and not fact, but on the other hand it has to be recognized that there is a dearth of documentary evidence about Strasbourg prior to the thirteenth century, despite what has so often been said about the importance of Strasbourg in Germany’s history: “Straßburg ist der Schlüssel zu Deutschland” (Bismarck, quoted here from Lorenz and Scherer 34). The city of Strasbourg was destroyed and rebuilt many times during the centuries between the first settlement and Gottfried’s time, but the description of Alsace that Ermoldus Nigellus (780–845), banished to Strasbourg by Louis the Pious, provides in his elegy to Pippin in 824 is equally applicable to Alsace in Gottfried’s time. (The quote is slightly abbreviated from the Carmen Nigelli Ermoldi exulis in honorem gloriosis Pippini regis — Poem by the exiled Nigellus Ermoldus in honour of the glorious king Pippin, lines 77–88; unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.) This is an ancient and fertile area, occupied by the Franconians who have given it the name Alsace. On the one side are the Vosges mountains, on the other the Rhine, and between them lives a lively population. Vineyards cover the slopes and their vines provide grapes. The valley floors offer fertile soil which enables the farmers to fill their granaries. The fields provide crops; the slopes provide wine, and the Vosges mountains are covered with forests. The [overflowing] Rhine fertilizes the soil. One has to ask oneself which enriches the inhabitants more, the mountains or the river. During the tenth century Alsace (less so the city of Strasbourg) suffered a great deal from the invasion of the Hungarians, and benefitted little from having been incorporated in 962 into the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. It was not really until the early twelfth century that Strasbourg’s fortunes began to improve (again), this time under the Hohenstaufen emperors, who had a fondness for the area. Frederick I in particular made Alsace virtually the center of the empire, but, although he was frequently in Strasbourg, he developed Hagenau rather than Strasbourg as the “imperial” city and accorded it extensive privileges in the charter of 1164. After the death of his successor Henry VI in 1190

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(in the struggle between Philip and Otto so brilliantly evoked by Walther von der Vogelweide), Alsace, where there were partisans on both sides, suffered a good deal, but Strasbourg, though besieged in 1199, was spared from destruction. One result of this conflict was the realization in Strasbourg that its defenses were inadequate, and additional defensive walls were built over the next few years, enclosing the already extensive suburbs. Estimates of its size vary somewhat, but the area enclosed seems to have been about one hundred hectares. The famous cathedral was not in any way affected by either the warfare or the rebuilding of the walls. It had been destroyed by fire some years earlier and was in the process of being rebuilt during Gottfried’s lifetime. At the same time, that is, in the first years of the thirteenth century, although the city was still largely under the jurisdiction of the bishop, the citizens seem to have been able to codify, if not to extend, their rights and privileges vis-à-vis the church. Like other major urban centers, Strasbourg had for centuries been under the control of an ecclesiastical authority, in this case the bishop, and a high proportion of the property both within Strasbourg and throughout Alsace belonged to the church in one way or another. Rodolphe Reuss dates the bishop’s authority from the end of the tenth century: “from that date [974] the bishop is unquestionably the real lord over the city” (“à partir de cette date [974] l’évèque est, sans conteste possible, le vrai seigneur de la cité,” 13). Although the emperor nominally had legal jurisdiction in Strasbourg, he had transferred his rights in 982 to the bishop, who therefore had also secular jurisdiction, that is to say, he or his nominees administered justice and were responsible for law and order, the minting of coinage, and so forth. Relations between the city and the bishop had, not surprisingly, at times been strained, and an attempt at regularizing relations took place as early as the twelfth century. The date is disputed, but it is now generally assumed that the first city code (erstes Stadtrecht) was written up in the first half of the century and listed what had come to be recognized as mutual rights and obligations. The details of this statute are not at issue here; what is important is the fact that, notwithstanding the various privileges granted to the citizens of Strasbourg by the emperor, for example, their freedom from certain taxes, the city was still firmly in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities. The bishop was still the master, but his power was no longer unlimited. As Reuss puts it, “his authority is still that of an overlord, but he exercises this authority within customary limits. There is a contract between him and his subjects. They owe him certain things, but only these things. If the bishop exceeds these limits, the citizens may not be punished for their denial [of his author-

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ity]” (“son autorité [. . .] est celle d’un maître, mais elle ne peut s’exercer que dans une mesure déterminée par la coutume. Il y a un contrat entre lui et ses sujets. Ils lui doivent certaines choses, mais celles-là seulement. Si l’évèque dépasse ces limites, le refus des citoyens ne peut leur attirer aucune punition,” 18) In the early years of the thirteenth century — and again the exact date is disputed, but I am assuming a period shortly before the granting of direct imperial status (Reichsunmittelbarkeit) in 1205 — a second statute showed that the city, though lagging behind other Rhenish cities such as Cologne, had made considerable progress towards a form of selfgovernment. Again, the details are not important, but what is significant is the constitution of the city council and the nature of the authority invested in it. The council consisted of ministerials and citizens. The meaning of the former term has been the subject of a vast amount of discussion, but it is perhaps best summed up by Hans Walter Klewitz, who refers to them as possessing “a lesser degree of subservience” (“eine Art gehobener Unfreiheit,” 24); by the latter term is meant of course reliable men from the merchant or artisan class. The council elected a “mayor” (magister) and had first and foremost the responsibility, as might be expected, of maintaining law and order and protecting the rights and privileges of the church and the city. The various infringements of the law and the appropriate penalties are given in some detail, and the penalties certainly seem to us nowadays rather drastic in some cases, for example, the amputation of a hand for thieves and counterfeiters, but it must be remembered that those who belonged in one way or another to the “family” of the church — and they were many — came under ecclesiastical, not civil law. The second statute does not provide the kind of detail about the administration that was provided in the first, and it is evident that the chief officers of the city were still the same, although they were now appointed or confirmed by the council, if, as had happened in some cases, the functions had not already become hereditary. The most important post was that of governor (Vogt), who was responsible on behalf of the emperor for all judicial matters outside the area that pertained to the ecclesiastical court. At a lower level, justice was administered by a mayor (scultetus or Schultheiss), another ministerial, and he in turn chose two assistant judges, as well as a representative from the old town and two from the new. The sessions were held in public, in fact normally in the open air, in order to avoid any semblance of lobbying. The burcgravius, the equivalent now, I suppose, of the city manager, was responsible for the general upkeep of the city, for roads, bridges, fortifications, and

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so forth, including the supervision of certain markets. But he was also responsible for the supervision of eleven trades. It is possible that these were the better organized (perhaps the more unruly!) groups, but they give us some indication at least of the kind of products being made at that time, although it is impossible, as Bernard Vogler says, to know anything about the quantities produced, whether for local consumption or for export (“il demeure impossible d’avancer des données quantitatives, tant pour la production que pour le commerce,” 21). These trades are, in alphabetical order: coopers, cupmakers, fruit suppliers, furriers, glovemakers, innkeepers, millers, saddlers, shoemakers, smiths, and swordsmiths. It is possible that authority was exercised over some of these trades on account of their traditional obligations to the bishop (also listed in part in the first statute), for example, to supply him with furs, gloves, etc. There were two officials concerned directly with financial matters. The one, the customs officer (telonearius), watched over the very complex system of tolls and tariffs, dividing the income appropriately between the various interested bodies (city, bishop, etc), and he also had the responsibility for the maintenance of the bridges in the new town. The other was the officer in charge of the mint, the monetarius, who had more or less the function one would expect. The production of coins was also open, so that anyone could see that there was no cheating, but it was possible for citizens to buy in to this operation, to buy shares, so to speak, since it was quite profitable. By the middle of the thirteenth century there were no less than three hundred participants. The other significant function of the council was the overseeing of what we would now generally term sumptuary laws. The statutes define in other words not only the parameters within which the traders, under the supervision of the burgrave, might function, but also the limits of social behavior, for example, what one should wear, how many people one might invite to private parties or ceremonies, and so forth. These laws make it evident that Strasbourg was at this time becoming more prosperous, since at least some of the people could now afford to indulge themselves, could afford to pay for luxuries. Those who were primarily concerned with such rules and regulations were members of the growing patriciate, recruited primarily, it seems, from the ministerial class. But the artisans were also growing both in number and strength, and they formed the guilds that were later to dispute the authority of the patriciate. While there were still many unfree servants within the jurisdiction of the bishop, the prosperity of Strasbourg attracted also an (initially) unfree population from the surrounding countryside, since the peasants

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were aware that they would be protected in the city and would become free if they were able to remain there long enough, the ancient principle being that the city air made them free (Stadtluft macht frei). To some extent the new prosperity was the result of the gradual change that had been taking place over the last decades from a primarily barter economy to a largely money-based one. In the country, for example, service or payments in kind in return for the occupancy of land had to a large extent been replaced by cash payments, and in the city the money economy — an early form of capitalism — was making itself felt. The various guilds still owed service to the bishop’s court, but this service was limited in extent, or carried out by a small group rather than by the whole body of the guild, or, in certain circumstances, replaced by a fee. Strasbourg owed a good deal of its prosperity to its position at the confluence of the Ill (then navigable) and the Rhine, at a point where not only rivers, but also major roads met. Its name supposedly refers in fact to its situation where important east-west and north-south trade routes crossed: the city at the (cross)roads. The most important product of the region was wine (introduced by the Romans), and it was famed throughout Europe. After wine, the major export articles were wood from the forests and cloth from the mills on the streams flowing out of the Vosges mountains. Vogler also refers to the importance of Strasbourg for the transshipment of salt between France and Germany (22). Local merchants were largely free of tolls, of course, and citizens of Strasbourg had actually been freed in 1205 from taxation on their property in other parts of Alsace (Nagel 32), but products passing through the city were generally subject to tolls of various kinds, and traffic up and down the Rhine as well as transportation across the river were also a source of income. Traders from all over Europe therefore passed through the city, and coins minted in Strasbourg have been found in most European countries, though not in great numbers. Whatever power the church may still have wielded in Strasbourg and elsewhere, there is no doubt that a large segment of the population in the whole of western Europe — and not only, perhaps not even primarily, the poor — had for a long time been dissatisfied with the current state of the religious hierarchy and had sought various means either to improve it or to opt out of it. Although the reforms introduced by Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) had been well intended and had accompanied, among other things, the Cluniac revival of monasticism, they had had little, if any, effect on the traditional hierarchy. Disappointed with the ostentatious wealth of abbeys and monasteries and with abuses such as simony, many people, including some of the clergy, demanded a return

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to the biblical virtue of apostolic poverty, the vita apostolica, a way of life that enjoined not only poverty and chastity, but the obligation to carry the word to others. While the church could hardly object in principle to the biblical virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility of those who joined these movements, it could and did object to their preaching to others, since the church authorities believed that only they were empowered to bestow the privilege of preaching. The development of the innumerable orthodox and heterodox sects of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries is an extremely complex and much disputed issue, and if I discuss this at some length, it is because I believe it is the most important aspect of intellectual life at Gottfried’s time. Gottfried must surely have been aware of the ideas of these groups, when writing his poem, and of the fact that most of the initiative for these religious movements came from women. One can, I think, safely make the following generalizations. In the first place the church was very slow to respond, and the response was at first very confused. Only during the papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216) did some basic principles emerge: the adherents of these new movements should be encouraged, as long as they maintained an orthodox position, to join an existing order, but they might preach only for the edification of their fellows, for example, to exhort them to adhere to their vows of poverty and chastity, not to discuss questions of theology, the interpretation of the Bible, and so forth. Secondly, it has to be said that the movements in the south, especially the south of France, tended towards heresy, primarily a form of dualism, which brought about, among other things, the crusade against the Albigensians in 1209, while the movements in the north (Belgium, Holland, and north-central Germany) remained largely orthodox. And thirdly, as I mentioned above, these movements in the northern areas were almost entirely driven by and in the hands of women, known generally as Beguines: “Beguine life [. . .] dates from the Investiture Struggle and the popular reform movement that rose out of it in reaction to simony and clerical marriage” (McDonnell 412). Specific information about the level or nature of religious dissidence in Strasbourg at the beginning of the thirteenth century is unfortunately lacking, but Beguines there must have been. For the most part these were not, as I said, heretical, but the confusion among church authorities led to differences of opinion as to how to deal with the large numbers of often rich women who insisted on donating their property to the poor and vowing perpetual poverty, chastity, and humility. There were few nunneries, the existing (male) religious orders were unwilling to accept them, and those male orders that were developing at this time and out

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of this same new spirit, for example, that of Saint Francis of Assisi, who began his preaching in the first years of the thirteenth century, were bitterly opposed to any responsibility for these women. The result was that they lived for the most part outside the church, sometimes remaining at home, sometimes forming small “convents,” sometimes accepted or supported by the local clergy or bishop, sometimes persecuted and even burned as heretics. In a few cases these women appealed directly to Rome for protection against attacks on their beliefs or on their person or for protection against the imposition of ordeals to determine their “true” status. Ordeals by fire or water were still employed at this time, though the church did not approve of them and in fact a little later, at the fourth Lateran council of 1213–15, the clergy was formally prohibited from taking part in such affairs. The treatment meted out to heretics in 1143 in Cologne and the diatribes against them during the first part of the twelfth century by, among others, Hildegard von Bingen, had probably faded from the memory of the inhabitants of Strasbourg by Gottfried’s time, but he and others must have been familiar, in the quarter-century following the edict against heresy of 1184, with the response of the church to the challenges of these new and sometimes heretical ideas, for example, with the trials of the Waldensians, in Metz in 1199 or of the Amalricans in Paris in the first years of the thirteenth century. The church was particularly adamant about the problem of itinerant preachers, who were so often assumed by local people to be heretics that even the early Franciscans had difficulty in convincing those to whom they preached of their orthodoxy. One of the accusations leveled against the Beguines was precisely their traveling about and living from charity rather than remaining cloistered and earning their living by handiwork, but by the early thirteenth century most were resident in cities, either individually or in small groups. Beguines, and probably also other and less orthodox groups, must then have existed in Strasbourg in Gottfried’s time, since heretics, perhaps Waldensians, but more likely followers of Ortlieb, a local heretic who, like the Cathars, was a dualist and an antitrinitarian, were burned there in 1212, and by 1237 there were no less than five official houses of Beguines with a total of three hundred resident women. One of the more interesting aspects of this revival of the apostolic life among women was the attempt to improve the level of education of their members or even of the local community, either by straightforward teaching or by the translation of biblical and edifying texts. Very little is known, unfortunately, about this side of the movements, except that the church was naturally very much opposed to any translations of biblical texts in the

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hands of the laity. Texts produced by the Waldensians, for example, had been publicly burned in Metz around 1200. However, it is also not clear to what extent literacy was achieved, to what extent, for example, the works of such well-known mystics as Hildegard von Bingen were written by herself or dictated to someone with a greater degree of literacy. Teaching of some kind did go on in Beguine communities, but one has to assume that much of the linguistic facility acquired by individuals was simply a form of memorization. We know very little about teaching in Beguine communities and that mostly from opponents, but we also know very little about the orthodox cathedral schools of Gottfried’s time, or for that matter of any prior time. As Stephen Jaeger puts it, “The obscurity of the cathedral schools is hard to dispel given the dearth of sources” (1994, 2). It must have been in such a school that Gottfried acquired his learning, for “one must bear in mind that the cathedral chapter [in Strasbourg] had for centuries maintained a school and supported a library” (“on n’oublie pas que, depuis des siècles, le chapitre cathédrale [of Strasbourg] entretenait une école et disposait d’une bibliothèque,” Livet and Rapp, II, 71), although what he learned there, his knowledge of the classics, of the law, and so forth, can only be deduced from his work. Such schools were originally intended to provide the empire with well-trained and enthusiastic civil servants, but church and state had by Gottfried’s time drifted so far apart that this was no longer necessary. The type of instruction had not, however, varied greatly, and the aim was still, as Stephen Jaeger commented in reference to Herbert of Bosham’s life of Thomas Beckett, to produce men who would be pleasing to “both God and the world” (1994, 298): “what began as applied educational goals developed into social values” (329). In such schools the classics were widely read and also appreciated, that is, they were not simply read as exercises in the study of Latin, and great emphasis was laid not only on the ability to read Latin, but also on the ability to compose poetry in that language. There was consequently an intermingling of classical mythology and Christian beliefs that strikes us now as rather strange. A case in point, and one that has some relevance to Gottfried’s studies, is the Anticlaudianus (1181–84) of Alan of Lille. In his depiction of the making of the perfect man, Alan describes how Prudence prepares a chariot made of the trivium and the quadrivium and drawn by five horses (the senses). In this she ascends to the heavens, first with the aid of theology, and later, since theology is not enough, with the aid of the essential requirement of faith. Throughout this lengthy and at times complicated work Alan makes such continual reference to figures from classical mythology that one occasionally has

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the feeling that the classical gods are as real to him as the Christian God. The detailed argument of this work is not important here, but it is worth noting that the amalgamation of the body and the soul of the perfect man is accomplished by Concord with the assistance of arithmetic and music, and that Alan emphasizes, as did so many others before him, the significance of deportment and dress, for the outward appearance, the manner of dressing, the gait, and so forth, are representative of the inner state of mind: “Modesty [. . .] outlines the correct posture for his head [. . .] Constancy [. . .] rejects an excessively grave gait [. . .] She warns the man not to stoop to thrusting forth base arms like a buffoon [. . .] She secures his gait with regular tread [. . .]” (16–17) etc. While it is not to be assumed that Gottfried knew this or any similar work, it must be assumed that his schooling involved a thorough grounding in the seven liberal arts and an appreciation above all of rhetoric, something on which Alan of Lille spends a good deal of time. Gottfried also, in a sense, depicts the making of a “perfect” man and a “perfect” woman, both of whom are pleasing to God and the world, and both the education of Isolde by Tristan and her subsequent formal appearance at court have distinct echoes of the kind of education provided at cathedral schools, no matter how Gottfried has “secularized” this training. One rather puzzling feature of Gottfried’s learning is his knowledge of recent vernacular literature, something he would surely not have encountered in a cathedral school. He was clearly thoroughly versed in classical literature, and given the situation of Strasbourg, it is not surprising that he would have learned French and come in contact with contemporary vernacular literature in that language, especially the works of the troubadours, but we know very little, unfortunately, of the availability of German vernacular literature at the time (for a recent treatment of literary culture in Strasbourg from the Middle Ages to the present, see the study by Schedl). What literary activity there was, was perhaps less in Strasbourg than in Hagenau, where two hundred years later manuscripts of Middle High German literature, including Gottfried’s work, were still being copied and offered for sale in Diepold Lauber’s scriptorium. Even in Strasbourg, the activity of the best-known figure after Gottfried, namely, Hesse, was as an editor and reviser of existing works, including Gottfried’s, rather than as a creative writer. In Gottfried’s time no one would have known of the earliest vernacular literature by Otfried von Weissenburg, but the Latin works of early female mystics, such as Elisabeth von Schönau (1129–64) and Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) would surely have been known, probably also the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg, who died in 1195.

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There is no evidence, however, of vernacular works in Strasbourg in Gottfried’s time, other, that is, than the primitive dramatizations in church of religious events (see the references collected by Martin Vogeleis, 11) and the performances of traveling joculatores. These latter seemed to have caused trouble for, or at least have been unpopular with, the city authorities, since citizens were forbidden by the second city statute from having more than four such people at wedding festivities, and if one turned up for a meal unbidden, the householder was fined ten sols. This rule suggests that the increase in disposable income was not at that time accompanied by an increased interest in literature and the arts. There seems, in other words, to have been no strong literary tradition in Strasbourg or even in the province of Alsace, not, that is, in the vernacular. There were of course many minor works in Latin that might be called literary, for example, orders of service or hymns, and references to these have been collected by Vogeleis. Despite the political and commercial significance of Strasbourg and its growing wealth, the vernacular literary tradition remained meager, at least as far as we know. The problem is that we cannot be sure that there were not writers of whom no information has been passed down to us, and, by the same token, we cannot know whether Gottfried listed in his literary excursus all the poets of whom he knew or whether he was being deliberately selective, choosing only those of whom he approved or, in the case of the unnamed Wolfram von Eschenbach, had reason to disapprove. The female mystics mentioned above were all in the Rhine area, and there was also a flourishing “Rhenish” school of vernacular poetry, of which Friedrich von Hausen was the best known representative. However, none of these Rhenish poets, with the exception of Bligger von Steinach, is mentioned by Gottfried, and Bligger is cited by Gottfried not as a minnesinger, but as having written an epic work that has not come down to us. This was presumably a chivalric epic and not a beast epic, such as the recent version of Renard the Fox, or a version of classical literature, none of which are mentioned by Gottfried. In fact, all the writers mentioned by Gottfried, with the exception of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide, are from the Rhine area, but around the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century the most intense literary activity, particularly in the production of lyric poetry, was occurring further to the east, in Vienna. Reinmar is cited by Gottfried (and by no one else) as being from Hagenau, but he had moved to Vienna, and so had Walther von der Vogelweide. Strasbourg in Gottfried’s lifetime was prosperous, and its prosperity was the result not only of its location, but also, in part, of the relation-

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ship of its citizens to the emperor and their ability to free themselves from the tutelage of the bishop. But it remained an ecclesiastical city, and the educational facilities from which Gottfried profited were very much those of an ecclesiastical, rather than a secular court. His attitude was conditioned on the one hand by his bourgeois background, but on the other by his classical training. The newly wealthy citizens of Strasbourg were not, however, concerned with questions of rhetoric and style, but with making money and keeping order in the city. The chief concern of all at that time, when it came to keeping order, was to control the “freethinkers” of the day, to ensure that Strasbourg’s commercial prosperity was not endangered by the new ideas generated by Beguines and others, ideas that conflicted directly with the developing consciousness of the uses of capital. Although Gottfried set himself, as I said above, into the context of a literary tradition, he was surrounded in his day not by writers in the vernacular, but on the one hand by a growing materialistic “middle class,” and on the other by an intense interest in religious questions, above all in the freedom to question established dogmas.

Works Cited or Consulted Primary Sources Alanus, ab insulis. Anticlaudianus or the Good and Perfect Man. Translation and commentary by James J. Sheridan. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973. Les annales et la chronique des Dominicains de Colmar. Trans. C. Gérard and J. Liblin. Colmar: Decker, 1854. Die Chroniken der oberrheinischen Städte: Straßburg. 2 vols. Ed. E. Hegel. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1870. Ermoldus nigellus (780–845); Ermold le noir. Lobgedicht auf Kaiser Ludwig und Elegien an König Pippin. Trans. Th. G. Pfund. Berlin: Besser, 1856. Ermoldus nigellus (780–845); Ermold le noir. Poème sur Louis le pieux et épitres au roi Pepin. Trans. Edmond Faral. Paris: Les belles lettres, 1952, 1964. Günther von Pairis. Ligurinus: Ein Lied auf den Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa. Sigmaringendorf: Glock & Lutz, 1995. Otto von Freising. The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa. Translated and annotated with an introduction by Charles Christopher Mierow, with the collaboration of Richard Emery. New York: W. W. Norton, 1953. Reprint 1966.

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Secondary Sources Achtnich, Karl (1910). Der Bürgerstand in Straßburg bis zur Mitte des XIII. Jahrhunderts Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer. Bender, Ernst (1914). Weinhandel und Wirtsgewerbe im mittelalterlichen Straßburg. Strasbourg: Heitz. Bock, Hildegard (1993). Literaturreisen: Straßburg und das Elsaß. Stuttgart: Klett. Borries, Emil von (1909). Geschichte der Stadt Straßburg. Strasbourg: Trübner. Buttner, Heinrich (1931). Geschichte des Elsaß. Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt. Cahn, Julius (1895). Münz- und Geldgeschichte der im Großherzogtum Baden vereinigten Gebiete. Heidelberg: Winter. Reprint 1911. Dollinger, Philippe (1977). Histoire de l’Alsace. Genève: Lamot. Dreyfus, François G. (1979). Histoire de l’Alsace. Paris: Hachette. Elm, Kaspar, ed. (1981). Stellung und Wirksamkeit der Bettelorden in der städtischen Gesellschaft. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Erbstösser, Martin, and Ernst Werner (1960). Ideologische Probleme des mittelalterlichen Plebejertums. Die freigeistige Häresie und ihre sozialen Wurzeln. Berlin: Akademie. Foltz, Max (1899). Beiträge zur Geschichte des Patriziats. Marburg: Foltz. Freed, John B. (1977). The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge MA: Medieval Academy of America. Gley, Werner (1932). Die Entwicklung der Kulturlandschaft im Elsass bis zur Einflußnahme Frankreichs. Frankfurt am Main: Elsass-Lothringen Institut. Grasser, Jean-Paul (1998). Une histoire de l’Alsace. N.p., Gisserot. Greven, Joseph (1912). Die Anfänge der Beginen. Münster: Aschendorff. Grübel, Isabel (1987). Bettelorden und Frauenfrömmigkeit im 13. Jahrhundert: Das Verhältnis der Mendikanten zu Nonnenklostern und Beginen, am Beispiel Straßburg und Basel. Munich: Tuduv. Grundmann, Herbert (1995). Religious Movements in the Middle Ages. Trans. Steven Rowan. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P. Hecker, Norbert (1981). Bettelorden und Bürgertum. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Hoeppfner, Ernest (1936). L’Alsace littéraire à travers l’histoire. Strasbourg: Librairie de la mesange. Hofmann, Albert von (1930). Das deutsche Land und die deutsche Geschichte im Mittelalter. 3 vols. Stuttgart/Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Horn, Hermann (1868). Anfänge der Straßburger Stadtverfassung nach dem ältesten Stadtrecht dargestellt. Rostock: Udler.

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Jaeger, C. Stephen (1994). The Envy of Angels:. Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe 950–1200. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Jaeger, C. Stephen (1977). Medieval Humanism in Gottfried von Strassburg’s ‘Tristan und Isolde.’ Heidelberg: Winter. Klewitz, Hans Walther (1929). Geschichte der Ministerialität in Elsaß bis zum Ende des Interregnums. Frankfurt am Main: Elsaß-Lothringen Institut. Koch, Gottfried (1962). Frauenfrage und Ketzertum im Mittelalter: Die Frauenfrage im Rahmen des Katharismus und des Waldensertums und ihre sozialen Wurzeln. Berlin: Akademie. Kruse, Ernst (1884). Verfassungsgeschichte der Stadt Straßburg, besonders im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert. Trier: Lintz. Lévy, Paul (1929). Histoire linguistique d’Alsace et de Lorraine. Paris: Les belles lettres. Livet, Georges, and F. Rapp (1980–82 and 1987). Histoire de Strasbourg des origines à nos jours, 4 vols. Strasbourg: DNA et Istra. Lorenz, Ottokar, and Wilhelm Scherer (1872). Geschichte des Elsasses von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Berlin: Weidmann. McDonnell, Ernest William (1969). The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene. New York: Octagon, Rutgers UP. Nagel, Hermann G. (1916). Die Entstehung der Strassburger Stadtverfassung. Strasbourg: Heitz. Perillon, Marie-Christine (1980). Histoire de la ville de Strasbourg. Roanne: Horvath. Pfleger, Luzian (1944). Kirchengeschichte der Stadt Strassburg im Mittelalter. Kolmar: Alsatia. Philipps, Dayton (1941). Beguines in Medieval Strasburg: A Study of the Social Aspect. Stanford University: Edwards. Rapp, Alfred (1940). Reichstadt am Oberrhein. Strasbourg: Oberrheinischer Gauverlag. Reuss, Rodolphe (1922). Histoire de Strasbourg depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Fischbacher. Scaglione, Aldo (1991). Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P. Schedl, Susanne (1995). “Strassburg als Literaturstadt: Ein Grundriss in literarhistorischen Längsschnitten (1170–1990).” Dissertation. Munich. Sittler, Lucien (1973). L’Alsace, terre d’histoire. Colmar: Editions Alsatia.

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Société savante de l’Alsace et des régions de l’Est (1962). Les lettres en Alsace. Strasbourg: Librairie Ista. Spach, Louis Adolphe (1862). Etudes sur quelques poètes alsaciens du Moyen-Age, du 16me et du 17me siècle. Strasbourg: Silberman. Stoeckicht, Otto (1942). Sprache, Landschaft und Geschichte des Elsaß. Marburg: Elwert. Reprint Sandig, 1974. Strobel, Adam Walther (1841–49). Vaterländische Geschichte des Elsasses. 6 vols. Strasbourg: Schmidt & Gruckner. Marthelot, Pierre, et al. (1966). Visages de l’Alsace [Paris]: Horizons de la France = Les Nouvelles provinciales 14. Vogeleis, Martin (1911). Quellen und Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters in Elsaß 500–1800. Strasbourg: Leroux. Vogler, Bernard (1997). Histoire économique de l’Alsace; croissance, crises, innovations, vingt siècles de développement régional. Strasbourg: Nuée bleue. Weber, Gottfried (1953). Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan und die Krise des hochmittelalterlichen Weltbildes um 1200. Stuttgart: Metzler. Winter, Georg (1878). Geschichte des Rathes in Straßburg von seinen ersten Spuren bis zum Statut von 1263. Breslau: Koebner.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Tristan plays for Marke. A scene from the Tristan story as depicted on the Chertsey Tiles.

II. Figures, Themes, Episodes

Gottfried’s Adaptation of the Story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur Danielle Buschinger

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of his romance, Gottfried von Strassburg tells the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, Tristan’s parents. Riwalin, ruler over Parmenie and vassal of Morgan, undertakes an educational journey to the court of King Marke in Cornwall, where he falls in love with Marke’s sister Blanscheflur. After he is severely wounded, Blanscheflur goes to him in disguise, the two consummate their love, and Blanscheflur conceives Tristan. Subsequently Riwalin secretly returns with Blanscheflur to Parmenie, where the two marry at the altar. In the course of a campaign against his overlord Morgan, Riwalin is killed, and news of his fate leads to the premature birth of Tristan and to the death of his mother Blanscheflur. Already in Eilhart’s Tristrant, which I believe is based on the same source as the romance of Thomas, there had been a short story about the parents of Tristan preceding the main story. For this reason one may assume that the story about the parents was part of the original Tristan story upon which all the later Tristan romances were more or less loosely based (see Buschinger 1995, 51). Thomas had already expanded this story about the parents, and it is clear that Gottfried von Strassburg — whose Tristan was based on Thomas’s romance — and possibly even Thomas before him shaped the story of the parents in a manner that anticipates that of Tristan and Isolde (see Ruh 231). In this assessment of the relationship of the story about the parents to the main story about Tristan and Isolde, I will show how the earlier story took shape and was lengthened as many elements of the story about Tristan and Isolde were incorporated into it. I will focus on a few important points of correspondence between the story of Tristan’s parents and the later story of Tristan and Isolde, particularly on the depiction of love (for detailed studies of the Riwalin-Blanscheflur story, see Nowé, Poag, and Okken), and in the comparison of the different versions of the Tristan story I will use the Tristrams saga of Friar Robert as representative of the missing text of Thomas. T THE BEGINNING

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The first important correspondence between the story of Tristan’s parents and the later one of Tristan and Isolde involves the May festival at Marke’s court, which is celebrated shortly after Riwalin’s arrival there, for this festival has been influenced by the later depiction of Tristan and Isolde’s life in the Love Grotto. The episode of the May festival was already in Gottfried’s source, but Gottfried has added more to the depiction of nature in springtime and has separated this from the depiction of court society and the actual preparation of the festival (compare the Tristrams saga, chapter 3). Gottfried employs the rhetorical locus amoenus in his depiction of a suitably lovely setting for the first meeting between Riwalin and Blanscheflur and for the beginning of their love. To be sure, the landscape of the sumerouwe (554ff.) in which the parents of Tristan first meet is much enhanced in the locus amoenus of the Love Grotto. The aspect of sound, which was not present in the Tristrams saga, is underscored both in the May festival and in the wilderness of the Love Grotto, but the motif of birds singing is acoustically more varied in the later episode. While only diu saelege nahtegal (580) is mentioned by name in the depiction of the festival, the scene at the Love Grotto culminates in the polyphony of numerous different forest birds, or waltvogelîn: nahtegal, troschel, merlîn, zîse, galander (nightingale, thrush, blackbird, finch, lark; 16887–97). In both episodes, optical components embellish the acoustic ones (which for the most part are also in Friar Robert’s version). The episode of the spring festival culminates in the description of the beauty of the landscape (552ff.): meadow, forest birds, resplendent flowers, herbs, blossoming trees, shadows, sunshine, a linden tree by a spring, a light breeze, grass bedecked by dew (552ff.). In the Love Grotto episode the same elements return, but again with greater intensity (see 16730ff. and 16881ff.). In the episode depicting the May festival, the love of Riwalin and Blanscheflur has only begun to awaken, whereas in the Love Grotto, surrounded by its paradisal landscape, the high festival of love is being celebrated. Because Thomas reduced the roughness of the forest as likely depicted in the Estoire (to the extent that this can be conjectured on the basis of the romances of Eilhart and Béroul), one can probably assume that it was he who first placed both episodes, the May festival and the forest life of the lovers Tristan and Isolde, in a relationship of correspondence to one another, and that Gottfried then added his own embellishments. Although the awakening of love is described with conventional rhetorical language, it is nevertheless obvious that Gottfried draws parallels between the love of Riwalin and Blanscheflur and that of Tristan and Isolde (probably in a free adaptation of Thomas, for much of this is in

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the Tristrams saga — see Buschinger 1998, 35). The image of the lime twig with which birds are caught is used in both love stories (see 841ff. and 11792ff.): just as the bird, which sits on the lime twig, remains stuck when it wishes to fly away, so too do lovers, as they begin to be overwhelmed by their passion, wish immediately to return to their freedom. But the sweetness of love pulls them back, and they can never again liberate themselves. Another important correspondence pertains to the effects of love. When the lovers first experience Minne, their lives and identities are completely transformed: “Owê got hêrre, wie leb ich! / wie unde waz ist mir geschehen?” (“Alas, Lord God, what a life I lead! Whatever has happened to me?”; 982f.). This question is posed by Blanscheflur in the course of a monologue, which in Thomas’s romance (as in Robert’s Tristrams saga) probably consists of three parts and is spoken by Blanscheflur as she watches the tournament. Thomas probably took this monologue from the later Tristan section of his source, where it was spoken by Isolde (the love monologue of Isolde in Eilhart’s Tristant shows numerous similarities to that of Blanscheflur in the Tristrams saga; see Buschinger 1998, 35). Blanscheflur observes Riwalin at the tournament, is very impressed by him, and falls in love, but because this is the first time she has experienced such feelings, she is not fully conscious of her love. Gottfried puts the three different parts as he probably found them in Thomas’s romance together in a single monologue and develops its psychological aspect. As he does so he makes the corresponding text longer and transforms it fundamentally. Blanscheflur, feeling strange to herself and the world, dissects her soul and her feelings. At the sight of Riwalin love has awoken within her, and the passion has so gripped her heart that her entire being is completely transformed and she gradually becomes aware that she is in love (981–1076). In this context Gottfried also devotes a passages to the depiction of the effects of love on Riwalin: he feels alienated from himself and his former life, everything he does is strangely insubstantial; he loses his faculty of judgement, as if bewitched. Riwalin no longer laughs as earlier, he is quiet and inwardly agitated. In the Tristrams saga there is no comparably lengthy passage, but rather only a short narratorial commentary, so Gottfried’s presentation of Riwalin here — reminiscent of Dante’s “incipit vita nova” — seems to be an independent embellishment: ein niuwe leben wart ime gegeben: er verwandelte dâ mite al sîne sinne und sîne site und wart mitalle ein ander man (938–41)

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(A new life was given him; so that he changed his whole cast of mind and became quite a different man. [Translations of Gottfried are based on Hatto.])

For the depiction of Riwalin’s feelings Gottfried has most likely taken corresponding elements from the extended monologue of Blanscheflur, but one observes later in the romance that the same feelings also animate Tristan and Isolde, whose lives have been completely disrupted by love, as Tristan underscores at one point: “ir eine und iuwer minne ir habet mir mîne sinne gâr verkêret unde benomen, ich bin ûzer wege komen sô starke und alsô sêre in erhol mich niemer mêre.” (12017–22) (“You and you alone and the passion you inspire have turned my wits and robbed me of my reason! I have gone astray so utterly that I shall never find my way again!”)

On the basis of the similarities in these passages from the two love stories, one may assume that Thomas and Gottfried embellished in varying degrees the description of the way love first comes to Riwalin and Blanscheflur by employing elements from the later story of Tristan and Isolde. As soon as Blanscheflur has recognized and accepted her love, she gives herself over to it completely. She can no longer turn her eyes away from Riwalin and she sends him furtive, loving glances that fire his passion. He soon returns her glances, and their mutual love grows stronger. Blanscheflur has already metaphorically hinted at her love when she takes the first step (see 747ff.). She has shown the beloved man that she loves him, and she actively arouses his amorous interest in her. Isolde will later proceed the same way with Tristan (11935–63). When it comes to attaching the bonds of love, the female partner appears to be more active (something that is reminiscent of Herzeloyde’s relationship to Gahmuret in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival). Like Riwalin, Tristan initially does not understand what Isolde means. Only by means of a play on the word lameir (which Gottfried doubtless took from his source, for this was contained in the recently discovered Carlisle fragment of Thomas’s romance), a word which, when spoken, suggests sea and bitterness as well as love, can she open Tristan’s eyes: “lameir’ sprach sî ‘daz ist mîn nôt, / lameir daz swaeret mir den muot. / lameir ist, daz mir leide tuot” (“La-

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meir is what distresses me, it is lameir that so oppresses me, lameir that pains me so”; 11986ff.). When love has to be protected or defended, it is again typically the woman who takes the initiative. It is Blanscheflur, for example, who resolves not to accept fate but rather to shape it when she goes to the wounded Riwalin so that their love can be consummated. She thinks of the nurse who was in charge of her upbringing and takes her into her confidence. This nurse here serves the same function for Blanscheflur in this episode that Brangaene later serves for Isolde. Together these two women come up with a plan that enables Blanscheflur to lie with the wounded Riwalin. Isolde later takes the initiative in a similar way when the problem is concealing the loss of her virginity from King Marke, by asking Blanscheflur to be the first to lie with Marke during her wedding night (12435ff.). As soon as love has come into the hearts of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, they become one: si haeten sich wol under in zwein / einmüeteclîche und rehte in ein / mit ir gedanken undernomen (Between them they had in their minds but one delight and one desire; 821ff.). The employment of mystical language in this depiction of love is consistent with other passages in Gottfried’s romance. Elsewhere, for example in the prologue and in the stories of Riwalin and Blanscheflur and Tristan and Isolde, the unio of the lovers is expressed stylistically by means of chiasmus, the alternating syntactic interlocking of names, which suggests that the lovers do not exist as separate individuals, but rather as a unity. Besides this syntactic interlocking of names, the terms beide, vil gemeine, and mit ein ander seal the indissoluble union of the lovers: beide eine liebe und eine ger. sus was er sî und sî was er. er was ir und sî was sîn. dâ Blanscheflûr, dâ Riwalîn, dâ Riwalîn, dâ Blanscheflûr, dâ beide, dâ lêal amûr. ir leben was vil gemeine dô, sî wâren mit ein ander vrô. (1357–64; emphasis added) (One delight and one desire. Thus he was she, and she was he. He was hers and she was his. There Blancheflor, there Rivalin! There Rivalin, there Blancheflor! There both, and their true love! Their life was now intimately shared. They were happy with each other. [emphasis added])

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The union of Tristan and Isolde is later described in a similar way after the lovers have revealed their feelings for each other after drinking the love potion: Dô die gelieben under in beide erkanden einen sin, ein herze und einen willen, ez begunde in beidiu stillen und offenen ir ungemach. ietwederez sach unde sprach daz ander beltlîcher an: der man die maget, diu maget den man. (12029–36; emphasis added) (When the two lovers both perceived that they had one mind, one heart, and but a single will between them, this knowledge began to assuage their pain and yet bring it to the surface. Each looked at the other and spoke with ever greater daring, the man to the maid, the maid to the man. [emphasis added])

Besides these mystical elements in the depiction of love, the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur and that of Tristan and Isolde also share the depiction of love and of lovers as physicians. On the advice of the aforementioned nurse, Blanscheflur disguises herself as a physician before she is taken to where Riwalin lies wounded. The consummation of love ensues, and in an intimate embrace Tristan is conceived. Riwalin seems close to death, but fate decrees differently: wan daz im got half ûz der nôt, / sône kunde er niemer sîn genesen: / sus genas er, wan ez solte wesen (But for God’s helping him from this dire pass he could never have lived; yet he did live, for so it was to be; 1328ff.). Against all expectations the young hero recovers. He has quite literally been healed by love, and Banscheflur is explicitly designated as the physician, the arzaetinne (1278), who has brought the needed medication to the wounded man. This motif of love as physician probably belongs to Gottfried, for in the Tristrams saga Riwalin’s wound is healed by a real physician after the clandestine meeting with Blanscheflur has already occurred. In Gottfried’s romance it is love that is the physician and no further medical assistance is necessary. Although the motif of love as physician can be found with Ovid, Gottfried’s use of the theme, as Kurt Ruh has observed, has a sacramental significance. It can be seen as analogous to the Eucharist, in which Christ gives himself to humanity in order to take away sin (Ruh observes that sin as illness is a very popular theme in the contemporary sermon literature; see Ruh 239). One is reminded in this

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context of the bread metaphor at the end of the prologue, which is clearly shaped by Eucharistic imagery. Gottfried has availed himself of analogies to Christianity with the goal of glorifying his characters, but one must concur with Ruh that Gottfried does not thereby intend to replace religion with a gospel of love (see Ruh 249ff.). In the story of Tristan and Isolde, the motif of love as physician is also employed when their love is first consummated at sea between Dublin and Cornwall: nu kam geslichen lîse zuo der kemenâten în ir amîs unde ir arzâtin, Tristan und diu Minne. Minne diu arzatinne si vuorte ze handen ir siechen Tristanden. ouch vant s’Îsôte ir siechen dâ. (12160–67) (There came stealing into her cabin her lover and her physician — Tristan and Love. Love the physician led Tristan, her sick one, by the hand: and there, too, she found her other patient, Isolde.)

The analogy to the sacrament of the Eucharist is clearer in this case, as the lovers are led by love to give themselves to one another as medicine: die siechen beide nam si sâ / und gab in ir, im sîe / ein ander z’arzatîe (She [Love] quickly took both sufferers and gave him to her, her to him, to be each other’s remedy; 12168ff.). Again, it seems likely that Gottfried employed a less elaborate version of this motif in the earlier story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur and thus achieved an intensifying effect when the motif appeared again in a more elaborate form in the story of Tristan and Isolde. In another significant correspondence between the stories of the parents and the story of Tristan, Gottfried shapes his depiction of the consummation of Riwalin and Blanscheflur’s love so that it signals the final love-death of Tristan and Isolde (even if his own romance fragment was not able to include this). The love-death had been depicted by Thomas in this way:

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Embrace le, si s’estent, Baise la buche e la face E molt estreit a li l’enbrace, Cors a cors, buche a buche estent, Sun espirit a itant rent, E murt dejuste liu issi Pur la dolur de sun ami. 2 (Sneyd Ms., lines 809–15, ed. Wind) (She took him in her arms, covered his mouth and face with kisses and embraced him passionately. As she lay there next to him, body touching body, mouth touching mouth, she gave up her spirit and died out of pain for her beloved. [Translations of the French texts are my own.])

In the episode depicting Blanscheflur’s incognito visit to the wounded Riwalin, the union of the lovers is depicted by Gottfried in a very similar way: und leite Riwalîne ir wange an daz sîne, biz daz ir aber dô beide von liebe und ouch von leide ir lîbes craft dâ von gesweich [. . .] sus lac si in der unmaht und âne sinne lange, ir wange an sînem wange, gelîche als ob si waere tôt. (1293–97, 1304–7) (She laid her cheek on Rivalin’s, till for joy but also for sorrow her strength deserted her body [. . .] Thus she lay motionless in a swoon for a long time, her cheek on his cheek, as though she were dead.)

The consummation of love in Gottfried’s story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur is overshadowed by death, not only because the language corresponds to that used by Thomas to depict the love-death of Tristan and Isolde, but also because Gottfried goes on to suggest that the love that causes Blanscheflur’s yearning will also bring her death (1335). Gottfried thus anticipates Blanscheflur’s fate, and underscores a major theme of his romance, which is that love is inextricably bound to suffering. Upon the death of Blanscheflur, Gottfried changes the text of his source substantially. In the Tristrams saga, and therefore probably with Thomas, Blanscheflur holds a long monologue, in which she gives expression to the pain love causes her. Gottfried’s text suggests that he has

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a strong dislike for ostentatious suffering. With Gottfried, the news of Riwalin’s death affects her like a mortal wound. Shock and desperation turn her to stone (1730ff.), but she does not lament or cry. For four days she is racked with contractions; then she gives birth to a son in an agonizing labor before dying without shedding a single tear. It is possible that Gottfried here is thinking of the desperation of Isolde’s death that one finds in the romance of Thomas: Treque Ysolt la novele ot, / De dolur ne puet suner un mot (when Isolde heard these words, pain allowed not a single word to pass over her lips; Douce Ms., line 1799, ed. Wind). The similarities in the portrayal of these two figures in these important episodes suggest that Blanscheflur’s death can be understood as a prefiguration of Isolde’s. The elaboration of the story of Tristan’s parents served to make it effectively anticipate the story of Tristan and Isolde, but antithetical aspects are also present. Riwalin, for example, is initially depicted as the exemplary model of the courtly knight, lacking none of the distinguishing characteristics that a ruler should have. Nevertheless, Gottfried’s praise soon ebbs, and we learn that Riwalin has characteristics that make him far from perfect. He is arrogant, imprudent and careless, and unable to restrain himself. Gottfried tells us that Riwalin is, in this respect, like all youths (301ff.), but he is nevertheless quite different from his son Tristan, who generally proceeds with utmost care and calculation. In the episode depicting Tristan’s abduction by the Norwegian merchants, after Tristan has been released on the Cornish coast, the initial reaction of fear is that of an ordinary child (2487ff.). But Tristan does not lose his composure, and he eventually comes to grips with the unknown and potentially dangerous environment in which he finds himself by means of his considerable intellectual abilities. Tristan is here distinguished by his ability to reflect, an ability that is uncommon in a fourteen-year-old boy. Tristan’s manner of thinking in this episode and later ones is strategic. He almost never leaves anything to chance, but invariably acts according to a carefully and intelligently crafted plan. He is thus able to adapt himself to dangerous situations and to subvert the forces in them that threaten to destroy him. Tristan masters life with his own strength and ability and shows himself to be more than equal to the difficult situations in which he finds himself. Given these characteristics of the Tristan figure as developed by Gottfried, one can venture the assumption that the figure of Riwalin, despite similarities to Tristan in matters of love, has been developed to some extent as an antitype of Tristan. In the same way, the figure of Blanscheflur was probably conceived to some extent as an antitype of Isolde. In contrast to Isolde, who breaks

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the little bell of the marvelous dog Petitcru — a magical source of solace for her — so that she can give herself over to the same suffering her absent lover is feeling, Blanscheflur passionately curses the love that has caused her nothing but suffering: “minne, al der werlde unsaelekeit!” (“Love, affliction of all the world”; 1400). She desperately asks herself what value the world finds in love, which rewards brief joys with long suffering. Blanscheflur sees love as an inscrutable destructive power (1410–17), and in contrast to Isolde, she does not willingly take love’s suffering upon herself. It is likely that Gottfried added this monologue in order to underscore the difference between her and Isolde (the monologue is not in the Tristrams saga, although Robert might of course have left it out). The antithetical aspects of the two stories go beyond the depiction of the characters. Like Thomas before him, Gottfried did not want the main story to be a mere repetition of the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, and for this reason he also developed the plots antithetically. This is the reason for the main difference between the two stories, the reason why there can be no question of a love potion in the story of Tristan’s parents. Riwalin and Blanscheflur fall in love at first sight, while the process is quite different with Tristan and Isolde. During Tristan’s first stay in Ireland (immediately following the battle with Morold), he gives instruction to Isolde, something that was already present in the source. By means of this instruction Tristan transforms Isolde into something close to a replica of himself, which clearly anticipates their later union in love. Although there is no trace of tender feeling between Tristan and Isolde in the entire episode of instruction, she has clearly made a strong impression on him, as we can see when he describes her beauty in glowing terms at Marke’s court after his return to Cornwall (8253ff.). Later on, with the words of Tristan’s faithful companion Curvenal, Gottfried even suggests that Tristan harbors a deeper affection for her: “ôwî ôwî” sprach er, “Îsôt, ôwî, daz dîn lop und dîn nam ie hin ze Curnewâle kam! was dîn schoene und edelkeit ze solhem schaden ûf geleit einer der saeligesten art, diu ie mit sper versigelt wart, der dû ze wol geviele?” (9650–57; emphasis added)

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(“Alas, alas, Isolde,” he said, “alas that your fame and glory ever came to Cornwall! Was your noble beauty framed for such ruin of one of the finest natures ever confirmed by lance and whom you pleased too well?” [emphasis added])

It is also clear in Thomas’s romance that the love of Tristan and Isolde has already awoken during Tristan’s first stay in Ireland (see Douce Ms. 1219f., ed. Wind). With regard to Isolde, the bath scene clearly shows that she feels a strong admiration — even love — for Tristan, but that she is not permitted to love Tantris because he is only a merchant and not a knight (see 10,000ff.). When it is revealed that Tantris is Tristan, her heart becomes stone and she calls out saeldelôse Îsôt (10092), which strongly suggests that Tristan is something other than a despised enemy. Love is obviously not possible at this time, as Isolde may not love the man who killed her uncle. Nevertheless, Gottfried has clearly prepared the way for their passion, and one way of understanding the love potion is as a symbol of the lovers’ final discovery of one another (see Spiewok 375). Riwalin and Blanscheflur gave Thomas and Gottfried an opportunity to tell a love story without a love potion, and also a story that would have been more in accord with social expectations. Both with Thomas and with Gottfried, Riwalin and Blanscheflur marry, following the advice of Rual li Foitenant, nach cristenlîchem site (1633). By contrast, the love of Tristan and Isolde is adulterous from the start, and according to medieval law such a relationship was a serious crime, punishable by death. The love of Tristan and Isolde is consequently opposed to social values and expectations. As a consequence of this difference, the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur lacks the triangular constellation characteristic of an adulterous love affair. Marke is dangerous for Blanscheflur only as a brother, as we see in the episode depicting the departure of Riwalin and Blanscheflur from Cornwall. Riwalin, who initially manifests irresponsibility and a stunning lack of concern for Blanscheflur’s situation when he begins to plan his departure from Cornwall, comes eventually to sympathize with her situation, after she reveals to him in a lengthy discourse the pain she has endured on his account (1454ff.). At the beginning of this discourse, Blanscheflur reproaches Riwalin for not treating her with greater affection. Subsequently, when she goes into greater detail, her discourse is divided into three parts, in which we observe three different, increasingly painful concerns: she expects a child and suspects she will not survive the birth; she fears her brother Marke, who might have her killed on account of the shame she has brought upon herself; and if

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Marke allows her to live, he will disinherit her, depriving her not only of possessions, but also of her honor. She is thus threatened not only by death from her brother’s hand, but also by the loss of guot and êre, which seems to her worse than death, because it would mean a personally devastating reduction of her social rank. The divulgence of her disgrace would also eventually have political consequences harmful to the reputation of Cornwall and England, the two lands over which her brother rules. All of these dangers she is determined to evade by fleeing: “wan möhte et ich mich versteln! / daz waere nû der beste rât / nâch dem dinge, als ez mir stât” (“If I could steal away in secret! That would be the best way out for me in my position”; 1554f.). For this she needs Riwalin. Despite his initial appearance as an irresponsible weakling, at least Riwalin is not cruel. He immediately empathizes with Blanscheflur, and the two craft the plan according to which she secretly steals away aboard his ship. Riwalin takes leave of Marke, at nightfall he boards his ship, meets his beloved, and the two sail from Cornwall. In Parmenie they are married in a church, and if Riwalin did not die in the feud with Morgan, the two presumably would lead a normal, socially acceptable life with their child. Support for this view is provided by Marke, who sanctions the marriage later on when he accepts Tristan as his nephew and makes him his heir (4290ff.). By contrast, the love of Tristan and Isolde could never be socially accepted. On the ship they endeavor to resist the increasing power of an adulterous love that is in conflict with êre and triuwe (that is, social status and loyalty, the central moral values of society) and with the institution of marriage. Tristan is very aware that he will break faith with Marke and that Isolde will act counter to her betrothal if the two give way to their feeling. Despite this awareness, the two consummate their love and thereby knowingly put themselves beyond social constraints and expectations. In the case of Tristan and Isolde we have a fundamental conflict between love and marriage, in which the poet advocates the purity and depth of individual feeling against the constraining social expectations associated with marriage. He thereby represents a new, more human morality, an aspiration to a happiness that is grounded in individual relationships rather than social conventions. With Riwalin and Blanscheflur there is a solution, but in the case of Tristan and Isolde the way is blocked, because marriage is one of the foundations of feudal society. Consequently, their love can be preserved against society only by means of deception. Their social status, or êre, however seemingly superficial for the lovers, must be preserved so that they may continue to live in a society without which they cannot survive (see 12421ff.).

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Even the life in the Love Grotto is only temporary, a utopian interlude that has no lasting substance and in which they cannot remain forever, because it lacks êre: sine haeten umbe ein bezzer leben / niht eine bône gegeben / wan eine umbe ir êre (They would not have given a button for a better life, save only in respect of their honour; 16875ff.). For the sake of this êre they eventually return to the real world of court society (17696–701), in which their love — however true — inexorably leads to suffering and eventually to death. Herein lies the tragedy of the story of Tristan and Isolde, and also its greatness, for Tristan explicitly embraces this love, even as the equivalent of death. He is prepared to take upon himself a “dying without end.” This death, which he experiences ever anew in the consummation of his love with Isolde, Tristan will live in all eternity: “solte diu wunneclîche Îsôt iemer alsus sî mîn tôt, sô wolte ich gerne werben umbe ein êweclîchez sterben.” (12499–502) (“If my adorable Isolde were to go on being the death of me in this fashion I would woo death everlasting.”)

The effectiveness of passages such as this in the story of Tristan and Isolde depends in no small part on the love story of Tristan’s parents that precedes it. We have seen that in their versions of the story of Tristan’s parents, Thomas and Gottfried employed many of the themes of the story of Tristan and Isolde, but in a less elaborate form, so that the latter — with its great theme of conflict between love and marriage — would be experienced as an intensification of the former. Thomas initiated this approach to the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, and Gottfried further refined the tendencies he found in his predecessor (see Nowé 319), in order to make of his romance a hymn of true love. Translated by Will Hasty

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Works Cited Primary Sources Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans.(German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Gottfried von Strassburg. ‘Tristan’ with the Surviving Fragments of the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. A. T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. The Saga of Tristram and Ísönd. Trans. Paul Schach. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Thomas. Les Fragments du Roman de Tristan. Ed. Bartina H. Wind. Geneva: Droz, 1960. ———. Tristan et Yseut: Les première versions européennes. Ed. Christiane Marchello-Mizia et al. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.

Secondary Sources Buschinger, Danielle (1998). Tristan allemand. Amiens: Sterne. Buschinger, Danielle (1995). Studien zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Greifswald: Reineke-Verlag. Nowé, Johan (1982). “Riwalin und Blanscheflur. Analyse und Interpretation der Vorgeschichte von Gottfrieds Tristan als formaler und thematischer Vorwegnahme der Gesamtdichtung.” Leuvense Bijdragen 71: 265–330. Okken, Lambertus (1996). Kommentar zum Tristan-Roman Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Poag, James F. (1989). “Entzauberte Heilsmuster. Zur Vorgeschichte von Gottfrieds Tristan.” Entzauberung der Welt: Deutsche Literatur 1200–1500. Ed. James F. Poag and Thomas C. Fox. Tübingen: Francke. 19–33. Ruh, Kurt (1980). Höfische Epik des Mittelalters. Vol. 2. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Spiewok, Wolfgang (1984). “Zur Tristan-Rezeption in der mittealalterlichen deutschen Literatur.” Mittelalter-Studien. Ed. W. Spiewok. Göppingen: Kümmerle.

This Drink Will Be the Death of You: Interpreting the Love Potion in Gottfried’s Tristan Sidney M. Johnson

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HY DOES THE LOVE POTION, “this annoyance or irritation (Ärgernis) of Tristan-interpreters,” as Walter Haug calls it (1989, 607), deserve a separate chapter in this volume on Gottfried’s Tristan? Haug answers by making the important point that the love potion by which Tristan and Isolde are inseparably joined to one another is one of the most controversial motifs of Tristan scholarship. Because of its central significance, the interpretation of the work may be determined to a considerable extent by the way it is viewed (1989, 575). But it is no easy task. There have been numerous attempts at interpretation over the years, and scholars have achieved no consensus. Nevertheless, the interpretation of the potion is so important that it cannot be overlooked. Perhaps the simplest way of approaching the problem would be to see first of all what people in the Middle Ages thought about love potions, to look at them historically, and to see whether we can discover how they were made and used. Having done that, we can then look at the history of earlier versions of the Tristan and Isolde story, to see what they tell us about the love potion. After all, Gottfried knew other versions (Tristan 131–73; Hatto, 43 [all citations from Gottfried’s Tristan are from the Krohn edition; all translations are from Hatto]) and generally rejects them in writing his story. What are the differences? Then, finally, we can survey briefly some typical ways in which scholars have viewed the love potion in Gottfried’s Tristan. It will not be possible to go into great detail, for the literature is vast, but perhaps some general tendencies can be presented. We are fortunate to have excellent bibliographical aids for Tristan scholarship, and they should be mentioned prominently here: the studies of Steinhoff, Picozzi, Dietz, and Wetzel.

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Love Potion History Love potions are among the many medical remedies with a long history going back all the way into antiquity and even before that. The distinction between love potions, other medicines, and magical cures is not always clear. In fact, all three treatments, if one may indeed differentiate them, were directed towards ameliorating physical or mental (spiritual) conditions, be they infertility, sleeplessness, wounds received in battle, fever, madness, or other ailments (see the fourth chapter of Kieckhefer). In some cases remedies using similar substances were used for different conditions, so that it is difficult to single out what a medieval love potion was. If one thinks of it as an aphrodisiac, are we thinking of a substance that might be used to induce someone to have sexual intercourse on a given occasion with no lasting effects, or are we talking about something that lasts much longer, perhaps even for a lifetime, as in Gottfried’s Tristan? Obviously, we would be interested in examining the latter here, but in looking at the history of aphrodisiacs, we cannot always be sure just what kind of aphrodisiac is intended. Another element to be considered is the maker of the aphrodisiac or other medical substance. In medieval times, particularly in medieval literature, women are the ones who prepare and administer the remedy. And these women are usually noble ladies, even queens, as is the case in the Tristan stories and in other courtly literature. To be sure, there were medical centers such as Salerno and Montpellier where male physicians held sway, but they are frequently described as ineffective. Perhaps the ancient association of women with magic (witches) influenced the medieval view that women had the secret knowledge to prepare potions and could effect seemingly impossible cures. Nevertheless, we do know something from ancient and medieval pharmacological recipes to give us some indication of the composition of medieval love potions, even though specific details are missing in the literary monuments. The following is based largely on the work of Irmgard Müller (77–83). The effective components of love potions were narcotics like opium, nightshade, and hashish. Mandrake root, a solinaceae like nightshade, was also very popular and was considered to have secret magic powers. Pliny (23–79 A.D.) recommended mandrake wine as a soporific, and Dioscorides (ca. 50 A.D.), the “Father of Botanical Medicine,” knew it as an anesthetic to be used in surgical operations. In the sixteenth century, Machiavelli (1496–1527) used this aphrodisiac in his comedy Mandragola, making use of an old superstition that mandrake root could cure

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infertility in women. The production of opium from the milky juice of unripe poppy seedpods (papaver somniferum) goes as far back as Minoan civilization. It was used in love potion recipes not only for its narcotic effect, but also because the seedpods with their wealth of seeds were considered a symbol of the fertility goddess and therefore suitable as an aphrodisiac. Henbane (hyoscamus niger), also with a long history, was likewise popular for its narcotic properties, but in larger doses it can cause arousal, cramps, hallucinations — including the illusion of flying and of turning into animals! — and loss of consciousness. Monk’s hood or wolf’s-bane (aconitum napellus), when added to henbane, can produce the feeling that hair or feathers are growing out of the skin, possibly accounting for the reputed flying of witches or their turning into animals. Hashish (cannabis sativa indica), known in the orient and brought back to the West by the crusaders, likewise produced illusions and ecstatic states of delight, the enjoyment of which caused users to do anything to repeat the experience. We do not know whether hashish was used in love potions, but Boccaccio (1313–75) in his Decamerone, eighth Novella of the third day, describes a situation in which a deceived husband was transported by hashish to the hereafter and brought back after a while by means of the same drug (see also Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, 2916–3330). Volker Mertens thinks that the love potion in Gottfried’s Tristan was an alcoholic herbal extract, that is, a wine mixed with herbs or a distillate of wine, if one wishes to take literally the reference to the fact that Isolde’s mother had “cooked/boiled” the potion (53–56, esp. note 28). Herbs that may have been used in the mixture could have been anise, white mustard, and above all, vervain, a plant of the verbena family. Other plants that might have been used may be found in Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur (1348–1350) where plants such as celery, white mustard, anise, cress, portulaca, are mentioned as sexual stimulants. Other sources tell us that verbena must be dug up either on the day of the Assumption of Mary or on St. John the Baptist’s Day (Midsummer), and the latter date could be important since it is mentioned in the version commune of the Tristan story as the day the potion was drunk. We can conclude then with Mertens: “Das mittelalterliche Publikum konnte sich durchaus ein reales Mittel unter dem Liebestrank vorstellen, verstand ihn sicher nicht als reines Symbol. Von Liebestränken ist nämlich in katechetischer und medizinischer bzw. naturwissenschaftlicher Literatur wiederholt die Rede” (The medieval public could definitely imagine a real, effective substance in the love potion and did not see it as a pure symbol. There is repeated mention of love potions in

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catechistical literature and the literature of medicine or the natural sciences; 53–54). We shall come back to this statement later in a different context, but it shall suffice here as a summary of the medieval view of love potions.

Prehistory of the Love Potion Before considering Gottfried’s conception of the love potion, we must take a quick look into the history of the Tristan and Isolde material. It is generally agreed that it originally came from Irish or Celtic sagas, but information about these sagas comes only from records that post-date the Tristan versions that we have. In other words, we either go for a backward projection of what the sources for our written records might have been, or we look at what we have extant and try to ascertain how those versions relate to one another and ultimately to Gottfried. Needless to say, we are skipping over a lot of scholarly work on the evolution of the Tristan saga, but it seems advisable to stay with the manuscripts that we have. Most scholars agree that there are two main traditions of the Tristan story that developed over the years, and there is evidence of these in both the Old French and Middle High German versions, with an important contribution from Old Norse literature. The two traditions are generally called the version commune and version courtoise, or, in German terms spielmännische (minstrel) and höfische (courtly) traditions. The difference is based on the attitudes towards love exhibited in each monument, the latter one being more “modern,” “courtly” and up-to-date (if that can be accurately ascertained!) than the former. The precursor of all these versions is usually referred to as the Estoire (Huber 15–24). Therefore it behooves us to look at the love potion and its effects in these other works in order to see just what Gottfried had to work with. The oldest extant version is found in the fragment of Béroul, in only one manuscript of the thirteenth century. However, it is thought to have been composed in the earlier twelfth century, and a German version by Eilhart von Oberge, consisting of earlier fragments and later complete manuscripts, seems to have been based on Béroul. In fact, many scholars think that Eilhart’s version represents the French version commune. A more “courtly” version by Thomas of England was composed after 1155 and may have been dedicated to Henry II of England. It could even have pre-dated Béroul and Eilhart, yet it, too, is fragmentary, and, although Gottfried claims Thomas as his source, the extant Thomas text overlaps very little with Gottfried’s extant text, covering as it does the latter parts

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of the story that are missing from Gottfried’s version. And this is where the Old Norse Tristrams Sage ok Ísöndar by Friar Robert comes in. Friar Robert uses Thomas as his source, and scholars have generally accepted the idea that Robert’s version may be considered to reflect the train of events as told by Thomas. On the other hand, it is not a translation in the modern sense of the word, but rather a retelling with a certain amount of condensation and abbreviation. Scholars have used Robert’s version as Gottfried’s source for material that was not in the fragments of Thomas. However, in 1995, Michael Benskin discovered a new Thomas fragment (publ. 1995) in a cartulary of the abbey of Holm Cultram in Cumberland, England, and it is now preserved in the Cumbria Record Office in Carlisle (see also: Haug, 1997 and 1999c; and Huber, 20–21). This sensational discovery consists of two pieces, originally forming one folio, which had been cut in two. Although a few lines were lost, 154 verses of probably 160 lines are extant. They correspond to lines 11958–12678 in Gottfried. Unfortunately for our purposes here, the fragment comes tantalizingly close to the scene of the drinking of the love potion; it begins just after that momentous event and is concerned with the reactions of the lovers to the effects of the love potion. It tells us very little about the potion itself. Nevertheless, it does show how Gottfried used his source here and will undoubtedly change some scholarly assumptions as a result. A simplified schematic representation of the extant material, not necessarily the chronological or proportional relationships, might look somewhat like this: version commune: --- ¨ Béroul --------- ¨ Eilhart Estoire version courtoise: --- ¨ ... (missing) .... ¨ Thomas ------ ¨| --- ¨ Gottfried ------ ¨ | ... (missing) .... | --- ¨ Robert, Tristrams Saga ------------ ¨|

With this as background, let us now see how the potion is described in Béroul/Eilhart first, and then take up the other versions. The actual drinking of the potion is not described in the Béroul fragment, but there are subsequent references to the potion and its nature. In lines 2131–49 (Lacy, ed.) the narrator states that Tristran and Iseut had been suffering greatly as a result of the potion: “Lords, you have heard about the wine

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they drank, which brought upon them so much torment for a long time; but I do not think you know how long the potion, the herbed wine, was supposed to last. Iseut’s mother, who brewed it, made it last for three years of love [. . .] On the day after the feast of Saint John, the three years of the potion’s effect had come to an end” (translations of Béroul are Lacy’s). Iseut herself describes the ending of the potion’s effect in conversation with the hermit Ogrin: “Never in my life will I again have any sinful desires. Please understand that I am not saying that I regret my relationship with Tristran or that I do not love him properly and honorably, as a friend. But he is entirely free of any carnal desire for me, and I for him” (2323–30). In Eilhart, verses 2264–300, the queen gives the potion to Brangene and instructs her to give the potion to her daughter and the king when they get in bed together. Eilhart then goes on to say: The potion was of such a nature that any man and woman who drank it together could by no means leave each other for four years. However much they might want to refrain, they had to love each other with their whole being as long as they lived, but for four years the passion was so great that they could not part for half a day. Who did not see the other all day became sick, and if they could not speak to each other for a week, they would both die; the drink was so brewed and of such strength. Remember this!” [Buschinger ed.; translations of Eilhart are those of J. W. Thomas.]

Eilhart goes on later to describe the drinking of the potion (Tristrant gives it first to Isalde, then drinks it himself) and the immediate physical effects on the couple (2340–97). Still later, Eilhart notes that the power of love kept Tristrant from leaving Isalde until the power of the potion had waned: “This happened four years after they had drunk it, [. . .] It then seemed to both of them that they should part, and both of them began to suffer greatly from the hardship of the forest: they couldn’t bear it another day and could hardly wait through the night” (4724–40). Turning now to the version courtoise, we note again that the surviving fragments of Thomas’s version do not describe the drinking of the potion, but there is a perplexing reference to it in a scene not covered by Gottfried’s version, the scene in which the mortally wounded Tristran asks Kaherdin to find Ysolt and to get her to come and heal him. He says: “Tell her that she should remember the joys, the happiness that we once had day and night, the great suffering, the great sadness, the joys and the sweetness of our complete and true love, after she had once healed my wound, the potion that we drank together on the sea when we were overwhelmed by it, i.e., love” (2486ff., Bonath ed.; note also

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p.388 ff.). The problem here is that Thomas seems to revert to the older tradition according to which young Ysolt rather than her mother effects the cure of Tristran’s wound. One could almost infer that Tristran and Ysolt had fallen in love before having drunk the love potion. However, this is difficult to substantiate since Thomas goes on to speak of the two being overwhelmed on the sea by the love potion, and the saga version of Friar Robert clearly establishes the potion as the cause of their love in chapter 46 (Schach trans., 71). The Old Norse version of Friar Robert may be seen as a limited surrogate for the missing parts of Thomas’s fragmentary Norman French version. As noted above, Robert seems to have followed the story line rather faithfully, although we cannot really be sure how accurate his version is, as compared to Thomas’s version. At any rate, we find a somewhat more detailed version of the preparation of the love potion by Ísönd’s mother in the Old Norse saga: “The queen prepared a secret potion with minute care and cunning craft from many kinds of blossoms and grasses, and made it so love-exciting that no living man who drank of it could refrain from loving the woman who drank it with him as long as he lived. Then the queen poured this potion into a flasket [. . .]” (chapter 46, 71; Schach trans.). Tristram drinks half the cup, then lets Ísönd drink what was left in the cup. Robert goes on to say: “And now they were both deceived by the potion they had drunk, for the lad had taken the potion by mistake, and thus he caused for both of them a life filled with grief and enduring distress, with carnal desire and constant longing. At once Tristram’s heart turned to Ísönd, and her heart completely to him, with such ardent love that they had no means with which to resist it” (ibid.). Bringvet, of course eventually takes Ísönd’s place in the king’s bed, but after the king awakes and asks for wine to drink, Bringvet cleverly gives him some of the wine the queen had mixed in Ireland. But this time Ísönd does not drink any. After a while, the king turns to Bringvet and sleeps with her, and he does not notice that she is not the same one. Nevertheless, the king and Ísönd seem to get along very well. The king finds her pleasing and shows her much love and joy so that Ísönd becomes very happy. She becomes cheerful and gentle, the king is affectionate, and she is liked and esteemed by all, although she and Tristram are together secretly whenever possible.

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Summary of Characteristics: Béroul/Eilhart:

Thomas/Friar Robert:

1. The potion is called a wine, specifically an herbed wine.

1. The queen makes the potion with minute care and cunning craft from many kinds of blossoms and grasses. 2. Its effect lasts as long as the lovers live. Tristram drinks half the cup, then Ísönd drinks what is left in the cup. 3. On the wedding night, Ísönd wears Bringvet’s clothes and stays close by, listening to hear whether Bringvet will betray her. The king has his pleasure with Bringvet and then falls asleep. 4. When he wakes up, Bringvet gives the king some of the potion that had been brewed in Ireland by the queen (Ísönd had finished it off! — see 2, above), but Ísönd does not drink any this time. Bringvet leaves, and Ísönd gets into bed with the king. 5. The king and Ísönd seem to get along very well. They are both very happy.

2. Iseut’s mother brews it to last 3 years (In Eilhart it is four years, but they must also love each other all their lives, see Ms. D). 3. Tristran and Iseut evidently drink the potion on St. John’s Day (Midsummer) because the effect is lost three St. John’s Days later. At that point they begin to think about leaving the forest. 4. (Eilhart) After drinking the potion they cannot be apart for more than half a day, and whoever did not see the other all day would get sick. If they did not speak to each other for a week they would die. As it is, they become pale and weak during their three years of suffering. 5. Tristrant drinks first, then gives the potion to Isalde to drink. 6. Tristrant arranges that there be no light in the room on the wedding night so that Brangene can be substituted for Isalde in Mark’s bed, and Tristrant and Isalde go to bed together in the same room.

Gottfried: 1.

2.

“The prudent Queen was brewing in a vial a love-drink so subtly devised and prepared, and endowed with such powers that with whomever any man drank it he had to love her above all things, whether he wished to or no, and she loved him alone. They would share one death and one life, one sorrow and one joy” (Hatto 192; italics are mine). The Queen explains to Brangaene that the brew is a love-philter: “When Isolde and Mark have been united in love, make it your

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strict concern to pour out this liquor as wine for them, and see that they drink it all between them” (192). When Tristan calls for something to drink, a young lady-in-waiting brings the little bottle. “No, it held no wine, much as it resembled it. It was their lasting sorrow, their never-ending anguish, of which at last they died!” (194–95). Tristan gives it to Isolde to drink first. She finally does, then gives it back and he drinks it (195). Brangaene enters, realizes what has happened and throws the bottle into the sea, saying to Tristan and Isolde: “This draught will be your death!” (195). Brangaene, disguised as Isolde, gets into bed with Mark, while Isolde worries that Brangaene will betray her. Brangaene leaves the King’s bed and Isolde takes her place. Tristan brings lights and wine (not the potion!), and the King and Isolde drink together (207–8).

From this summary it is quite clear that Gottfried has much more in common with the version courtoise than with the version commune. And that is certainly no wonder, since Gottfried acknowledges Thomas as his source, although he recognizes other versions and even gives them credit for at least being well intended (131–73). Still, says Gottfried, “they did not write according to the authentic version as told by Thomas of Britain, who was a master-romancer and has read the lives of all those princes in books of the Britons and made them known to us” (43). As far as the love potion goes, the outstanding difference is that in the version commune there is a definite term in which the effects of the love potion wear off, three years in Béroul and four in Eilhart, although Eilhart somewhat illogically adds that they had to love each other all their lives, at least in ms. D. The potion serves as an excuse for the adulterous behavior of the lovers. In the version courtoise and in Gottfried it is a life sentence and can only end with the death of the lovers, a fate that Tristan is willing to accept. Some specific differences between Gottfried and the Thomas and Robert versions may be seen in the summary of characteristics above, but for a much more differentiated analysis of the love potion in each poem see the pertinent sections in Anna Keck’s study.

The Love Potion and Its Interpretation Since the love potion, or at least the idea of an overwhelming and eternal love, is so central to any interpretation of the poem, it is difficult to talk about the potion without reference to other aspects of the work. Furthermore, the question of how to interpret the love that the potion

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causes raises another question of interpretation: what is the significance of what has come to be known as “Tristan-love”? And this brings us back to the interpretation of the entire poem. Since we are interested primarily in the potion itself, we shall try to concentrate on that rather than survey the entire history of Tristan scholarship and incidentally make reference to the potion, otherwise we shall exceed the limits of this study. It may therefore be best to begin our consideration of the potion by looking closely at what Gottfried himself has to say about it. After describing the preparation of the potion by Queen Isolde, Gottfried observes: in was ein tôt unde ein leben, / ein triure, ein vröude samet gegeben (1143f.: They, i.e., those who drank it together, would share one death and one life, one sorrow and one joy). Gottfried states clearly that it is not just a love potion, but it rather combines life and death, joy and sorrow. The effect is not primarily sexual, but rather existential, even though sexual pleasure is certainly also intended in the shared joy (Mertens 56). The queen gives Brangaene specific instructions about the potion when she gives it to her for safekeeping: Brangaene is to guard it well and give it to Marke and Isolde immediately after they have consummated their union, a refreshing glass of wine being customary on such occasions: “swenne Îsôt unde Marke in ein der minne komen sîn, sô schenke in disen tranc vür wîn und lâ si’n trinken ûz in ein. [. . .] der tranc der ist von minnen.” (11460–67) (When Isolde and Mark have been united in love, make it your strict concern to pour out this liquor as wine for them. [. . .] This brew is a love-philtre.])

When the journey to Cornwall is interrupted later by a landing on the way, Tristan asks for something to drink, and the potion, instead of wine, is unwittingly brought to him. Thereupon Gottfried states: nein, ezn was niht mit wîne, doch ez ime gelîch wære. ez was diu wernde swære, diu endelôse herzenôt, von der si beide lâgen tôt. (11672–76) (No, it held no wine, much as it resembled it. It was their lasting sorrow, their never-ending anguish, of which at last they died.)

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It is interesting to note that Isolde is the one who drinks from the potion first, whereupon she gives the rest to Tristan. This could well be a reflection of the biblical origin of sin in paradise where Eve gives Adam the apple to eat (Gen. 3: 6) and they both consequently lose their innocence by partaking of the forbidden fruit. For Tristan and Isolde it is the potion that propels them out of their state of innocence into a state of love, the essence of which will be joy and sorrow, life and death (Mertens 57). When Brangaene comes and realizes what has happened, she blames herself and exclaims: “ouwê Tristan unde Îsôt, / diz tranc ist iuwer beider tôt!” (11705f.: “Ah, Tristan and Isolde, this draught will be your death!”). The point of all this is that Gottfried himself sees the potion as the cause of the love between Tristan and Isolde, and he goes on to say: Nu daz diu maget unde der man, Îsôt unde Tristan, den tranc getrunken beide, sâ was ouch der werlde unmuoze dâ, Minne, aller herzen lâgerîn, und sleich z’ir beider herzen în. ê sî’s ie wurden gewar, dô stiez s’ir sigevanen dar und zôch si beide in ir gewalt. si wurden ein und einvalt, die zwei und zwîvalt wâren ê. (11707–18) (Now when the maid and the man, Isolde and Tristan, had drunk the draught, in an instant that arch-disturber of tranquility was there, Love, waylayer of all hearts, and she had stolen in! Before they were aware of it she had planted her victorious standard there and bowed them beneath her yoke. They who were two and divided now became one and united. [195])

Gottfried has spoken of death and life, sorrow and joy, death from neverending anguish, and has had Brangaene predict that the potion would be the death of both of them. There she was obviously thinking of what would surely happen when the adultery is discovered, but she repeats her observation and tells Tristan and Isolde again, after they have discovered their love for one another and become sexually involved, that they have drunk a love potion (12484ff.). It is important to note Tristan’s reply at this point, because many scholars view it as a sign of Tristan’s willingness to accept death as an essential part of his love for Isolde:

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“nu walte es got!” sprach Tristan “ez waere tôt oder leben: ez hât mir sanfte vergeben. ine weiz, wie jener werden sol; dirre tôt der tuot mir wol. solte diu wunneclîche Îsôt iemer alsus sî mîn tôt, sô wolte ich gerne werben umbe ein êweclîches sterben.” (12495–502) (“Come what may,” said Tristan, “whether it be life or death, it has poisoned me most sweetly! I have no idea what the other will be like, but this death suits me well! If my adorable Isolde were to go on being the death of me in this fashion I would woo death everlasting!”)

Volker Mertens thinks that this may be not only an acceptance of the existential unity of life and death, but he suggests that the idea of death and dying in love — la petite mort — may also refer to an orgasm (58). If that is indeed the case, we might say that Tristan may actually be expressing his feelings using a form of the colloquial American expression: “What a way to go!” This would, of course, mean that it is not a serious, perhaps even noble expression of his willingness to die for Isolde, but rather a casual, devil-may-care turn of phrase, tossed off on the spur of the moment. Most scholars however, including Mertens, take Tristan’s remark literally and seriously. L. Peter Johnson, for example, sees the potion as “the effective cause of love between Tristan and Isolde [. . .] the allegorical figure of Love who by military force occupies the hearts of the lovers after they have drunk the potion stands for a dark, elemental, demonic love which exists in the world and which, unexpectedly and irrationally, seizes the hearts of men and women so that they must cleave to each other blindly, as if they had drunk a love potion. Tristan and Isolde have” (1983, 127). But Johnson also believes that Gottfried diminishes the importance of the love potion, first by having both of them “seize responsibility, accepting willingly and gladly the fate that has befallen them” (218). They are not mere puppets, and Johnson points out that Gottfried plays down the potion in a second way by ignoring it: “except for the scene when Brangaene is substituted for Isolde on her wedding night with Mark, the potion is never mentioned again” (ibid.; see also Johnson 1999, 320 ff.). Therefore we can say that Gottfried, in contrast to, say, Eilhart, does not use the love potion as an excuse for the illicit love of Tristan and Isolde. Rather he keeps it as the cause of their love, following the mythi-

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cal tradition, but he has them accept full responsibility for their love and then refuses further comment on the cause of it. This would seem to be a fair assessment of the potion as Gottfried presents it himself, but now we must see how other scholars have interpreted the love potion. A brief survey of nineteenth-century scholarship on Tristan shows little particular interest in the love potion. The initial favorable reception of Gottfried’s work gave way, under the influence of the Lachmann school, to a condemnation of the work as morally reprehensible. Gottfried’s Tristan was inevitably compared to Wolfram’s Parzival and came up short, as a tale of adultery, lacking in spirituality. It was considered blasphemously anti-Christian. On the other hand, many of the same critics praised Gottfried’s artistry in enhancing the immoral foreign material, thereby demonstrating the superiority of German literary achievement over French at a time when German nationalism was a strong political force and fostered strong antipathy towards France. In the latter half of the century interest centered on biographical studies — attempting to create a Gottfried biography from his literary work — and source studies. In the latter case, work that had been started earlier on the mythological background of the Celtic material was continued and interest in the relationship of Gottfried to Thomas and other sources increased. Any specific attention to the love potion itself was probably in connection with the mythological sources. I am indebted to the excellent work of Rosemary Picozzi (106–8) for this brief overview, but see also the study of Dietz. To move on to the twentieth century, Picozzi comments: “Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in 1925 the course of the whole future development of Tristan interpretation was set by Ranke’s analysis of one section in the romance which originated indisputably with Gottfried, namely the allegory of the Minnegrotte” (110). We shall not attempt to trace the influence of Ranke’s work on the ensuing research (on this see Picozzi 109–54 and Dietz 34–46; 89–124). However, the very fact that Ranke stressed the allegorical and symbolic interpretation of the Love Grotto and saw Gottfried’s description of the grotto as parallel to traditional allegorizations of the Christian church opened the door for scholars to see all kinds of symbolism in various aspects of Gottfried’s work, including the love potion. If we consider the love potion to be a symbol, then we must ask the question: a symbol of what? One of the most common answers is to see the potion as a symbol of love that had sprung up and already existed before Tristan and Isolde had drunk the potion, but it was an unrecognized love, and it took the drinking of the potion together to bring

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about the mutual realization of their love. Those who believe this have what they consider evidence to support their views. But the potion may still be viewed as a somewhat different kind of symbol even by those who believe that Tristan and Isolde were in love before drinking the potion. In his definitive study of 1957, H. Furstner (25–32) sees four possibilities: 1) It is a concrete symbol of Love itself, a sign of a complete and basic transformation of the whole person. Tristan and Isolde suddenly become lovers (de Boor, Stolte); 2) The drink is a symbol of their becoming conscious of their love. The potion raises to consciousness that which was already deep in their hearts (see also Schwietering); 3) It is a symbol of the awakening of a demonic sensual love (Weber); and 4) The drink is actually superfluous. It has no genuinely symbolic value. Gottfried kept it out of respect for tradition (Nickel, Naumann, G. Ehrismann, Schneider). What evidence is there to support the idea that Tristan and Isolde were in love, consciously or unconsciously, before drinking the potion? Furstner lists six occasions: (1) Tristan’s lavish praise of Isolde at Marke’s court after he returns from Ireland the first time (8253ff.); (2) after Tristan’s praise of Isolde, Gottfried comments: “Tristan resumed his old life, with a joyful heart. A second life had been given him, he was a man newborn” (8310ff.) — this “second life” is presumably the result of his acquaintance with Isolde; (3) Tristan offers to undertake the wooing trip himself (8545ff.); (4) Tristan’s willingness to fight with the dragon is an indication of his unconscious love and desire to possess Isolde (8902 ff.); (5) Isolde rejects the steward emphatically (9283ff.); and (6) the handsome Tantris in the bath arouses the interest of young Isolde, who is unable to kill him after she discovers that he is the one who had killed her uncle (9992ff.). After rejecting all of this “evidence,” Furstner comments: “Wir müssen wohl zu der Schlußfolgerung gelangen, daß Gottfried alles unterlassen hat, was uns den Eindruck geben könnte, Tristan und Isolde hätten sich schon vor dem Augenblick, da sie den Minnetrank zu sich nahmen, geliebt” (We must indeed come to the conclusion that Gottfried has omitted everything that could give the impression that Tristan and Isolde had already loved one another before the moment when they drank the potion; 34). Writing in the same year as Furstner, Arthur T. Hatto adds another argument to demonstrate that Tristan and Isolde were neither consciously nor unconsciously in love before drinking the potion. Hatto points out the fact that Gottfried refers to Isolde as “Love’s falcon” at the time she appears at court when the steward comes to claim her as his reward:

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suoze gebildet über al, lanc, ûf gewollen unde smal, gestellet in der waete, als sî diu Minne draete ir selber z’einem vederspil. (10893–97) (exquisitely formed in every part, tall, well-moulded, and slender, and shaped in her attire as if Love had formed her to be her own falcon.)

Gottfried continues this falcon image in lines 10947ff. and again in lines 10992ff. Hatto stresses the fact that Isolde is at the height of her radiant youth, fancy-free, and is compared to the free bird on a branch, a raptor whose eyes roam all about looking for prey. This recalls the song in Minnesangs Frühling about the lady, who in happier days was free to make a choice of a lover (37,4). However, after Isolde has drunk the potion she is caught like a bird on a branch covered with lime as a trap: When she recognized the lime that bewitching Love had spread and saw that she was deep in it, she endeavoured to reach dry ground, she strove to be out and away. But the lime kept clinging to her and drew her back down. The lovely woman fought back with might and main, but stuck fast at every step. She was succumbing against her will. She made desperate attempts on many sides, she twisted and turned with hands and feet and immersed them even deeper in the blind sweetness of Love, and of the man. Her limed senses failed to discover any path, bridge, or track that would advance them half a step, half a foot, without Love being there too” (Hatto trans. 196; verses 11791ff.).

The change in the state of “Love’s falcon” in Gottfried’s imagery is striking, and we must assume the same change for Tristan. A love potion, in Hatto’s view, that would be a pure symbol without causing love would be a radical change that Gottfried in principle would never have made. In the 1960s scholars were still trying to cope with the results of the convincing arguments by Furstner and others that Tristan and Isolde were neither consciously nor unconsciously in love before drinking the potion. Walter Johannes Schröder poses two questions: (1) Does Gottfried maintain that the potion causes love?; (2) If yes, what does that mean for the essence of love? Schröder seems to come to a reluctant “yes” in answer to his first question after wondering why Gottfried omitted reference to its genetic function as well as its moral function. His second question actually deals perhaps more with the nature of “Tristanlove” than with the potion itself, a concept that we had hoped to avoid discussing, but which it makes sense to look at here. Schröder observes

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that drinking the potion is the result of a chance accident by a third person; so also is Tristan’s death. The beginning and end of love are determined by fate or chance (28f.). Such a love is without cause, it is a miracle, it simply happens, but it happens to both the lovers and at a specific moment (29). Tristan and Isolde love one another because of their high personal qualities. Tristan loves Isolde because she is Isolde and vice versa. “Das Ich erlebt sich selbst in der Einsamkeit seiner Einmaligkeit und erkennt das Ich des Anderen als ein dem eigenen Ich gleiches. Ich und Du werden austauschbar, da sie sich in ihrem Existenzgrund gleichen” (The I experiences itself in the loneliness of its singularity and recognizes the I of the other as an I equal to its own I. I and You are interchangeable since they resemble each other in the basis of their existence; 32). Schröder concludes that the love potion, as Gottfried describes it, cannot be characterized as a symbol. It is first of all simply a part of the epic action, it is without intention, without cause, purposeless, chance. The action is limited completely to the moment in which it happens; it rests in itself. Is our love potion as symbol no longer a viable interpretation? Peter Ganz, writing in 1970, asserts that the potion, rather than being a symbol, is the cause and the beginning of the love between Tristan and Isolde. He points out that for Gottfried’s contemporaries the power of the potion was all-important. Veldeke, Chrétien, Bernger von Horheim, and Friedrich von Hausen all cite the Tristan potion as an example, and there is historical evidence that belief in magic potions that can turn hate into love was widespread in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, Ganz points to Gottfried himself, who clearly states that the drink is the cause of the love between Tristan and Isolde (see above: 11707–17). “Love” here is a personification, to be sure, but it came from the outside and was not present in their hearts before. The entry of Love has been prepared from the beginning of the poem, according to Ganz. She has created the natiure of the two lovers, and both belong to her before they get to know one another. She endows the coincidental with its exemplar, and her intervention makes visible the rational connections that lie concealed behind the break-in of the irrational in this epic. The above interpretations of both Ganz and Hatto have the advantage of being philologically based, of treating the love potion from a medieval perspective and of avoiding any anachronistic psychological approaches from a modern perspective. W. T. H. Jackson, however, takes a slightly different approach. He sees Isolde’s love for Tristan as a very gradual process developing over a long period of time during which there is no outward sign of love be-

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tween them. “The drinking of the potion is not a ‘mere’ symbol or representation of the act of falling in love and being bound in love forever. It is an act in time which actually took place but which had significance beyond its narrative function [. . .] It indicated that the lovers are aware of being in love [. . . .] They were attracted to each other to an increasing degree and [. . .] Isolde, much more than Tristan, shows the symptoms of affection struggling with reason. Awareness of the other’s presence was growing but not awareness of love” (86). Jackson seems to be temporizing about the love potion as a symbol, but he still comes down on the side of those who see the love developing gradually, although, to his credit, he does admit that there is little evidence in the text to support it. One final article from the 1970s is that by Walter Haug (1972, reprinted in 1989), who takes a different approach. He investigates the various meanings of the word aventiure in general, then in Arthurian literature, and finally in Gottfried. Not unexpectedly, he finds that in most instances in Gottfried the word has the meaning of “chance” or “by chance.” That, for Haug, is significant when it comes to the love potion. He sees the actual drink as a perfect example of a chain of unfortunate circumstances. Strictly speaking, — I paraphrase — there is no guilt involved. It is the typical situation of a trap, which, having been built by a combination of conditions, snaps shut by a chance touch (von aventiure). One is compelled to think that it was precisely the episode of the love potion that provided Gottfried with the principle of the action, and possibly the law of the world into which he wanted to place his Tristan. The love potion is the moment that by chance triggers the love. The possibility of an unconscious love is consequently completely irrelevant. Later Haug takes up the love potion again briefly in a 1986 article (also republished in 1989) that is mainly about “Tristan-love,” but he treats that love within the framework of chance. For Haug, Eros is the highest form of the irrational chance. It is the absolutely irrational that breaks through, the irrational that is incalculable in its origin, without relation in its reality and thereby without order, sufficient only unto itself. Tristan not only succumbs to it; he commits himself to it. That is the change that is expressed in the love potion at the turning point: “Der Liebestrank, dieses Ärgernis der ‘Tristan’-Interpreten, setzt auf das treffendste die Kopplung von Eros und Zufall ins Bild, den Einbruch des absolut Unkalkulierbaren in die rationale Welt des Helden, das nun nicht mehr bekämpft, sondern akzeptiert wird” (The love potion, this annoyance/irritation of “Tristan” interpreters puts the coupling of Eros and chance into the picture most aptly, the invasion of the absolutely incal-

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culable into the rational world of the hero, and this is no longer struggled against, but rather accepted; 1989, 607). Although Haug’s interpretation is well-argued, Werner Schröder questions his reading of the text and criticizes important aspects of his reading as “postmodern” in an appendix to his article on the love-blind Tristan (1994, 181–85). Two more studies of the 1980s must not be overlooked. The first is Rüdiger Schnell’s Causa Amoris, an exhaustive study of the conception and representation of love in medieval literature, and the second is Otfried Ehrismann’s stimulating article on magic, love, and the love potion in Gottfried’s Tristan. Schnell claims that the relationship between the love potion and the occurrence of love has not been clarified (see 11707 ff.). He asks whether Minne is more than just Love personified, whether Minne has a “real existence.” If the potion and Minne personified form only a single causa amoris, what is their relation to one another? (325). After surveying the love potion in the various Tristan stories (326–29), Schnell then gives an excellent, concise summary of various views on the meaning of the love potion in Gottfried and criticizes the methods of many of them (329–31). He is most interested in how love arises, however, and proceeds to examine three love relationships that occur in Gottfried’s Tristan. He first considers the origin of the love of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, Tristan’s parents. Here, Schnell maintains, Gottfried waits for the chance of a “big scene,” the great courtly festival, to have them fall in love. It is at that moment that he depicts the inner “psychological” change that takes place. This shows that love does not befall people as a “mythic” power. It arises within them. Riwalin is not forced into love by a fateful power. He has the freedom to decide for love (841– 49), but once that decision is taken, like the bird settling down on the limed branch, he is caught. Schnell sees a similar growing into love on the part of Blanscheflur, who even discourses on how and why she came to love Riwalin (verses 1003, 1040, 686ff., 1037f., and 1045ff.). Love comes to people not as an absolute, indivisible power, rather it grows in them bit by bit. At the moment when the love is confessed, the narrator signals its significance with the help of a rhetorical figure. Schnell also points out that those two lovers could have separated from each other (pages 332ff.). Marke’s love for Isolde seems to be completely sexual. The sight of Isolde’s beauty activates his love for her, it is pure sexual desire (verses 17591–602, 17560, 17724–27, 17498f., 17553–56, and 17767ff.). Even on his wedding night Marke cannot tell the difference between Brangaene and Isolde (12664–71). Tristan is first attracted to Isolde of the White Hands by the fact that she reminds him of Isolde, and he

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wants to fall in love with her in order to forget Isolde (18965ff. and 19056ff.). It is a visual attraction, not unlike Marke’s for Isolde (19349– 62). It is a change and a defection from his ideal love for Isolde. Schnell believes that Gottfried has a definite idea behind the external seductive beauty of Tristan and Isolde on the one hand and the lack of an erotic reaction between the two before drinking the love potion on the other. This is apparent in the drinking of the potion scene. Schnell thinks that Gottfried avoids having the love between Tristan and Isolde arise mechanically from the drinking of the potion. He leaps from the drinking of the potion to the description of the inner processes (11707– 17, 11721–27), the pairings of herz und sinne, that is, heart and mind (11707–17, 11721–27) and herze und ougen, heart and eyes (11820, 11845). Their love therefore comes not from the outside, from the beauty of the partner, not from the eyes, but rather it comes from inside and creates the outer world, the beauty of the partner (11856–70). The love potion symbolizes the ideal love between Tristan and Isolde, which receives its impulse not from outside, from beauty or from the seductive appearance of a person, but rather suddenly breaks out in the heart, and first with the eyes of the heart and then with the outer eye makes this other person beautiful and recognizes him or her as such. No one, Schnell continues, will want to maintain that the magical power of the love potion itself produces this ideal love. Should we imagine that love is a transcendental power, a mythic being that afflicts people from outside like Venus? Or is it a rhetorical device of personification? Schnell says that if the Minne in the potion scene were a real, mythic being, the function of the potion would have to be redefined. We should not assume that the divine being, Minne, can spring into action only after the biological-physiological preconditions are fulfilled by the drinking of the potion. He sees several things that argue for Minne being a personification of love in the potion scene: (1) love may be a stylistic device in the Riwalin/Blanscheflur story, and a mythical creature in Tristan and Isolde, but nothing forces us to assume this; (2) Tristan and Isolde never appeal to love as a “mythic” creature existing in reality; (3) the exchangeability of the words minne and liebe (Tristan: 11858ff., 12507ff.) makes the existence of a “transcendent” power called Minne uncertain; (4) the abstract noun minne is used in such a way that the phenomenon of minne appears completely independent of the personification Minne (12057; 11863); (5) the influence of the apparently “transcendent” power, Minne, over people is completely dependent on inner human conflicts; Triuwe, Êre, Minne struggle with one another in Tristan (11741 ff.); (6) Minne as a personified being

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occurs only in passages where Gottfried wants to give special weight through rhetorical ornamentation. It therefore suggests that Love should be considered a poetic figure (344). Otfried Ehrismann takes quite the opposite position. In a rather polemical view of the scholarship on Tristan-love, he is against any interpretation that tends to see symbolism in Gottfried, noting that has been the tendency ever since Ranke’s interpretation of 1925. Ehrismann cites evidence that according to popular belief at least well into the fifteenth century, magic was considered necessary for and capable of supporting a happy consummation of marriage and eternal love. There could have been a potion, as Gottfried faithfully presents it in his Tristan, in reality (282–84; see also Peter Ganz, above). Tristan-love arose through misdirected magic. The misdirection is responsible, not the magic. Tristan is less a story of love than a story of misdirected love — Ehrismann’s counter to any idealized understanding of Tristan-love (284–87). In his third section, Ehrismann claims that German scholarship has raised the love potion to a symbol, thereby losing its magic. He maintains that the history of the love potion has shown how little taste the potion has had for German scholars since Ranke; they do not accept it for what it is, but generally insinuate unquestioningly that the essential nature of it is somehow or other enhanced or different (291). His final section is devoted to a review of the demystification the potion has undergone since Ranke, and summarizes his position as follows: “Der Zauber gehört zur seelenerquickenden poetischen Parabel und zum Volksglauben; es gibt keinen Grund, ihn durch theologische Konzepte, die ihm schon immer feind waren, aus der Welt zu schaffen” (Magic belongs to the poetic category of the parable that refreshes the spirit and to popular belief; there is no reason to throw it out of the world because of theological concepts that were always foreign to it; 295–96.) Ehrismann sees Gottfried as caught between the demystification of the world and magic. In a sense he belongs to both, and therefore makes it impossible for us to decide whether he intends the potion to be understood qua magic potion, or as having an enhanced essential nature, or both ways. That decision is a problem of the reception of the potion and its various interests. However, it would seem that the text demands a decision in favor of it being what it is rather than something different (296). All in all, Ehrismann’s article is a good counter to a lot of the idealizing tendencies of more recent Tristan scholarship, and it is especially valuable bibliographically through ca. 1986. In the scholarly literature of the 1990s there are few studies of the love potion per se, but many on the nature of Tristan-love. Of course,

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one can hardly speak of Tristan-love without considering the love potion, but the potion is frequently passed over without much specific comment. An exception is the study by Volker Mertens that we have mentioned above, and we should note here that Mertens emphasizes the mythic aspect as well as the substantiality of the love potion, saying that Gottfried, perhaps intentionally, left that choice up to the reader (59). This would put Mertens in the camp of those who see the potion as something real or considered to be real in Gottfried’s day. We have also referred to Anna Keck above, who does not see the potion as a harmless modern symbol; it does not stand for love as a force friendly to life, but rather as a life-threatening power. Walter Haug (1995a, 210) sees in Tristan’s readiness to accept the love that has befallen him by chance an indication that the potion causes and signifies absolute love and that at the same time this love is affirmed unreservedly, thereby releasing it from all contingency (173–74). In another article (1995b) Haug views Tristan as someone who uses his wits and skill successfully in every situation, only to be confronted by another situation dictated by Chance. Tristan has successfully gained Isolde for Marke and ended the conflict between Ireland and Cornwall. Yet at that very moment Chance plays its greatest trump: Love. Love appears — symbolized by the contingency of the love potion — as Chance in its highest potentiality, as simply the Uncontrollable-Irrational (225–26). Haug returns to this idea in two other contexts (1999a and 1999b). René Wetzel’s review of research on the Tristan versions of the Middle Ages, published in 1996, covers the period 1969–1994, the earlier portion of that period somewhat less thoroughly than the latter. He reflects the opinion of many scholars that in the last twenty-five years Tristan research has had to start practically from zero and to examine Tristan anew with changed premises in view of the fact that agreement could be reached by scholars on hardly any important point, let alone on a basic conception of the work. The only consensus in understanding Gottfried’s Tristan was the agreement that such a consensus was unattainable, and this has led to resignation and withdrawal into the investigation of details (197–98). Wetzel does see two areas of research that, while not exactly new, have been especially fruitful during the period of his review: a) The cultural-historical background as a basis for interpretation and b) The question of the mechanics of the work and how it functions. Under the first topic (199–209) he places the influence of French early scholasticism and humanistic tendencies in courtly society (new theological influences, mysticism, Ovidian love psychology, courtly ideology); the awakening

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and crisis of individuality and identity (modern concepts of individuality, acceptance of the contradictions in the work, social identity, the “singularity” of the hero); and the realm of conflict in Tristan-love (Andreas Capellanus, the fear of society at the autonomy of love and of the individual, the female figures as exemplifying the humanistic ideal). Under the second topic (209–14) Wetzel puts the discovery of structural connections in Tristan and the consideration of reception mechanisms, for example the use of rhetoric in guiding the reader (the relationship of excursus and action, the rhetoric of the prologue) and Tristan as a literary experiment (contrastive analogy to Arthurian romance, intertextuality, Gottfried as a quasi “postmodern” author, a montage of literary roles). Although it does not address the problems of the love potion specifically, we have included Wetzel’s Forschungsbericht in our survey of research in order to give a somewhat broader view of the various directions of Tristan research in recent years. It has not been possible to zero in on the love potion, which is certainly involved in almost every one of the studies, without first putting it into the context of each study, and that would exceed our limits here. Nevertheless, it is important to note the general directions of the research that Wetzel outlines and the bibliographical references in his report. They can be of benefit to those who may wish to dig deeper and to search for specific references to and interpretations of the love potion. We should also be aware that the variety of interpretations will surely continue. The love potion may be a vexing problem to those seeking something definite in it, something that is right or wrong, mythic or mystic, anti-religious or religiously sublime. It may be all, or none of those things, but I would prefer to see it in the context of Gottfried’s day. We obviously cannot transport ourselves back in time and place, but it seems reasonable to assume that people at that time saw love potions as very real. I would therefore side with those who start from that premise, such as Otfried Ehrismann and Volker Mertens, and would emphasize the potion’s substantiality. Insofar as the function of the love potion in the work as a whole is concerned, I find the arguments of Walter Haug (1995b and 1999a) to be especially appealing. In closing, I should like to add that it is a fascinating experience to review the various conceptions of the love potion, and I can only hope that the reader will share that fascination enthusiastically while drinking more deeply of the potion.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Béroul. The Romance of Tristran. Ed. Trans. Norris Lacy. New York: Garland, 1989. Eilhart von Oberge. Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant. Trans. J. W. Thomas. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1978. Eilhart von Oberge. Eilhart von Oberg. Tristrant. Ed. Danielle Buschinger. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1976. Gottfried von Strassburg. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. With the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. Arthur T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans.(German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Konrad von Megenberg. Buch der Natur. Ed. Franz Pfeiffer. 1861. Modern German trans. with notes by Dr. Hugo Schulz. Greifswald, 1897. The Saga of Tristram and Îsönd. Trans. Paul Schach. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1976. Thomas. Thomas. Tristan. Ed. and trans. Gesa Bonath. Munich: Fink, 1985.

Secondary Sources Benskin, Michael, Tony Hunt, and Ian Short (1992–1995). “Un nouveau fragment du Tristan de Thomas.” Romania 113: 289–319. de Boor, Helmut. (1940). “Die Grundauffassung von Gottfrieds Tristan.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 18: 262–306. Reprinted in Gottfried von Straßburg, ed. Alois Wolf, Darmstadt, 1973. Dietz, Reiner (1974). Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg: Probleme der Forschung (1902–1970). Göppingen: Kümmerle. Ehrismann, Gustav (1927). Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters. Vol. 2. Munich: Beck. Ehrismann, Otfried (1989). “Isolde, der Zauber, die Liebe — der Minnetrank in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan’ zwischen Symbolik und Magie.” Ergerbnisse und Aufgaben der Germanistik am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Elisabeth Feldbusch. Hildesheim: Olms. 282–301. Furstner, H. (1957). “Der Beginn der Liebe bei Tristan und Isolde in Gottfrieds Epos.” Neophilologus 41: 25–38. Ganz, Peter F. (1970). “Minnetrank und Minne. Zu Tristan, Z. 11707f.” Formen mittelalterlicher Literatur: Festschrift für Siegfried Beyschlag. Ed. Otmar Werner and Bernd Naumann. Göppingen: Kümmerle. 63–75.

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Hatto, Arthur T. (1957). “Der minnen vederspil Isot.” Euphorion 51: 302–7. Haug, Walter (1989). Strukturen als Schlüssel zur Welt: Kleine Schriften zur Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters. Tübingen: Niemeyer. (Includes the articles “Aventiure in Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan” [originally published in 1972] and “Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan. Sexueller Sündenfall oder erotische Utopie?” [originally published in 1986]. Haug, Walter (1995a). “Der ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Straßburg: eine narrative Philosophie der Liebe?” Brechungen auf dem Weg zur Individualität. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 171–83. Haug, Walter (1995b). “Eros und Fortuna. Der Höfische Roman als Spiel von Liebe und Zufall.” Brechungen auf dem Weg zur Individualität. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 214–32. Haug, Walter (1997). “Reinterpreting the Tristan Romances of Thomas and Gotfrid: Implications of a Recent Discovery.” Arthuriana 7.3: 45–59. Haug, Walter (1999a). “Die Einsamkeit des epischen Helden und seine scheiternde Sozialisation. Zur Anthropologie eines narrativen Musters.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 128: 1–16. Haug, Walter (1999b). “Für eine Ästhetik des Widerspruchs. Neue Überlegungen zur Poetologie des höfischen Romans.” Mittelalterliche Literatur und Kunst im Spannungsfeld von Hof und Kloster. Ed. Nigel F. Palmer and HansJochen Schiewer. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 211–27. Haug, Walter (1999c). Gottfrieds von Straßburg Verhältnis zu Thomas von England im Lichte des neu aufgefundenen ‘Tristan’-Fragments von Carlisle. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Huber, Christoph (2000). Gottfried von Straßburg. Tristan. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Jackson, W. T. H. (1971). The Anatomy of Love: The ‘Tristan’ of Gottfried von Straßburg. New York: Columbia UP. Johnson, L. Peter (1983). “Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan.” New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. 1, part 2. Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. 207–21. Johnson, L. Peter (1999). “Gottfried von Straßburg.” Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit. Ed. Joachim Heinzle. Vol. 2/1: Die höfische Literatur der Blütezeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 305–23. Keck, Anna (1998). Die Liebeskonzeption der mittelalterlichen Tristanromane: Zur Erzähllogik der Werke Bérouls, Eilharts, Thomas’ und Gottfrieds. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Kieckhefer, Richard (1989). Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lanz-Hubmann, Irene (1989). ‘Nein unde jâ.’ Mehrdeutigkeit im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg: Ein Rezipientenproblem. Bern: Peter Lang.

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Mertens, Volker (1995). “Bildersaal — Minnegrotte — Liebestrank. Zu Symbol, Allegorie und Mythos im Tristranroman.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (= Pauls und Braunes Beiträge, abbrev. PBB) 117: 40–64. Moser, H., and H. Tervooren, eds. (1977). Des Minnesangs Frühling: I Texte. Stuttgart: Hirzel. Müller, Irmgard (1984). “Liebestränke, Liebeszauber und Schlafmittel in der mittelalterlichen Literatur.” Liebe — Ehe — Ehebruch in der Literatur des Mittelalters. Ed. Xenia von Ertzdorff and Marianne Wynne. Giessen: W. Schmitz. Naumann, Hans (1929). Höfische Kultur. Halle: Niemeyer. Nickel, Emil (1927). Studien zum Liebesproblem bei Gottfried von Straßburg. Königsberg: Königsberger Deutsche Forschungen. Picozzi, Rosemary (1971). A History of Tristan Scholarship. Bern: H. Lang. Ranke, Friedrich (1925). “Die Allegorie der Minnegrotte in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft. Geisteswiss. Kl. 2 (1925). 21–39. Reprinted in Gottfried von Straßburg, ed. Alois Wolf, Darmstadt, 1973. Schneider, Hermann (1925). Heldendichtung, Geistlichendichtung, Ritterdichtung. Heidelberg: Winter. Schnell, Rüdiger (1985). Causa Amoris: Liebeskonzeption und Liebesdarstellung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur. Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag. Schnell, Rüdiger (1992). Suche nach Wahrheit: Gottfrieds ‘Tristan und Isold’ als erkenntniskritischer Roman. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Schröder, Walter Johannes (1967). “Der Liebestrank in Gottfrieds Tristan und Isolt.” Euphorion 61: 21–35. Schröder, Werner (1994). “Tristan der minnen blinde.” Über Gottfried von Straßburg. Stuttgart/Leipzig: S. Hirzel. 176–86. Schwietering, Julius (1932). Die Deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters: Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Oskar Walzel. Potsdam. 183–94. Reprint Darmstadt 1957. Steinhoff, Hans-Hugo (1971). Bibliographie zu Gottfried von Straßburg. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Steinhof, Hans-Hugo (1986). Bibliographie zu Gottfried von Straßburg II. Berichtszeitraum 1970–1983. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Stolte, Heinz (1940). “Drachenkampf und Liebestrank.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 18: 250–61. Tomasek, Tomas (1985). Die Utopie im ‘Tristan’ Gotfrids von Straßburg. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Todtenhaupt, Martin (1992). Veritas amoris: Die Tristan-Konzeption Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Weber, Gottfried (1953). Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan und die Krise des hochmittelalterlichen Weltbildes um 1200. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler. Wetzel, René (1996). “Der Tristanstoff in der Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters. Forschungsbericht 1969–1994.” Forschungsberichte zur Germanistischen Mediävistik. Ed. Hans-Jochen Schwiever. Bern: Lang. 190–254. Wolf, Alois, ed. (1973). Gottfried von Strassburg. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan Nigel Harris

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IE FRAGE DES VERHÄLTNISSES der Tristandichtung zum Christentum ist das schwierigste und vielschichtigste Problem der Tristanforschung” (The question of the relationship of the Tristan poem to Christianity is the most difficult and multi-layered problem of Tristan research). So wrote Reiner Dietz in his 1974 survey of Tristan scholarship (152), and his statement would be equally true today. Over the past decades, indeed centuries, many distinguished medievalists have pondered issues such as Gottfried’s concept of God and his dealings with people, the role he assigns to religious ideas and practices in his vision of society, and, above all, the complex and deeply ambiguous relationship he suggests between the love of Tristan and Isolde on the one hand and contemporary models of love between human beings and God on the other. As yet, however, nothing approaching a consensus has been reached. All bar the most recent research on these and related subjects is summarized by Picozzi (1971, in English), Dietz (1974), Langmeier (1978), and Weber/Hoffmann (1981); so it should suffice here to offer merely a brief introduction to the main schools of thought, before proceeding to detailed textual analysis of Tristan itself. The earliest school is associated with one of the greatest of all nineteenth-century Germanists, Karl Lachmann, who in 1820 memorably and influentially denounced the work in the following terms: “anderes, als Üppigkeit oder Gotteslästerung, boten die Haupttheile seiner weichlichen, unsittlichen Erzählung nicht dar” (the principal sections of his soft, immoral story offered nothing apart from voluptuousness and blasphemy; Lachmann 159). Such orotund condemnations are of course no longer current in scholarly circles, but the notion of at least parts of Gottfried’s romance (notably the ordeal scene) evincing, if not a blasphemous, then at least a skeptical attitude towards religion persisted well into the twentieth century, when it was enunciated by, amongst others, Hans-Günther

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Nauen (37–38 and passim), Th. C. van Stockum (25–26) and, more recently, Werner Schröder (65). A radically different view of Gottfried’s religiosity was proposed in 1915 by Ulrich Stökle, whose dissertation offers an abundance of at times naïvely interpreted evidence in support of the view that Gottfried was not just theologically orthodox but possibly a priest (104). Whilst many of Stökle’s ideas, not least those related to Gottfried’s biography, were soon discredited, several later scholars have accepted and developed the idea that Gottfried’s views do not conflict with orthodox Christianity, and indeed have postulated that the love experienced by Tristan and Isolde is pleasing to God. (These two views do not, of course, necessarily go together. Heinze, for example, sees Tristan as in essence theologically orthodox, but as suggesting a rather negative view of Tristan and Isolde’s love, which he regards as fundamentally tainted by the Fall). Among those who consider that Gottfried was not in conflict with orthodoxy are H. B. Willson (1957, 1965), Petrus W. Tax, and, most famously or notoriously, Bodo Mergell, who goes so far as to suggest that the love of Tristan and Isolde, when purified by suffering, leads and develops into mystical union with God, thereby establishing a harmony between God and the world that he sees as quintessentially Gothic. This perception of a close analogy between secular love and mystical union with God reveals the influence of two other important schools of thought, whose representatives, however, come to radically different conclusions from that of Mergell. The first of these approaches, initiated by Friedrich Ranke in 1925, sees in the love of Tristan and Isolde nothing less than an alternative religion. Basing his interpretation on the observation that Gottfried’s allegory of the Love Grotto (Minnegrotte) possesses many similarities to contemporary allegorical treatments of Christian churches, Ranke argues that Gottfried presents the cave as a temple erected to the goddess Love, der gottinne minne (16723), in whose service Tristan and Isolde live as “fromme Klausner” (pious hermits; 34). Whilst this view has had its critics, most notably perhaps Herbert Kolb, who has demonstrated that Gottfried’s allegory owes as much to contemporary French love poetry as it does to any theological traditions (1962), it has also been very influential, especially perhaps through the widely disseminated views of Helmut de Boor, who draws comparisons between Tristan and medieval hagiographical traditions, and characterizes Tristan and Isolde as “Minneheilige” (saints of love; 276). The second interpretative tradition to which Mergell and many others are indebted is that associated with Julius Schwietering, who in a series of writings (1943, 1954) draws attention to parallels between

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Tristan-love as described by Gottfried and the language of Christian mysticism, especially as articulated by Bernard of Clairvaux. Stressing the imperfect nature of Tristan and Isolde’s relationship, he does not see these parallels either as constituting the basis of an alternative religion or as a form of prelude to mystic union; rather he interprets the crossfertilization of secular and spiritual discourse they reflect as characteristic of the gradual development from the Romanesque to the Gothic. Whilst few would accept that conclusion today, Schwietering’s emphasis on the importance for Tristan of mystical thought has been taken up and developed by, amongst others, Dolores Baumgartner and Klaus Allgaier; and, in spite of the valuable critique of aspects of Schwietering’s textual analysis by Hermann Kunisch, most would probably agree with W. T. H. Jackson that the mystical element in Tristan-love is “an important one,” even if Gottfried may merely have used “mystical terminology as a modern writer might use Freudian terminology, as an accessible and widely if not universally understood system which would allow him to differentiate Tristan-love from the love described in courtly romances” (55–56). A further tendency within Tristan research has been to interpret Gottfried’s view of God and religion as at least implicitly heretical. Hans Goerke linked Gottfried’s conception of love with that of the Amalricians; Gottfried Weber (1953) drew from his concept of Tristan-love as simultaneously “Seelenliebe” and “Sinnenliebe” (love of the soul and of the senses) the conclusion that Gottfried was influenced by neoManichean dualism; and in a series of studies Hans Bayer has suggested that Tristan propounds many ideas which smack of Catharism (see Bayer 1978 and 1996). Theories such as these, based as they often are on the tacit assumption that modern critics are able to discern hints and nuances which remained impenetrable to medieval audiences, are, however, intrinsically unsatisfactory; and they have been very far from widely credited. In recent decades, indeed, scholars in general have evinced a much greater reluctance than their predecessors to attempt far-reaching overall interpretations of Tristan. Partly as a consequence, they have tended to focus less on the work’s theological implications and more on other areas of enquiry. Nevertheless there have been numerous treatments of sections of the romance in which religious questions play a significant role (such as the Minnegrotte — see Dimler, Lewes, Thomas, Cole, and Mertens; or the ordeal — see Kerth, Schröder, Grubmüller, Kolb 1988, and Ziegler), as well as essays on the relationship between God and language (Dickerson) and on biblical typology (especially the parallels between Tristan and the story of Joseph — see Jacobson). Of particular relevance to this essay have been studies that concern themselves with,

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amongst other things, the nature and role of God as they are presented in the romance as a whole. Hugo Bekker, for example, suggests that Gottfried consistently confronts us with what he terms a Boethian rather than an Augustinian God, who, most of the time, “does not intervene. Man is to work out his own destiny, as a free-willed individual who can act and find means to maintain himself, also in adversity” (225). Joachim Theisen takes this concept of a non-interventionist God a stage further by claiming that the God of Tristan is ultimately a creation of man, one who does not demonstrably participate in human affairs at all, but rather is invoked by characters in their attempts to manipulate the truth to their own advantage (166–67). Other scholars take perhaps greater account of the varying faces that God presents in the course of the romance: Quinn, for example, speaks of “two different conceptions of God. There is the God of this world, of society, of conventional morals, of the rights of husbands, of worldly reputation, of Mark’s court and of the Church hierarchy [. . .] There is also the God of the Tristan-world, who favors and protects [the lovers]” (200); and, in an important study, Schnell gives a thorough account of the various human perceptions of God articulated in Tristan and sees their multiplicity and inconsistency as part of Gottfried’s attempt, throughout the romance, to highlight the flawed and limited nature of human beings’ search for truth (57–118). The foregoing survey has surely already demonstrated that the subject under discussion cannot be addressed in all of its complexity and controversy in a single essay. In the following we will focus on the various references to God, the church and their activities that occur in Gottfried’s romance; then we shall examine some of the most important ways in which Gottfried uses religious vocabulary and imagery. Finally, we shall draw some inevitably inconclusive conclusions.

2 The word got, its genitive form gotes and its dative gote occur a total of 288 times in Tristan (Hall 90–91, 290) — a high figure, even for a romance of nearly twenty thousand lines. Most of these occurrences, however, simply form part of formulaic expressions such as durch got (for God’s sake; e.g. 1008, 8685, 12793), ob [ez] got wil/wolte (God willing; e.g. 4177, 7864, 15449), weizgot (God knows; e.g. 3798, 4931, 10069), so helfe iu got (may God help you; e.g. 2231, 4658, 5084), or in gotes namen (in God’s name; e.g. 2370, 6152, 15731). As such, they are entirely unexceptional in medieval German literature, and cannot be said to reveal any particular concept of God on Gottfried’s part — even

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Kerth’s statement that the large number of formulaic oaths “demonstrates just how empty, how common the name of God, and thus the conception of God, has become in a Christian society” (6) smacks of over-interpretation. It is also unremarkable in the context of a medieval narrative that characters, as they do in Tristan, should observe the formalities of sacramental religion. Mass is plainly celebrated at Tintagel on a regular basis: when Rual first comes to Cornwall he witnesses people arriving for such a service (3880–85); a church ceremony also forms part of Tristan’s investiture as a knight (5012–18); and even Melot attends matins at Mark’s behest (15139–44). There is, admittedly, no sense of church attendance necessarily reflecting inner piety: it is specifically said of Mark and Melot when they go to matins whilst plotting to trap Tristan and Isolde that their andâht was [. . .] / vil cleine an kein gebet gewant (their observance had little concern with prayer; 15152–53); Rual and Floraete advise Riwalin and Blanscheflur to undergo a wedding rite in church explicitly in order they might be seen to do so by both clergy and laity (da ez pfaffen unde leien sehen, 1632); and even Tristan’s baptism (1968– 73) involves an element of insincerity and deception, in that Floraete is passing herself off as the baby’s mother. Especially given this circumstance, one feels obliged to reckon with the possibility of irony in the narrator’s suspiciously naïve-sounding comment that the child, following this ceremony, swie’z ime dar nâch ergienge, / [. . .] doch cristen waere (however it should fare in days to come, [would] nevertheless be a Christian; 1972–73); and it is hard not to see as ironic his statement that Isolde hears Mass with “deep devotion” (ir andâht diu was gotelîch, 15655) immediately before misleading the assembled notables of the Cornish realm in the context of her ordeal. In spite of the casualness, even skepticism towards Christianity and the church that such passages imply, however, one cannot persuasively charge Gottfried with any consistent or thoroughgoing anti-clericalism. Such members of the clergy who do appear are, after all, presented thoroughly positively. The Irish priest who has acted as tutor to both Isoldes, for example, shows compassion and practical helpfulness to Tristan on the occasion of his first visit to Ireland, and is plainly a cultured and humane individual: he possesses list unde kunst genuoge (was a skillful and dextrous performer; 7701), can play stringed instruments and speak foreign languages (7702–4), and has devoted himself for many years to vuoge unde [. . .] höfscheit (the cultured pursuits of the court; 7705); moreover he feels both admiration for Tristan’s own artistic abilities and pity for his sufferings (in erbarmete sîn ungemach, 7730), reactions which

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lead him to commend the ailing pseudo-minstrel to the attention of Queen Isolde (7741–57). Equally, of the numerous senior clerics who are summoned by Mark to his council and attend Isolde’s ordeal (15308–14, 15634–41), the only one who plays a prominent role, the aged Bishop of the Thames, is presented in unequivocally positive terms. He is described by the narrator as an witzen und an jâren / ze guotem râte wol gestalt (well fitted by sagacity and age to offer good advice; 15344–45), a quality that he proceeds to demonstrate by arguing that Isolde is innocent until proven guilty and as such merits an appropriate trial (15350–418), and by continuing to show himself sensitive and just in the speech he addresses to her shortly afterwards (15428–68). Both he and the other clerics are arguably implicated by the fact of their presence in the fiasco that is the ordeal by hot iron, but it should be noted that the decision to employ this antiquated and flawed form of justice is taken by Mark himself, apparently without clerical advice (15518–26 — on this issue see Bekker 224), and in the context of an assembly that, as Kolb has demonstrated (1988, 321–24), is essentially secular in character. The churchmen in Tristan, then, are able, courtly and honest, but few in number and not especially significant. Of rather greater interest are the numerous occasions on which God himself intervenes, or at least appears to intervene, in the events narrated. Sometimes one suspects that these interventions are illusory; that is to say, characters are perhaps apt to credit God with a degree of involvement in their affairs that may not always be accurate. Riwalin, for example, initially believes that God has brought him to Cornwall (496–97); and Rual ascribes his subsequent return to Parmenie to God’s agency (1601–3), just as his sons do when, much later, Tristan follows in his father’s footsteps (18630–31). Meanwhile Brangaene believes that God has enabled her and her two mistresses to find Tristan alive after his combat with the dragon (10435– 36), and by contrast attributes her part in Tristan and Isolde’s consumption of the love potion to God having forgotten her (12478– 79). In each of these cases, however, we are dealing with subjective interpretations, which, given the absence of any supporting evidence presented in the narrator’s voice, may well be simply mistaken. Nevertheless there are other occasions on which God’s active involvement in affairs seems much less open to question. There are three major episodes in particular in which his direct participation is asserted, namely Tristan’s rescue from the Norwegian merchants, his victory over Morold, and Isolde’s ordeal. In the first of these, the merchants’ desire to take Tristan back to Norway with them is frustrated in no uncertain terms by the one who, in the narrator’s words,

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elliu dinc beslihtet, beslihtende berihtet, dem winde, mer und elliu craft bibenende sint dienesthaft. (2406–9) (orders all things and ordering sets them to rights, whom winds, sea, and all the elements subserve in fear and trembling [All translations of Gottfried’s romance are from Hatto])

Over a period of eight days and nights, God visits a violent storm on their ship, which threatens to destroy both it and them, until one of them eventually acknowledges that they have brought the storm upon themselves by stealing Tristan from his friends (2441–49). When all the others join him in repentance, the storm miraculously abates near the coast of Cornwall (2462–69), and they allow Tristan to go ashore. God also appears to intervene powerfully in Tristan’s fight against Morold. In this victory over a far stronger and more experienced opponent, with its manifest echoes of the combat between David and Goliath, God (in alliance with reht and willeger muot [“Right” and “Willing Heart”; 6883, 6887]) is explicitly stated by the narrator to be on Tristan’s side, and indeed could be said to save Tristan when he is in danger of imminent defeat (6996–99), providing him with the herze unde craft (strength and encouragement) necessary to achieve victory (7008). Tristan himself certainly attributes his success to God (“der rehte und der gewaere got / und gotes waerlîch gebot / die habent dîn unreht wol bedâht / und reht an mir ze rehte brâht” [by His infallible decree God, the just and true, has judged of your wrong and, through me as His instrument, restored justice to its own again; 7075–78); and in the context of what has gone before, and of the parallels he draws between Morold and the Devil (6852, 6906), most readers will be at least tempted to conclude that the narrator agrees with him. Thirdly, and notoriously, there is Isolde’s ordeal, in which God appears to join with the queen in perpetrating a gross miscarriage of justice. Three passages in particular describe his partnership with Isolde in this section. Immediately after Mark has ordered that she be tried by ordeal, she is beset with fears for her honor, and confides these cares an den genaedigen Crist, / der gehülfic in den noeten ist (to Christ, the Merciful, who is helpful when one is in trouble; 15545–46), whilst simultaneously devising einen list [. . .] / vil verre ûf gotes höfscheit (a ruse which presumed very far on her Maker’s courtesy; 15551–52) — namely, of course, the plan which results in Tristan, dressed as a pilgrim, carrying her from her ship to the harbor at Caerleon and falling in such a way that

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she lands in his arms. The second passage begins with an account of what, to modern eyes at least, seems to have been an attempt on Isolde’s part to bribe God: diu guote küniginne Îsolt diu haete ir silber unde ir golt, ir zierde und swaz si haete an pferden unde an waete gegeben durch gotes hulde, daz got ir wâren schulde an ir niht gedaehte und sî z’ir êren braehte. (15643–50) (The good Queen Isolde had given away her silver, her gold, her jewellery, and all the clothes and palfreys she had, to win God’s favour, so that he might overlook her very real trespasses and restore her to her honour.)

This passage continues with the reference to Isolde’s “deep devotion” at Mass (15651–55), which we cited earlier; it then tells us of her suitably penitential clothing (15656–63); and finally it reminds us that she has surrendered êre unde leben / vil verre an gotes güete (life and honour utterly to God’s mercy; 15673–74) and rendered up hant unde herze beide / [. . .] gotes segene / ze bewarne und ze pflegene (heart and hand to the grace of God, for him to keep and preserve; 15678–80). The third passage records Isolde’s literally true but essentially deceitful oath to the effect that only Mark and the pilgrim have held her in their arms (15706–16), her commending herself to God and all the saints (15717– 20), and her picking up the hot iron without being burned (15731–32); and it culminates in that most extraordinary and opaque of all narratorial comments: dâ wart wol g’offenbaeret und al der werlt bewaeret, daz der vil tugenthafte Crist wintschaffen alse ein ermel ist. er vüeget unde suochet an, dâ man’z an in gesuochen kan, alse gevuoge und alse wol, als er von allem rehte sol. erst allen herzen bereit, ze durnehte und ze trügeheit. ist ez ernest, ist ez spil, er ist ie, swie sô man wil. (15733–44)

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(Thus it was made manifest and confirmed to all the world that Christ in His great virtue is pliant as a windblown sleeve. He falls into place and clings, whichever way you try Him, closely and smoothly, as He is bound to do. He is at the beck of every heart for honest deeds or fraud. Be it deadly earnest or a game, He is just as you would have Him.)

In certain respects these three episodes (Tristan’s abduction, the combat with Morold, and the ordeal) all share the same basic pattern, in that in each case God’s intervention is triggered by the prayer of a person, or people, in distress. We have already seen this in the case of Isolde’s ordeal; but it applies to the other two episodes as well. Following Tristan’s abduction by the Norwegians, Curvenal, set adrift and in deadly peril, prays to God to rescue him from danger (2360–68) and, in spite of having never rowed a boat before (2356–58), sets off in gotes namen (in God’s name; 2370), eventually arriving home als es im got gegunde (as God of His grace vouchsafed him; 2372). Immediately after his return, both he and the other Parmenians pray fervently and protractedly that God might help Tristan in his continuing plight (2386–400); and very soon after this, God sends the storm that enables this wish to come true. Similarly, Tristan’s victory over Morold is not only preceded by various invocations of God or exhortations to pray on Tristan’s own part (6120– 25, 6321–32, 6450–53, 6760, 6778–83), but also, at the very opening of the episode, by lachrymose and desperate prayer on the part of the Cornish barons that God might protect their children and lineage (6038–47) — a wish which is of course granted when Tristan defeats Morold. The parallel with Isolde’s prayer before the ordeal is in this instance perhaps especially marked, given that the behavior of these barons both here and elsewhere in the romance is at best questionable in moral terms. Nor are these the only occasions on which it is at least implied that God acts in response to prayer. Immediately following his arrival in Cornwall, Tristan is three times described as engaging in lengthy and heartfelt prayer for God’s protection (2487–532, 2585–619, 2655–59); and slightly later, Rual prays that God might direct him to Mark’s court and consequently to Tristan (3835–44). The wishes of both supplicants are soon granted, not least through the agency of the two pilgrims whom both Tristan and Rual meet, and whose close association with God is emphasized by dint of several epithets (gote gebaere, wâren gotes kint, gotes knehte [of godly aspect, God’s true children, servants of God; 2624, 2627, 2640]) — the narrator, indeed, tells us specifically that Rual has encountered these pilgrims von gotes genâden (by the grace of God; 3804). Subsequent prayers made in times of trouble also appear to be answered,

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such as Isolde’s that Brangaene might not betray her after she has slept with Mark (12620–28), Brangaene’s that her would-be assassins might spare her (12843–48), and Tristan and Isolde’s (14637–56, 14706–8) that their secret might not be discovered on the occasion of their assignation in the orchard. These instances of apparently successful prayer must also be seen in the context of certain passages in which it is implied that those who trust in God are more successful in life than those who rely on something else — be it fortune, such as the Norwegian merchants (si haeten sich mitalle ergeben / an die vil armen stiure, / diu dâ heizet âventiure [they had abandoned themselves utterly to that poor prop called ‘Chance’; 2420–22]), or their own strength, such as Morold (wan Môrolt lac billîche tôt. / der was niwan an sîner craft / und niht an gote gemuothaft [for Morold was justly slain. He had placed his trust not in God but in his own strength; 7224–26]). Praying to God plainly does not preclude human effort, as can be seen in many of the above examples; but one could certainly make a case to the effect that Gottfried, or at least his narrator, both believes in and indeed seeks to commend to his audience a transcendent, interventionist, compassionate, if perhaps over-indulgent Christian God, who answers the prayers of those who “ask, seek, and knock” — albeit without always enquiring too closely into their inner motivation for doing so. Such a case, though, would be a rather naïve and partial one. For one thing, it would ignore those prayers that are not answered. Blanscheflur’s implicit prayer in lines 1466–68 that God might save her from death in childbirth (“ich trage ein kint, / des entrûwe ich niemer genesen, / got enwelle mîn gehelfe wesen” [I carry a child whose birth I fear I shall never survive, unless God be my helpmate]) is, for example, unsuccessful, in that she does die giving birth to Tristan; and the prayers of the Cornish court in lines 1575–77 to the effect that God might preserve Riwalin on his return to Parmenie similarly prove vain (manc segen wart im nâch gegeben, / daz got sîn êre und sîn leben / geruohte in sînem schirme hân [many pious farewells were sent after him, with a prayer that it please God to have his life and his honour in His keeping]). An interpretation of God’s role that focused solely on his shaping of events through answered prayer would also run the risk of ignoring the important function of chance, and indeed fate, in the romance as a whole. A number of things, including some highly significant ones, are described by the narrator as happening von âventiure, by chance. This is true of the first meeting of Riwalin and Blanscheflur (737–39), of the Norwegians’ arrival in Parmenie (2149–59), of Tristan subsequently

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catching sight of the chessboard on the Norwegians’ ship (2219–24), of his learning of Morgan’s hunting expedition and hence vulnerability to attack (5309–13), of his discovery of the Minnegrotte (16683–86), and of Mark’s huntsman’s sighting of the window there, through which he espies the sleeping bodies of Tristan and Isolde (17430–35). As Haug’s article on the subject (1972) has amply demonstrated, âventiure is itself a polyvalent and elusive concept, but its importance should not be underestimated in discussions of the contribution to events made by God. Nor should that of fate. Going under the slightly unusual appellation der billîch, fate is invoked by the narrator in the context of Isolde’s first sight of Tristan after his fight with the dragon: nu ergieng ez, alse ez solte und alse der billîch wolte, diu junge künigin Îsôt daz sî ir leben unde ir tôt, ir wunne unde ir ungemach ze allerêrste gesach. (9369–74) (now it happened, as it was meant to happen and as an equitable fate would have it, that Isolde, the young princess, was the first to set eyes on her life and her death, her joy, her sorrow.)

In what is plainly a deliberate parallel, the same quality is later said to underlie Isolde’s discovery of the splinter in Tristan’s sword: Nu ergieng ez aber Îsolde, alsô der billîch wolde: daz si aber ir herzequâle zem anderen mâle vor den andern allen vant. (10057–61) (Now it again happened to Isolde as an equitable fate intended it that for the second time, before all the others, she discovered her heart’s torment!).

Just to complicate matters further, fate is elsewhere closely associated both with chance (the Norwegians place their trust not just in âventiure [2422] but also in geschicht [2423]) and with God — who in such cases, as far as one can tell, operates without the stimulus of prayer. Riwalin survives his first wound both because God helps him in distress (1328) and because ez solte wesen (it was to be; 1330); but he succumbs to his second because ez muoz nu sîn (it has to be; 1703), given that he has

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won honor and renown only die wîle ez got wolte (so long as it pleased God that he should do so; 1757). In spite of some evidence in its favor, therefore, an interpretation of God’s role in the romance that was content to point uncritically to what Haug calls the “Mechanik von Gebet und Erhörung” (mechanism of prayer and answer to prayer; 1972, 104) would not be a satisfactory one. This is so not only because it would fail to take appropriate account of the evidence marshaled in the last three paragraphs, but also because of the inherently problematic nature of the mechanism itself — at least as it is presented by Gottfried. As Haug goes on to point out, it often seems to work with such alarming swiftness, indeed cursoriness, as to suggest that Gottfried is not taking it entirely seriously — a point that is perhaps confirmed by the narrator’s playful concern, in 6980–89, that God and Right, uncharacteristically, are taking an unconscionably long time to leap to Tristan’s aid in his fight against Morold: got unde reht, wâ sint sî nuo, Tristandes strîtgesellen? ob s’im iht helfen wellen, des nimt mich michel wunder. si sûment sich hier under. ir rotte und ir geselleschaft diu ist sêre worden schadehaft. sine komen danne drâte, sô koment s’al ze spâte. von diu sô komen schiere! (Where are God and Right now, Tristan’s comrades-in-arms? Are they going to help him, I wonder? Their company has taken heavy punishment, yet they are slow to put in an appearance. If they do not come soon they will be too late: so let them come quickly!)

Above all, however, the mechanics of answered prayer in Tristan are problematized by the not infrequent implication that, whilst appearing to pray meekly and in faith to a transcendent God, characters are actually seeking to instrumentalize him, to control him, to use him for their own sometimes nefarious ends — and that they meet with success when they do so. This is of course especially apparent in the episode of Isolde’s ordeal: whether the narrator’s description of Christ as “pliant as a windblown sleeve” (15735–36) and “at the beck of every heart for pious deeds or fraud” (15741–42 — this passage is cited above) is understood literally — as a deeply unorthodox comment on God’s true nature — or

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ironically — as a barb directed at contemporary [mis]understandings of that true nature — the image of God that emerges is of a divine being capable neither of independent action nor of sound moral judgement, and as such ready to do whatever people tell him. Dickerson (136) perhaps overstates the case, but does so perceptively, when he argues that “the deity in Gottfried’s poem [sometimes!, N. H.] is not a deus ex machina who comes to the lovers’ rescue but a deus in machina which can be turned on or off at will [. . .] a robot-like deity whose commandments derive from mechanical rather than metaphysical laws.” This description is of course particularly apt for the ordeal scene; but it is arguably valid for other parts of the text as well: for example Schnell (85– 94) has suggested that, in the episodes in which Tristan challenges and fights Morgan and then Morold, he appeals to God and subsequently claims to have benefitted from his favor solely in order to legitimize a variety of morally dubious actions that he himself has decided in advance to perform. In other words, he makes up God’s mind for him, reduces him to the status of a “Befehlsempfänger,” a recipient of commands (Schnell 91), and hence makes him into an instrument of human will. However one reacts to such an image of God, it is not a conventional or comfortable one; and nor is it of a piece with the more orthodox image of the deity we meet elsewhere in the romance.

3 Gottfried’s account of God’s activities in Tristan is, then, only superficially straightforward. Rather, the image of God he presents is a multifaceted, inconsistent, elusive, and at times disturbingly provocative one. Much the same could be said of his use of religious motifs to describe and illuminate the love of his protagonists. On one level, Gottfried uses a number of highly positive religious concepts and allusions which suggest that the love of Tristan and Isolde is so profound as to be in some ways analogous to the love between God and the faithful soul. Perhaps the most obvious — if, as we have seen, controversial — respect in which Tristan uses religious discourse is its use of the language of mysticism. As Allgaier in particular has shown, the influence on Gottfried of mystical thought processes and language can be detected on numerous levels. Some of these levels, it is true, are likely to be perceived only by readers equipped with a detailed knowledge of, say, Bernard of Clairvaux or Richard of St. Victor; but others are more readily accessible. For example, one does not need an exhaustive knowledge either of medieval mysticism or indeed of the Tristan legend to

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become aware of the various analogies that are implicitly drawn between the unique closeness of Tristan and Isolde’s love on the one hand and the concept of mystical union between God and the soul on the other. A few examples will suffice. Soon after consuming the potion, it is said that lovers wurden ein und einvalt, die zwei und zwîvalt wâren ê [. . .] (11716–17) sî haeten beide ein herze. ir swaere was sîn smerze, sîn smerze was ir swaere. si wâren beide einbaere an liebe unde an leide. (11727–31) (They who were two and divided now became one and united . . . each was to the other as limpid as a mirror. They shared a single heart. Her anguish was his pain: his pain her anguish. The two were one both in joy and in sorrow).

Thereafter, comparable examples recur at regular intervals. Following their mutual declaration of love, the narrator tells us that Tristan and Isolde erkanden einen sin, / ein herze und einen willen (perceived that they had one mind, one heart, and but a single will between them; 12030–31). Similarly, when their separation is described in lines 14328– 32, we are told that ez enwas ouch an in beiden niemê wan ein herze unde ein muot. ir beider übel, ir beider guot, ir beider tôt, ir beider leben diu wâren alse in ein geweben. (for there was but one heart and soul between them. Their pleasure and their pain, their life and their death were as if woven into one.)

And perhaps most eloquently of all, following Tristan’s final departure from Cornwall, Isolde laments that “iuwer leben daz bin ich. iht mêre muget ir âne mich iemer geleben keinen tac, dan ich âne iuch geleben mac. unser lîp und unser leben

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diu sint sô sêre in ein geweben, sô gâr verstricket under in, daz ir mîn leben vüeret hin und lâzet mir daz iuwer hie. zwei leben die enwurden nie alsus gemischet under ein. wir zwei wir tragen under uns zwein tôt unde leben ein ander an.” (18499–511) (“I am indeed your life. Without me you cannot live for one day longer than I can live without you. Our lives and very souls are so interwoven, so utterly enmeshed, the one with the other, that you are taking my life away with you and leaving yours with me. No two lives were ever so intermingled: we hold death and life for each other, since neither can really find life or death unless the other give it.”)

Such concepts of mutual interweaving, enmeshing, intermingling and so on form an undeniable, if approximate and equivocal link between the very human love of the protagonists and the love between a mystic and his/her God; and they strongly imply that, however worldly the love of Tristan and Isolde might be in many respects, it nevertheless “permits them an experience akin to that of the religious mystic and one that can only be expressed in similar terms” (Batts 75). A not dissimilar link is forged in certain passages between Tristanlove and the sacrament of the Eucharist. This is most obviously the case in Gottfried’s prologue. When Tristan and Isolde’s story is told, the narrator claims, Deist aller edelen herzen brôt. hie mite sô lebet ir beider tôt. wir lesen ir leben, wir lesen ir tôt und ist uns daz süeze also brôt. Ir leben, ir tôt sint unser brôt. sus lebet ir leben, sus lebet ir tôt. sus lebent si noch und sint doch tôt und ist ir tôt der lebenden brôt. (233–40) (This is bread to all noble hearts. With this their death lives on. We read their life, we read their death, and to us it is sweet as bread. Their life, their death are our bread. Thus lives their life, thus lives their death. Thus they live still and yet are dead, and their death is the bread of the living).

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The sacramental overtones of this passage are arguably reinforced later by the fact that the potion manifestly resembles, and indeed is initially mistaken by Tristan, Isolde and their lady-in-waiting for wine (11670, 11685). There is no denying, then, that religious language is not infrequently used in Tristan to hint at the exceptional nature of the love between Tristan and Isolde (and indeed between their parents), and to lend it a certain aura of spirituality. This is true not just of the overtones of mysticism and the Mass which we have already considered, but also of features such as, for example, the numerous reminiscences of the Song of Songs in Gottfried’s description of the Minnegrotte (compare, for example, the references to cedar wood in Song of Songs 1,17 and Tristan line 17022; to rocks in 2,14 and 16763; to ivory in 5,14, 7,4 and line 17025; and to a bed of love in 1,16, 3,1 and lines 16977–78; the Songs of Songs, at least as understood in the Middle Ages, is of course [along with Classical authors such as Ovid] a precursor of Gottfried also in the general sense that it suggests parallels between secular, physical love and love for God). Religious language is also evident in the image of conversion associated with the dawning of Riwalin’s love for Blanscheflur (er greif in ein ander leben; / ein niuwe leben wart ime gegeben [For now he laid hold of a new life, a new life was given to him; 937–38]), and in the (decidedly bold) narratorial statement that Riwalin and Blanscheflur enhaeten niht ir leben / umb kein ander himelrîche gegeben (would not have given this life of theirs for any heavenly kingdom; 1371–72). The significance of such parallels and overtones should not be underestimated; but it should not be overestimated either. For one thing, the analogies between religious and secular love Gottfried suggests are invariably, indeed almost by definition, inexact and limited. Mystical love, for example, is in its essence “a yearning for return to a larger love, an envelopment in a larger entity, the extinction of the individual in a larger light” (Jackson 4); and none of these descriptions remotely applies to the love of Tristan and Isolde. Moreover the kinship between Tristanlove and the Eucharist, powerfully presented as it is, is a decidedly distant one: after all, it is Tristan and Isolde’s story, rather than they themselves, which is described as bread (230–33); that story can have implications for this life only; and it is efficacious only for edele herzen (noble hearts), rather than potentially contributing to the salvation of all. We must never forget that we are dealing here with a romance, not a theological treatise, and that the kind of imprecise, if eloquent, allusions to the spiritual realm that we have been discussing should not be taken as programmatic of any particular religious view. Certainly interpretations which suggest that

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Gottfried uses them to promote Tristan-love as an alternative religion to Christianity are ultimately unpersuasive. One must also bear in mind that by no means all of the religious images and vocabulary Gottfried uses have the effect of placing the love of Tristan and Isolde in a positive light. That love is, after all, profoundly ambiguous — destructive and fatal as well as uniquely satisfying; and some of its more baleful as well as some of its more glorious aspects are at least suggested by religious motifs. The consumption of the potion itself, for example, is described in terms that possess overtones not just of the Eucharist, but also of the Fall. Isolde’s actions of first drinking the potion and then handing it to Tristan (11683–85) must surely remind most readers of Eve’s eating from the apple and then proffering it to Adam; and this implicit association is reinforced strongly by the numerous references in this part of the work to death, which must inevitably result from the consumption of the potion (see 11674–76, 11691–93, 11703, 11706). Nor are motifs that can be seen to link Tristan-love with the Fall limited only to this episode. Such an association is at least hinted at in Brangaene’s later statement “daz der vâlant sînen spot / mit uns alsus gemachet hât” [“that the Devil has mocked us in this fashion”; 12128]) in causing Tristan and Isolde to drink it; there are numerous subsequent references to the inevitably fatal nature of Tristan-love (e.g. 12487–89, 18421–26, 18467–85, 18510–11); and, above all, there are strong overtones of the Fall in the scene that immediately precedes the lovers’ being discovered flagrante delicto at Mark’s court: Isolde sets up a bed (18145–47) in an orchard (18139) at noon (18126) and invites Tristan to meet her there (18159–61); and the upshot is, of course, that Tristan nu tete [. . .] rehte als Âdam tete. / daz obez, daz ime sîn Êve bôt, / daz nam er und az mit ir den tôt (Now Tristan did just as Adam did; he took the fruit which his Eve offered him and with her ate his death; 18162–64). References to the Fall in Tristan are, like so many other aspects of the text, multi-faceted and ambiguous: the Minnegrotte, for example, to which the lovers are banished in disgrace, is in certain respects ironically reminiscent of the Garden of Eden before the Fall, and several references in Gottfried’s disquisition on the dangers of surveillance (the huoteexcursus, 17817–18114) imply that a form of amorous “living paradise” (“daz lebende paradîs,” 18066, 18088) is possible on earth — albeit for couples whose female half is rather more concerned with the dictates of honor and moderation than is Isolde (see 17986–91, 18009–10). Nevertheless there can be little doubt that, overall, Gottfried’s association of the protagonists’ love with the Fall implies a certain distancing of himself

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from their activities and priorities, and constitutes an example of religious imagery being used to undermine, rather than enhance, the reader’s confidence in the spirituality and exemplarity of their love. The sense which that reader sometimes has of a certain gulf between Tristan-love and Christian values is reinforced by the fact that God does relatively little to further the interests of the lovers. Indeed, after the potion has been consumed, he is portrayed as playing a significantly less important role in the motivating and arranging of human affairs than he has done previously — an assertion that is arguably borne out by the statistic that, of the 288 references to God referred to earlier, no less than 184 occur before the potion is drunk (see Hall 90–91). God is certainly not absent from Tristan and Isolde’s lives post-potion: as we have already seen, they pray with apparent success for his protection when they need his help in the orchard scene (see 14637–38, 14644–45, 14653–54, 14706–9), and he enables Isolde to survive her ordeal (15717–46). Nevertheless he is not mentioned or addressed by them as often as he was previously; and the two episodes just referred to are particularly good examples of what we described earlier as human attempts to instrumentalize and control God, rather than being directed by him. Moreover Hahn is correct to argue that, insofar as God can be said with confidence to intervene at all in these situations, he does so exclusively in order to protect the lovers’ lives and honor, rather than to promote or reward their love (175). It is as though his role in matters amatory is largely usurped by Minne, aller herzen lâgaerîn (Love, waylayer of all hearts; 11711) who, almost immediately after the consumption of the potion, is described as having “stolen in” and ê sî’s wurden gewar, / dô stiez s’ir sigevanen dar / und zôch si beide in ir gewalt [before they were aware of it she had planted her victorious standard in their two hearts and bowed them beneath her yoke; 11713–15]). Perhaps one should not be surprised that, in the face of this onslaught from the “goddess Love” (4809, 16723), the “courtly God” (15552) should be particularly concerned with questions of honor and conventional morality. Throughout the romance, after all, God is notably closely associated with characters who are courtly, or who at least remain within the courtly pale. There is a sense, indeed, in which, the more courtly the person, the more God is likely both to figure in his or her conversation and to be active in his or her life. This is true especially of that paragon Rual li Foitenant, who, in the first part of the romance, is described on numerous occasions as praying to God, speaking of him and indeed pleasing him (see 3835–36, 3841–44, 3851, 3897, 4130, 4153, 4177, 4304, 4360–61); and, in the section of the romance fol-

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lowing the drinking of the potion, God features particularly prominently in the life and conversation of the excellent Brangaene (see 11700–702, 12099–100, 12127–30, 12478–79, 12783, 12837–48, 14400–01, etc.). One is also struck by the fact that, after he has finally left Cornwall and Isolde’s side, and in a sense therefore rejoined the courtly world, Tristan’s speeches once more become peppered with references to God (there are for example already five in the speech he makes at Rual’s grave, 18654–69) — just as they were formerly, before his consumption of the potion. Again we must be wary of over-interpretation. As we have already seen, many of the mentions and invocations of God that pervade the discourse of courtly people are essentially formulaic and hence of little thematic importance; moreover, whilst God may not feature prominently in Tristan and Isolde’s “uncourtly” life together in Cornwall, he is not entirely absent from it either; and in any event one must remember that not only God, but also courtly values and lifestyle are not infrequently presented by Gottfried in an ambiguous and questionable light. To postulate a neat binary opposition between a courtly God embodying orthodox Christian values and uncourtly lovers pursuing their passion under the baleful aegis of a non-Christian goddess would therefore be misguided. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the narrator does at times insinuate that the potion and its implications create a certain disjunction between God and the lovers, and this must be taken into account when assessing the significance of the analogies between Tristan-love and love for God that are suggested elsewhere.

4 This statement brings us back once again to the profound ambiguity that characterizes so much of Gottfried’s presentation of God and use of religious motifs. It is possible, of course, that this ambiguity may seem more pervasive and intractable to the modern reader than it did to Gottfried’s contemporaries. Our understanding of the precise cultural and theological context in which he wrote is, after all, limited, especially given the paucity of reliable information we have concerning his own biography; and we are almost bound to approach Tristan, or any medieval text, with modern preconceptions about literature and about the world that encourage us to ask the wrong questions and seek answers to them in the wrong places. But there is more to it than that. A certain delight in ambiguity, in complexity, in paradox, even in opacity, is surely fundamental both to Gottfried’s narrative technique and to his authorial

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intention. The precise origins and nature of that delight are, of course, in themselves difficult to establish. Ilse Clausen has pointed to the importance of irony, which for Gottfried is arguably not just a literary technique, but also a Weltanschauung (152–200, especially 154). Rüdiger Schnell interprets the inconsistent and mutually contradictory elements of Tristan as an attempt on Gottfried’s part to stimulate reflection on the inconsistency and inadequacy of our attempts to perceive and assess reality (especially 5–8). By contrast, Hans Fromm and Irene LanzHubmann stress the influence on Gottfried of the antithetical-dialectical method of Peter Abelard, as demonstrated supremely in his Sic et non; at least one of the consequences of this influence is, according to LanzHubmann, that Gottfried presents himself as an “auctor absconditus” (48), a hidden author who “bietet nicht Hand: Er wirft Wertkonflikte auf, schürzt einen gordischen Knoten, den jeder Rezipient nur aufgrund einer persönlichen, subjektiven Wertentscheidung für sich persönlich lösen kann” (does not show his hand: he sets up conflicts of values, ties a Gordian knot, which every reader can untie for him- or herself personally only on the basis of a personal, subjective decision about those values; 52). Whatever the reasons for the ambiguities of Tristan, they are undeniably present; and to recognize and embrace them is not to admit defeat, but rather to begin to understand something of the work’s texture and purport. As Walter Haug has put it, it is wise “die Widersprüche anzunehmen und zu fragen, ob nicht das Verständnis ihrer Unlösbarkeit gerade der Schlüssel zum Verständnis des Werkes sein könnte” (to accept the contradictions and to ask whether their very insolubility might be the key to the understanding of the work; 1986, 41). That is sage and encouraging counsel — as long as we are willing to concede that such a key may not, or may no longer exist; and that even if it does, it will never be able to open every door in this most imposing and carefully guarded of literary edifices.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Gottfried von Strassburg. Gottfried von Strassburg. ‘Tristan.’ With the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. Arthur T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984.

Secondary Sources Allgaier, Karl (1983). Der Einfluß Bernhards von Clairvaux auf Gottfried von Straßburg. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Batts, Michael (1971). Gottfried von Straßburg. New York: Twayne. Baumgartner, Dolores (1978). Studien zu Individuum und Mystik im ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Göppingen: Kümmerle. Bayer, Hans (1978). Gralsburg und Minnegrotte: Die religiös-ethische Heilslehre Wolframs von Eschenbachs und Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Berlin: E. Schmidt. ———. (1996). “parasitus Golias. Gottfried von Straßburg (Gunther von Pairis) und die zeitkritisch-häretische Schulpoesie der Carmina Burana.” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 31: 39–80. Bekker, Hugo (1988). Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan: Journey through the Realms of Eros. Columbia, SC: Camden House. de Boor, Helmut (1940). “Die Grundauffassung von Gottfrieds Tristan.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 18: 262–306. Clausen, Ilse (1970). Der Erzähler in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan.’ Dissertation. Kiel, 1970. Cole, William D. (1995). “Purgatory vs. Eden: Béroul’s Forest and Gottfried’s Cave.” Germanic Review 70: 2–8. Dickerson, Harold D. (1972). “Language in Tristan as a Key to Gottfried’s Conception of God.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 3: 127–45. Dietz, Reiner (1974). Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg: Probleme der Forschung (1902–1970). Göppingen: Kümmerle. Dimler, G. Richard (1975). “Diu fossiure in dem steine: An Analysis of the Allegorical Nomina in Gottfried’s Tristan (16923–17070).” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 9: 13–46. Fromm, Hans (1973). “Gottfried von Straßburg und Abaelard.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 95: 196–216.

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Goerke, Hans (1952). Die Minnesphäre in Gottfrieds Tristan und die Häresie des Amalrich von Bena. Dissertation. Tübingen, 1952. Grubmüller, Klaus (1987). “ir unwarheit warbaeren. Über den Beitrag des Gottesurteils zur Sinnkonstitution in Gotfrids Tristan.” Philologie als Kulturwissenschaft: Studien zur Literatur und Geschichte des Mittelalters. Festschrift Karl Stackmann. Ed. Ludger Grenzmann et al. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 149–63. Hahn, Ingrid (1964). Review of Tax 1961. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 75: 171–78. Hall, Clifton D. (1992). A Complete Concordance to Gottfried von Straßburg’s ‘Tristan.’ Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Haug, Walter (1972). “âventiure in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 94: 93–111. ———. (1986). “Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan: Sexueller Sündenfall oder erotische Utopie?” Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses Göttingen 1985. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Vol. 1. 41–52. Heinze, Hartmut (1984). “Das gläserne Glück der Kinder Evas. Zur Grundstruktur von Gottfrieds Tristan.” Euphorion 78: 82–91. Jackson, W. T. H. (1971). The Anatomy of Love: The Tristan of Gottfried von Straßburg. New York: Columbia UP. Jacobson, Evelyn (1985). “Biblical Typology in Gottfried’s Tristan und Isolde.” Neophilologus 69: 568–78. Kerth, Thomas (1978). “With God on Her Side. Isolde’s Gottesurteil.” Colloquia Germanica 11: 1–18. Kolb, Herbert (1988). “Isoldes Eid. Zu Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan 15267–764.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 107: 321–35. ———. (1962). “Der minnen hûs. Zur Allegorie der Minnegrotte in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Euphorion 56: 229–47. Kunisch, Hermann (1971). “edelez herze — edeliu sêle. Vom Verhältnis höfischer Dichtung zur Mystik.” Mediaevalia litteraria. Festschrift Helmut de Boor. Ed. Ursula Hennig and Herbert Kolb. Munich: Beck. 413–50. Lachmann, Karl (1820). Auswahl aus den hochdeutschen Dichtern des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. Berlin: G. Reimer. Langmeier, Beatrice Margaretha (1978). Forschungsbericht zu Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Stoff- und Motivgeschichte für die Zeit von 1759–1925. Dissertation. Fribourg. Lanz-Hubmann, Irene (1989). “Nein unde jâ. Mehrdeutigkeit im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg: Ein Rezipientenproblem.” Deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen bis 1700. Vol. 5. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

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Lewes, Ülle Erika (1978). The Life in the Forest: The Influence of the St. Giles Legend on the Courtly Tristan Story. Chattanooga, TN: Tristania Monographs. Mergell, Bodo (1949). Tristan und Isolde: Ursprung und Entwicklung der Tristansage des Mittelalters. Mainz: Kirchheim. Mertens, Volker (1999). “Klosterkirche und Minnegrotte.” Literatur und Kunst im Spannungsfeld von Hof und Kloster. Ed. Nigel F. Palmer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 1–16. Nauen, Hans-Günther (1947). Die Bedeutung von Religion und Theologie im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Dissertation. Marburg. Picozzi, Rosemary (1971). A History of Tristan Scholarship. Bern: H. Lang. Quinn, Esther C. (1975). “Beyond Courtly Love: Religious Elements in Tristan and La Queste del Saint Graal.” In Pursuit of Perfection: Courtly Love in Medieval Literature. Ed. Joan M. Ferrante and George D. Economou. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat. 179–219. Ranke, Friedrich (1925). “Die Allegorie der Minnegrotte in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft. Geisteswiss. Kl. 2 (1925). 21– 39. Reprinted in Gottfried von Straßburg, ed. Alois Wolf. Darmstadt, 1973. Schnell, Rüdiger (1992). Suche nach Wahrheit: Gottfrieds ‘Tristan und Isold’ als erkenntniskritischer Roman. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Schröder, Werner (1979). “Text und Interpretation. Das Gottesurteil im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg.” Sitzungsberichte der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main 16/2. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner. Schwietering, Julius (1954). “Gottfried’s Tristan.” Germanic Review 29: 5–17. ———. (1943). Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg und die Bernhardische Mystik. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften. Stökle, Ulrich (1915). Die theologischen Ausdrücke und Wendungen im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Dissertation. Tübingen. Tax, Petrus (1961). Wort, Sinnbild, Zahl im Tristanroman: Studien zum Denken und Werten Gottfrieds von Straßburg. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Theisen, Joachim (2000). “Des Helden bester Freund. Zur Rolle Gottes bei Hartmann, Wolfram und Gottfried.” Geistliches in weltlicher und Weltliches in geistlicher Literatur des Mittelalters. Ed. Christoph Huber et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 153–69. Thomas, Neil (1988). “The Minnegrotte: Shrine of Love or Fools’ Paradise? Thomas, Gottfried and the European Development of the Tristan Legend.” Trivium (Lampeter) 23: 89–106. van Stockum, Th. C. (1963). “Die Problematik des Gottesbegriffs im Tristan des Gottfried von Straßburg.” Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks 26/9.

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Weber, Gottfried (1953). Gottfrieds von Straßburg ‘Tristan’ und die Krise des mittelalterlichen Weltbildes um 1200. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler. Weber, Gottfried, and Werner Hoffmann (1981). Gottfried von Straßburg. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Metzler. Willson, H. B. (1965). “The Old and the New Law in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Modern Language Review 60: 212–24. ———. (1957). “‘Vicissitudes’ in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Modern Language Review 52: 203–13. Ziegler, Vickie (1994). “A Burning Issue: Isolde’s Oath in its Historical Context.” The Germanic Mosaic: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Society. Ed. Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport/London: Greenwood Press. 73–82.

The Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde Ann Marie Rasmussen

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OTTFRIED’S TRISTAN AND ISOLDE CREATES one of the most complex and interesting constellations of female figures in all of medieval German literature. The agency and intelligent resolve shown by all the female figures — Blanscheflur, Tristan’s mother; Princess Isolde and her mother, Queen Isolde; Brangaene, Princess Isolde’s cousin and companion — stand in contrast to the dominant medieval clerical ideology of feminine passivity and weakness. Gottfried’s Tristan invites the reader to reflect on the similarities and differences between the lives of these female figures by creating between them a dense network of linkages and allusions based on kinship, imagery, allegory, and shared names. The story enacts what it means to be a woman through the enfolding of plot, character, and imagery, and through philosophical reflection, most notably in two episodes, Queen Isolde’s debate with the Irish seneschal (9820–982), and the narrator’s excursus on the practice of keeping noblewomen under surveillance to guarantee their chastity (17817– 18114). Gottfried’s elaborate and sympathetic treatment of the motherdaughter relationship is unique both in medieval German literature and among the pan-European Tristan stories. The relationship between Isolde and her companion, Brangaene, explores the complexities of women’s friendship. Finally, the figure of Isolde is presented in a sequence of contrasting images that pose fascinating and difficult questions about the work’s overarching philosophy of love: Is Isolde the personification of love or love’s victim, the temptress Eve or a “new” type of woman ennobled by her love and her suffering? In short, Gottfried’s Tristan challenges its readers to think about gender, that is to say, about what it means to be a man or a woman in the universe of this work. Asking about gender means examining the values, assumptions, and practices regarding masculinity and femininity in specific cultures at specific times. It means asking about, for example, beliefs about men’s and women’s cognitive abilities, about their sexual and emotional characteristics, about the nature and effect of reproductive roles upon the

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understanding and practice of what it means to be male or female, and about the unequal distribution of economic, social, and political resources in favor of men that marks patriarchal societies. It also means examining cultural beliefs about the physical world of the body and the meanings the body acquires. As the literary critic Toril Moi has recently pointed out, “although our biology is fundamental to the way we live in the world [here Moi is thinking not just of the sexed body, but also of such biological events as age and disease], biological facts alone give us no grounds for concluding anything at all about the meaning and value they will have for the individual and for society” (69). When reading a story written 800 years ago, it is important to keep in mind Jo Ann McNamara’s reminder that understandings of the physical body as a sexed body are also historically shaped: “sexual similarities and differences appear and disappear in historical context. The gender system requires strong institutional support to resolve the tensions between them” (1). What, then, is the nature of femininity and masculinity in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde, and how do they relate to one another? What kinds of assumptions about femininity and masculinity are enacted by the characters? Are there differences between the way male and female figures act and the attitudes and beliefs expressed by the narrator or other characters about femininity and masculinity? Do imagery, plot, and rhetoric reveal other assumptions and beliefs about gender? In Gottfried’s Tristan the reader will discover, I think, a way of thinking about gender that is recognizable, yet also foreign and different. Familiar may well be the “sexual-political system of the world” (Schultz 103) and the asymmetry of power relationships, which favor men and disadvantage women. In Gottfried’s world, men occupy all positions of political, social, and economic power, and ideal masculinity is associated with agency — the ability to take action in the world — and with cognitive and volitional strength of purpose. Familiar as well may be women’s subordination to men politically and economically, and the relatively consistent pattern of representing women as objects of male desire and as instruments through which men pursue their ends. Yet the reader may be surprised to meet a man such as the Irish seneschal whose actions and words make him, in the text’s gender system, not a man but a woman, or a woman such as the Irish Queen Isolde, whose beauty is presented without erotic overtones and who displays the political and intellectual strengths of a virtuous man. Perhaps there is another way to ask these questions. What, we might ask, does Gottfried’s text tell us of femininity and of the situation of

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women in the world? Do the categories through which it thinks about women and femininity derive primarily from the old and august tradition of clerical misogyny, a learned tradition that at its best disdained women as weaker vessels, garrulous, contentious, and carnal, and at its worst despised and feared them? Or does it owe more to learned clerical categories of pro-feminine thought that sought to commend and praise women and that also formed an important — though lesser known — stream of intellectual thought in the Middle Ages? Implicit in this essay is my belief that Gottfried’s work belongs in the pro-feminine tradition. The portrayals of the women are complex and compassionate. The text stages sympathetically the kind of problems that women endure because of their limited access to power, their subordination to men, and the double standard of sexual morality to which society subjects them. Isolde’s mother, Queen Isolde, is portrayed as a shrewd political leader and diplomat without any detectable skepticism, cynicism, or hostility on the narrator’s part. Nevertheless, it is perhaps, as Alcuin Blamires writes, “inevitable that, within such a patriarchal culture, many medieval profeminine texts do indeed rehearse a male point of view” (4), and this is true of Gottfried’s Tristan, as will be illustrated in the discussion of the heroine, Isolde. Indeed, the fantasy of romantic, erotic love in the Tristan legend was lucidly critiqued by Leslie W. Rabine two decades ago, in a feminist analysis that has lost none of its force even now. But to say that a great work of fiction such as Gottfried’s Tristan remains at some level entangled in the contradictions of its times, even when and as it reflects on those contradictions, does not, I think, diminish its extraordinary achievement or its power to reveal through its fantasies and fictions some of the deeper longings and beliefs upon which modern lives continue to be built.

Blanscheflur, Tristan’s Mother Gottfried’s Tristan opens by recounting the tragic love story of Tristan’s parents, Riwalin, the young and reckless lord of Parmanie in France, and Blanscheflur, who is the sister of King Mark of Cornwall. After attacking and defeating his overlord, Riwalin journeys to Mark’s court to join in the springtime round of courtly festivities and tournaments. His youth, beauty, and prowess — remarked in a short passage by all the ladies at the festivities (704–19) — capture Blanscheflur’s heart; for her, it is love at first sight. Chance brings Riwalin to Blanscheflur’s side, and in response to his chivalrous, yet entirely conventional greeting she uses all of her rhetorical skill to suggest the love she cannot openly reveal. Pondering Blanscheflur’s mysterious words, Riwalin at last grasps Blanscheflur’s

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message, and in response, falls in love with her himself. She follows up her mysterious words with longing glances that further nourish his passion for her. Their secret love flourishes. A pattern has been established that holds throughout their love affair: Riwalin, the aggressor in war, is not the initiating partner in this love affair; that role falls to Blanscheflur. She falls in love first, and then finds a way to elicit and foster a like response from Riwalin. When shortly thereafter Riwalin is grievously wounded defending King Mark’s land and brought back to die, Blanscheflur has herself smuggled into his bed chamber disguised as a poor, female physician. There, her kisses and embraces elicit a physical response from the dying man, and Tristan is conceived. When Riwalin recovers and is called back to his homeland to repel the invasions of his overlord, he secretly goes to Blanscheflur’s chamber to take leave of her. There it is Blanscheflur again who moves the relationship to a new stage. She reveals the pregnancy and then describes the social and political nature of her predicament, thereby eliciting — some might say compelling — Riwalin’s offer of protection and a continuing relationship. The characterization of Blanscheflur introduces themes, motifs, and images about gender that reappear throughout the work. Like all the noble female protagonists in the story, Blanscheflur is not only surpassingly beautiful, but also a skilled and persuasive speaker, and a woman who, while preserving courtly decorum and protocols, finds ways to take action to get what she wants. Her disguise as a doctor anticipates the crucial roles Queen Isolde and Princess Isolde will play as healers. Her story prefigures the link between femininity, eroticism, and love-death. Blanscheflur’s corpselike swoon beside the gravely wounded Riwalin precedes their sexual union, which is initiated by the reawakened Blanscheflur’s kisses. Blanscheflur’s impassioned embrace kindles Riwalin’s dwindling life force, yet at the same time the narrator comments that the sexual act in which Tristan is conceived almost kills Riwalin, who recovers only because of God’s intervention. Further, the reader is shown that women rely on one another for companionship and for help in dealing with the threats and predicaments to which society’s gender roles consign them. Just as Queen Isolde, and later Princess Isolde, are aided by Brangaene, Blanscheflur is aided by a female confidante, an old nursemaid who arranges the assignation with the mortally wounded Riwalin and, it is implied, helps get Blanscheflur secretly on board the departing Riwalin’s ship. Blanscheflur’s portrayal also establishes that in this story sexual desire is actively experienced by both women and men, though as Schultz

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points out, it is presented rhetorically in different ways. Blanscheflur is not condemned for her passion, but rather portrayed as a devoted lover and wife. But while the emotional experience of passion may be quite similar for Riwalin and Blanscheflur, the story makes clear that its physical and social effects are not. The pregnant Blanscheflur describes for Riwalin — who had apparently been ready to regretfully end the affair in order to resume the violent feud with his overlord — the danger of childbirth, as well as the shame, dishonor, and threat of death to which this illegitimate pregnancy exposes her (1454–1510). This scene reveals differences between men’s and women’s choices and possibilities and suggests that different social and moral standards operate for men and women. Blanscheflur alone would face almost certain dishonor, banishment, and loss of status, while Riwalin seems to have the option to abandon her and maintain his social standing and his lordship. It is important to note that the text does not seek to underwrite or legitimize this double standard. It is simply presented as a social fact, one that Blanscheflur and Riwalin overcome in a delicate negotiation that bridges this gender inequality with affection, gentility, honor, and trust. The flight to Parmanie and the hasty marriage that follows mark the end of Blanscheflur’s agency. Now a wife in need of protection, she is left in the care of Riwalin’s marshal, and shortly thereafter Riwalin is slain in battle. Blanscheflur, overcome with grief — the romance says that her sorrow turns her to stone — loses her ability to speak and to mourn. After four days of torment she delivers Tristan and dies. The tale of Tristan’s parents closes with their deaths, to which the narrator adds a short and moving epilogue in which he expresses his shock and pity at Blanscheflur’s terrible suffering and lamentable death, and specifically exhorts the “good men” in his audience to imitate his sympathy and compassion for the trials of women.

Queen Isolde, the Heroine’s Mother Though a direct comparison of Gottfried’s text with his source is not possible, it is highly plausible that Gottfried himself elaborated the remarkable tale of mother-daughter devotion that is one of the hallmarks of his Tristan and Isolde (see the article by Wilfried Wagner). In all versions of the story, the entire plot concerning fated, adulterous, erotic love is set in motion by the gift the mother has prepared for her daughter, the love potion. Yet in Eilhart’s Tristrant, the queen is unnamed and virtually absent from the story, which assigns all of the actions of Gottfried’s Queen Isolde (with the exception of brewing and bestowing the

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love potion) to her daughter, Princess Isolde. Gottfried’s full account of the queen and the mother-daughter relationship fleshes out the story and in the process gives the reader one of the most interesting fictional portrayals of a powerful medieval woman that has come down to us (see Rasmussen 1996). The episodes in which Queen Isolde plays a key role occupy about 4,300 lines (7165–11517), a little more than a fifth of the uncompleted epic. She is introduced into the story as a highly skilled medical practitioner by her brother Morold during his duel with Tristan: diu erkennet maneger hande / wurze und aller crûte craft / und arzâtlîche meisterschaft (She is versed in herbs of many kinds, in the virtues of all plants, and in the art of medicine; 6948–50). Even the hero, Tristan, owes everything to the queen’s intelligence, skill, and resolve. In the course of the story she saves his life three times: first, when she heals him, in his disguise as Tantris, from the poisoned sword wound inflicted by her brother Morold; second, when she cures Tantris/Tristan, the dragon slayer, from the dragon’s poison; and third, when she restrains Princess Isolde from murdering Tristan in the bath with his own sword when she realizes that Tristan, the killer of Morold, and her tutor Tantris, the dragon slayer, are one and the same man. Recalling that Queen Isolde brews the love potion, it may surprise the reader to learn that her first and last appearances in the story occur with her daughter, Princess Isolde, in scenes of mourning and grief. She is first depicted grieving deeply with her daughter, Princess Isolde, over Morold’s death (7165). She leaves the story in another scene of sorrow and grief, Princess Isolde’s departure for Cornwall, which has the finality of death for mother and daughter, who will never see one another again. In her final speech Queen Isolde entrusts her daughter to the care of her niece, Brangaene, in words that leave no doubt about the deep love she bears her daughter: ich bevilhe dir Îsôte / vil tiure und vil genôte. / an ir sô lît mîn beste leben (I most dearly and urgently commend Isolde to your care. The better part of my life is bound up with her; 11469–71). Her final action in the story is to shower kisses on her departing niece and daughter (11516–17). The opening scene of grieving over the death of Morold explicitly connects Queen Isolde and her daughter to mourning behavior that is described as typical for women:

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diu künigîn sîn swester, der leit was aber noch vester, ir jâmer unde ir clagenot. sî unde ir tohter Îsôt die quelten manege wîs ir lîp, als ir wol wizzet, daz diu wîp vil nâhe gênde clage hânt, dâ in diu leit ze herzen gânt. (7165–72) (But the grief of his sister the Queen, and her sorrow and lamentation, were much more vehement. She and her daughter Isolde tormented themselves in one way and another — you know in what a heartrending fashion women behave when they are deeply afflicted. [Translations of Gottfried’s text are from Hatto.])

The notion of a close connection between women and ritualistic mourning behaviors is traditional in many societies; what is of interest here is that the narrator is at pains to tell us that the grieving behavior of the queen and her daughter arises out of real, experienced sorrow and pain. The scene of Tristan’s conception established an erotic connection not just between wounding and healing (see Tax) but also between femininity, grief, and death. This scene removes (for the time being) the erotic element from the nexus (though not the physical one, since we are told that the queen and princess kiss Morold’s severed head and hand) to underscore the connection between femininity and grieving. The women’s mourning differs sharply from the immediately preceding scene, in which the warrior Tristan, dealing his enemy a mortal blow to the head, mocks and exults as Morold expires. These contrasting responses to death are organized around traditional concepts of gender roles, which delegate to noblewomen the enactment of grief and sorrow, while warriors (men who kill) respond to the deaths they inflict with a cold, almost gloating triumphalism. To my knowledge the workings of this cultural paradigm in Tristan have not been fully explored; as we saw in the narrator’s response to Blanscheflur’s death, men’s grief can also be presented as necessary and appropriate. In any event, the narrative’s focus on these traditional and venerated roles for women as mourners resonates with theological models for an ideal of femininity. These scenes establish and enhance the respectability and admirability of mother and daughter. Queen Isolde is consistently portrayed as a wise woman, both in the specific sense of a woman learned in the arts of medicine and magic, and in the broader sense of political and psychological astuteness. Her power

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as a healer clearly derives from her knowledge of plant lore and medicine. She uses a special instrument to remove the splinter of Tristan’s sword from Morold’s skull. She heals Tristan twice. At least once she uses her knowledge of plants not to heal but to harm, concocting poison for Morold’s sword for which she alone knows the antidote. This poison in fact confirms her consummate mastery of medicinal lore, because every learned physician has failed in the task of treating the poisoned wound Morold inflicted on Tristan. The duality of healing and harming, and the secrecy associated at times with it, point to the realm of magic, an area in which Queen Isolde also possesses remarkable occult powers. Faced with the Irish seneschal’s false claim to be the dragon slayer, the queen is able to summon a truth-telling dream (9298–305). She brews the magical love potion, making her the producer of that which symbolically unites wounding and healing, grief, love, and death. The fact that magic and medicine are not strictly divided in the portrayal of Queen Isolde corresponds well to medieval theory and practice (see McCracken). Yet the tale does not partition medicine into lay medicine, which had both male and female practitioners, and learned, literate medicine, which was exclusively the domain of men (whether as practitioners, teachers, students and/or clerics), a division that had in fact emerged during Gottfried’s lifetime (see Green). Queen Isolde is imagined as a wise, knowledgeable, powerful, and respected female medical practitioner of the highest social status, but she does not, it appears, own or consult books. At the end of the story in Gottfried’s source, Princess Isolde has taken over her mother’s role as a renowned female healer, yet as with her mother, we do not learn how she acquired her medical knowledge. Perhaps in Gottfried’s time it seemed self-evident that women’s knowledge of medical practice was transmitted orally. Further research will be necessary to clarify this important issue. Like most noble mothers in medieval fiction, Queen Isolde attends to her daughter’s upbringing and guides her into a proper marriage. (On mothers and daughter in medieval German literature, see Miklautsch 1991 and Rasmussen 1997.) She has recognized Tantris/ Tristan’s extraordinary gifts and keeps him on to instruct Princess Isolde, who becomes under his tutelage an equally gifted linguist and musician. What is unique in this portrayal of maternal guidance is that the queen is also depicted as possessing a shrewd political intelligence and resolve that is in harmony with her love for her daughter. The entwining of these two strands — maternal love and political astuteness — is enacted in scenes that are some of the most dramatic and interesting in the entire epic: the story of detection surrounding the Irish seneschal, who has deceitfully

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claimed Princess Isolde’s hand in marriage, and the juridical scenes following it, in which the queen successfully wards off the dreaded mesalliance by humiliating the seneschal, delivers up to the court the true dragon slayer, Tristan, and through him, proposes an honorable and politically advantageous marriage for Isolde. Leadership, resolve, good judgment, prudence, and maternal love all characterize Queen Isolde. These traits are imagined as reinforcing and supporting one another; all of the action in these scenes is interwoven with the queen’s words of comfort and reassurance to her daughter. In the first public hearing it is the queen, and not the king, who acts as prosecutor, humiliating the seneschal for his pretense of manly courage in order to gain the short postponement needed to prepare the final evidence of the seneschal’s deceit. Before the first public hearing takes place, we are told of a private conversation between the king and the queen, in which the queen tells the king to turn the hearing over to her and to order her to speak. At no time does the queen tell the king any of the secrets she has discovered, only reassuring him in general terms that she knows the truth. As I have argued at length elsewhere, these scenes represent “a critical examination of the range, the limits, and the dependencies of the power of a wise and well-respected queen” and provide testimony about the kind of political power that “the queen attempts to secure for her daughter (in her marriage) through the love potion” (Rasmussen 1997, 120). Gottfried also used these episodes to introduce the story’s first reflection on gender. When first the seneschal’s claim to have won the Princess and then his avowals of affection for her are brusquely rejected by the queen, the seneschal launches into a diatribe on female fickleness that rehearses a number of misogynist stereotypes about women, such as: “I can see that you behave just like other women. You are all so constituted in body, nature, and feelings that you must think the bad good and the good bad” (9866–71). The queen reacts to this by agreeing with the seneschal and then skewering him with his own arguments: “You are too deeply versed in femininity, you are far too much advanced in it. It has robbed you of your manhood!” (9906– 8). She then challenges the seneschal to leave womanly ways to women such as herself and reclaim his manhood by owning up to the truth that he did not slay the dragon: “Thus falls to Queen Isolde the paradoxical role of publicly defining herself as a woman by assenting to the misogynist discourse that brands all women fickle, in order to negotiate and set aright the standards of masculinity” (Rasmussen 1996, 48). It is striking that the queen invokes gender conformity without embodying it. She is not fickle, but resolute, not “full of contradictions” but rather truthful

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and trustworthy, not frail but strong. Her performance in public enacts masculine virtues, and this, the story suggests, is a praiseworthy thing.

Brangaene Brangaene appears at the Irish court as the relative and inseparable, intimate companion of Queen Isolde and her daughter, Princess Isolde. Her first words in the story come as the three women (accompanied by a male servant), have just discovered the true dragon slayer. Brangaene’s first speech in the work, ez ist ein zunge, dunket mich (9422), correctly identifies the noxious piece of the dragon clutched by the unconscious Tristan, a tongue, which bears witness to the truth that Tristan, not the seneschal, slew the dragon. Symbolically, it directs the reader’s attention to the work’s central conceptual focus on the tangled connections between language, evidence, and truth: truth-telling and lying, honesty and deceit, and the possibility to shrewdly manipulate others by means of rhetorical dexterity. In her role as adviser, companion, and confidant to the lovers, Brangaene has a special relationship to this linguistic realm. Adept at persuasion, rhetorical double-speak, and artful linguistic deceit, she helps the lovers conceal the truth of their illicit love. Brangaene’s immediate identification of the tongue also reminds the reader that she recognizes things for what they are. Brangaene’s piercing grasp of reality, no matter how difficult or grim, earns her the epithet diu wîse (far-seeing, wise; 12051). This quality of mind plays a role in the development of events long before it makes her friendship invaluable to the lovers. When the dragon-slayer Tristan is revealed to be Morold’s slayer from two years past, Queen Isolde has already been duped by him into giving a pledge of protection, an act that stands in the way of her exacting vengeance for his killing of her beloved brother. As the duty — and indeed desire — to take revenge wars with her obligation to honor her pledge, Queen Isolde turns to Brangaene for advice. Brangaene counsels both mother and daughter to set aside vengeance and focus on the aid that only Tristan, the true dragon slayer, can give them in vanquishing the false seneschal in the upcoming trial. Brangaene’s advice that past grievances, however painful, must be set aside in order to deal with immediate, pressing realities is made all the more convincing by her reminder that she, though humbler in station, is nevertheless also a relative of Morold. Brangaene is also implicated in the passion that ensnares the lovers because it is her lack of vigilance that sets the love plot in motion. Queen Isolde entrusts Brangaene with the care of Princess Isolde and secretly

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gives her the love potion together with strict instructions that it is to be hidden and served only to Mark and Isolde on their wedding night. Yet when Brangaene is not watching, a lady-in-waiting finds the potion and, mistaking it for wine, serves it to Tristan and Isolde. (A similar lapse of watchfulness on Brangaene’s part will prompt Tristan’s banishment from Mark’s court later in the tale.) Brangaene’s subsequent remorse and shame, as well as, presumably, her knowledge that the potion’s secret magic is strong, immediate, and irreversible, bind her inextricably to the fates of Isolde and Tristan. And they will need her. Brangaene becomes their confidant and advisor already on board ship, recognizing the lovers’ plight and counseling them to avoid scandal by concealing their assignations. She will continue to play the role of consoler, intermediary, and advisor throughout the story, as the deceptions and secrets shared by the three accumulate. The first of many predicaments arises as the ship nears its destination: how will Isolde conceal from Mark that she is no longer a virgin? With shrewdness born equally of innocence and desperation, Isolde begs Brangaene to take Isolde’s place in the marriage bed. Deeply mindful of her own guilt, Brangaene agrees. In all versions of the romance, Isolde’s lost virginity is a terrible problem requiring no commentary or explanation. It is always a woman’s problem (no one asks or cares whether Tristan is a virgin), and it is apparently rendered particularly acute by the high status of the marriage partners. It also makes visible the need for solidarity and trust among women, and opens up a narrative space for a complex exploration of female friendship. Brangaene’s comfort, help, and trustworthiness are particularly important to Isolde, for as Queen of Cornwall she is closely scrutinized by the court, without kin, protectors, or close companions aside from Brangaene, and her love affair with Tristan puts her in constant danger. This context explains, to a certain extent, what has been to many readers and scholars one of the more troubling episodes in the story: Isolde’s testing of her friend Brangaene. In her first months at court, a naive Isolde only partially comprehends her dependence on Brangaene and does not understand that female solidarity and friendship are necessary to maintaining the love affair with Tristan. Fearful and distrustful of Brangaene, Isolde secretly hires two foreign squires to murder her and report back Brangaene’s dying words. She then asks Brangaene to go out and gather fresh herbs, and sends the squires along as “protection.” When the squires prepare to assassinate her, Brangaene saves her skin by telling them that the only “harm” she has ever done the queen is that she at first refused to lend Isolde a clean, white shift in

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exchange for Isolde’s dirtied one when Isolde married. This initial hesitation, she says, might have incited Isolde’s anger but she has otherwise never overstepped Isolde’s wishes (12798–839). That this story is in fact an allegory of Brangaene’s substitution for Isolde in the marriage bed is entirely lost on the assassins (that is Brangaene’s intention, of course), who are rather so perplexed by the tale and the pity they feel for the girl that they let her live, bind her high in a tree (“lest the wolves should get her before their return,” 12867–68), and return to Isolde’s chambers. Here they pretend to have carried out her orders, and repeat Brangaene’s story. Isolde immediately comprehends both the story’s hidden message and the meaning of Brangaene’s choice to speak allegorically. Not only has Brangaene always acted in accordance with Isolde’s wishes, even in the face of death she does not betray Isolde’s secrets (Brangaene’s use of allegory is explored in C. Stephen Jaeger’s article from 1971). Isolde threatens the squires, vehemently denies her initial orders, is overjoyed to learn that Brangaene is still alive, and welcomes her back with hugs and kisses. This test has been Brangaene’s ordeal, and passing it seals the women’s trust and faith in one another. There is no question that Isolde behaves badly here. Even the narrator scathingly remarks diu sorchafte künigîn / diu tete an disen dingen schîn, / daz man laster unde spot / mêre vürhtet danne got (In this the fearful Queen showed that people dread scandal and derision more than they fear the Lord; 12709–12). For many scholars, this episode simply cannot be reconciled with, for example, the prologue’s claims that Isolde is a protagonist worthy of emulation. Yet it is also worth noting that after Tristan and Isolde fall in love the narrative is dominated by the theme of testing and trials, and so it seems only fitting that this female friendship should be tested as well. (Gottfried’s Old French source explores further the strains experienced by both women within their friendship. In these scenes, which occur after Gottfried’s text breaks off, Brangaene and Isolde quarrel with one another, and it is Tristan who reconciles them with one another.) Can the thematic context of female friendship shed any light on this problem of interpretation? Neither the narrator nor the characters offer any explanations based on assumptions about woman’s nature; notions of gender are not brought into play. But the narrative does go to some trouble to suggest that Isolde is frightened, naive, and bereft. Isolde, it appears, has much to learn about her new position at court that can only be taught by a trusted female companion who understands better than she the gendered constraints and demands that court life places on women. In episodes occurring only a little later, Brangaene tutors Isolde

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in countering the traps and tests to which she is subjected by her increasingly suspicious husband, Mark. Here the reader sees that Isolde is dependent on Brangaene’s insight, and that she is in dire need of instruction by a skilled rhetorician such as Brangaene if she is to survive. King Mark seeks to ensnare Isolde by asking her which member of the court should be entrusted with her care when he undertakes a lengthy journey. Isolde’s innocent and truthful response — that it should be Tristan — arouses the king’s anger and doubt. Told of this conversation, Brangaene explains to Isolde that the question was a trap, and the truth exactly the wrong answer. She then teaches Isolde how to lie convincingly to Mark and soothe his suspicions. Isolde is to insist that she thought their first conversation was a joke, that she in fact hates Tristan because he killed her uncle and only makes a show of friendship towards him in order to avoid censure. When the above scenario between Mark and Isolde is repeated, Brangaene again instructs Isolde in the art of lying. Isolde not only entirely erases Mark’s doubts, she also manages to deflect his suspicions of deceit toward the steward, Marjodoc, who has in fact been telling the truth all along. Isolde learns quickly and soon no longer needs Brangaene’s instruction. In the famous scene by the brook, in which Tristan and Isolde outwit the eavesdroppers Mark and Melot, Isolde demonstrates that she, too, understands the art of double-talk, managing to convey her love to Tristan and to assuage her husband’s doubts at one and the same time in sentences such as this: und gihe’s ze gote, daz ich nie ze keinem manne muot gewan und hiute und iemer alle man vor mînem herzen sint verspart niwan der eine, dem dâ wart der êrste rôsebluome von mînem magetuome. (14760–6) (For I declare before God that I never conceived a liking for any man but him who had my maidenhead, and that all others are barred from my heart, now and for ever.)

Brangaene’s and Isolde’s skilled double-talk is not shared by the male characters. Is it, then, presented as a part of woman’s nature, that feminine deceitfulness and contrariness mentioned by the seneschal? Women as cunning manipulators of language was a common misogynist stereotype. Or is the command of artful language presented as a laudable skill

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developed by these female figures in response to the many social, political, and economic disadvantages and vulnerabilities to which normative notions of femininity consign them? There is, arguably, one male figure in the story who shares this trait: the narrator himself. As evidence for his self-conscious mastery of “double-speak” one might point to the lengthy allegorical discourses in the story (Tristan’s knighting, the Love Grotto), which are addressed directly to the reader. The male narrator is also a crafty manipulator of language, and in this sense Brangaene and Isolde resemble him.

Princess Isolde, Tristan’s Lover This essay has already said much indirectly about the heroine, Isolde. She enters the romance as a fearful, young girl; at its fragmented ending, she is a grown woman striving towards the noble goal of bearing as a sacrifice for love the suffering love causes her. The descriptions of the young Princess Isolde in the Irish episodes are among Gottfried’s finest rhetorical flourishes. Tantris/Tristan tutors Princess Isolde in the French style of courtly refinement and manners, a manner of aristocratic self-fashioning that is new in Ireland. Both gifted and beautiful, Isolde becomes an exemplar of this new aristocratic mode, especially the gentle art of courtesy or morâliteit. / diu kunst diu lêret schoene site. / dâ solten alle vrouwen mite / in ir jugent unmüezic wesen (8004–7), which Hatto translates as “Bienséance, the art that teaches good manners, with which all young ladies should busy themselves.” She quickly learns to speak French and Latin, to play beautifully the fiddle, lyre, and harp, to sing suoze unde wol (well and sweetly; 7997) in a number of different styles and registers, to compose music and words, and to read and write. From the perspective of plot development, these early episodes establish Tristan and Isolde as the perfect match for one another intellectually and artistically long before the love potion overcomes the political enmity that exists between them and transforms their attachment into an erotic one. (The exile in the Love Grotto later in the story repeats the motif of their artistic and intellectual equality.) Yet the narrative makes explicit the erotic potential inherent in the refined joy that Isolde’s performances produce at her father’s court, dwelling at length on Isolde’s extraordinary accomplishments as an artist. Isolde’s songs are compared to those of the Sirens, sea nymphs from Greek mythology whose irresistible songs lure passing ships onto the rocks with a force that the text compares to magnetism (8076–141). Likewise, Isolde’s songs are presented as an irresistible force that draws the secret thoughts and

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desires of listeners towards her. Music and art are, to be sure, the key forces of seduction here, but Isolde’s beauty is a second, secret song that reinforces the first, making her audience more susceptible to the emotive, soul-opening, and dangerous force of her music and art. Nor can this effect be attributed entirely to Tantris/ Tristan’s teaching. Joan C. Dayan argues that even before Tristan/ Tantris has begun tutoring her, Isolde’s listening improves his performance (29). On a metaphorical level, the figure of Isolde establishes a connection between notions of feminine beauty and the dangerous enchantment of music and art, suggesting philosophically an aesthetics that privileges the feminine as a transfiguring force (Dayan 31). From the perspective of gender studies one notes that Isolde’s beauty has an almost alienated quality, that is to say, it inhabits her and is made visible in her quite apart from her own self-knowledge and volition. Isolde is not the agent of this force, which works through her, but rather its object or vessel. There is a gendered dynamic at work here. Not only is Tristan, the male hero, always active; he is exquisitely self-aware of the effect he has on others. Isolde the enchantress, on the other hand, may well sing and play, but she is presented as being unaware that she is the instrument of this aesthetics of beauty. This lack of awareness guarantees her innocence of carnal intent and her virtue, but it also entraps her in a subject position that is about embodiment rather than action. In this regard as in many others, masculinity and femininity are not created equal. Later in the Irish scenes, when Isolde recognizes Tristan but cannot bring herself to kill him, Isolde’s virtuous lack of action is given a gendered explanation: an ir striten harte die zwô widerwarte, die widerwarten conterfeit zorn unde wîpheit, diu übele bî ein ander zement [. . .] biz doch diu süeze wîpheit an dem zorne sige gestreit. (10257–61, 10277–78) (those two conflicting qualities, those warring contradictions, womanhood and anger, which accord so ill together, fought a hard battle in her breast [. . .] till at last sweet womanhood triumphed over anger.)

Here we have a clear statement of a social norm, “a perennial configuration whereby the masculine is constructed as ‘harsh,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘irascible,’ and the feminine is constructed as ‘soft,’ ‘merciful,’ and ‘pacific’”

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(Blamires 85). A courtly woman such as Princess Isolde has been raised to be cannot act on her anger. In these descriptions the feminine, embodied in the figure of Isolde, is that which holds opposites (passivity and action; danger and salvation; virtue and vice) in productive tension with one another. Throughout the work, depictions of Isolde “form a sequence of contrasting image structures” that build “a pattern of polarity” (Dick 15). In the Irish episodes the chief female protagonists are aligned with heavenly symbols in a positive manner: Queen Isolde with the dawn, Brangaene with the moon, and Princess Isolde with the sun (for a discussion of this symbolism see Deist, 1996). The imagery of the sun remains attached to Isolde, but as Ernst Dick points out, the sun becomes a more and more ambiguous image. The shining figure of the young Isolde begins to shift and change, and the later scenes in which she plays a key role — the testing of Brangaene, the ordeal, the discourse on surveillance and the banishment from the garden — are among the most hotly debated in the entire work. Isolde’s ordeal involves restoring the honor of the court, King Mark, and herself, which have been damaged by persistent rumors of Tristan and Isolde’s affair. A tormented Mark calls a council of bishops, who suggest that Isolde publicly undergo the ordeal of carrying a red-hot iron; if she is innocent God will protect her and she will not be burned (if she is guilty, Mark can presumably repudiate her then and there and so repair his reputation.) Trapped in this impossible situation, Isolde arranges for Tristan, disguised as an old pilgrim, to publicly carry her from her boat to shore, then stumble and fall on top of her. Her doctored oath — another example of double-speak — reflects this fact: “That no man in the world had carnal knowledge of me or lay in my arms or beside me but you [i.e. King Mark], always excepting the poor pilgrim whom, with your own eyes, you saw lying in my arms” (15706– 16). And so Isolde, whom we all know to be guilty, carries the red-hot iron and is not burned. Though there has been little agreement among scholars about this episode, the reader might consider first that throughout this entire episode the speakers focus on the injurious rumors of scandal rather than on establishing the “facts” of the case. It is not the truth per se that interests them, but the political damage being done to the court and to Mark’s reputation by these rumors. Because the positive outcome affirms the status quo, it is acceptable. Secondly, there is the problem of God’s acceptance of Isolde’s double-speak in what is arguably the most controversial passage in medieval German literature: “thus it was made manifest and confirmed to all the world that Christ in His

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great virtue is pliant as a windblown sleeve” (15733–36). Kelly Kucaba’s elegant study of this problem (1997) suggests that Isolde’s oath is an instance of elevated, poetic language being linked with the figure of Christ, who becomes for Gottfried an “aesthetic potential” (92), and that Isolde is forgiven by God so that she may reform her ways. In the framework of the tale, however, such a resolution cannot mean giving up her love for Tristan, but rather only striving to live it as discretely as possible, as indeed the lovers do for a time, especially in the episode of the Love Grotto. The discourse on surveillance is introduced by the narrator’s scathing remarks about King Mark’s lust for his wife, who he knows does not desire him. Because of this, Mark places Isolde under strict surveillance, a practice the narrator deplores in no uncertain terms. The discussion then turns to the question of women and sexual desire. As Peter Thurlow writes: The narrator parades the arguments of medieval clerical misogyny against the daughters of Eve, that is all women who are guilty of the typically feminine fault of disobedience, and then praises all women who with the Christian moral strength of men practice virtue by conquering their nature and deny their own sexuality for the sake of honour. At the end of the excursus on surveillance and women, he contrasts the good woman who denies her gender and her sexuality with a biderbe wîp, a noble woman who is capable of combining sexual love with honour by practising moderation, mâze, through avoiding the extremes of sexual abstinence and promiscuity. By practicing wîplîche güete and giving herself to one fortunate man, ein saelec man, she can grant him an earthly paradise of mutual loving. (407)

Does this praise depict Isolde? Are we to understand her as a virtuous woman? The discourse on surveillance is followed directly by the scene of discovery in the garden, in which Isolde, tormented by sexual desire because the surveillance placed over her makes it impossible for the lovers to meet, rashly summons Tristan to a noon-day tryst, where they are discovered in a sleeping embrace by Mark. The episode is directly compared to the Bible: Tristan as Adam and Isolde as the temptress Eve from whom he receives his death. Tristan must flee Cornwall and the lovers will see one another only intermittently until their deaths. As Stephen Jaeger has pointed out, this entire episode “forces the question of where Gottfried stands” (1999, 195). The debates on the answer to that question begin in the Middle Ages, with the medieval continuators of Gottfried’s fragmentary romance. They lay the blame for the downfall and death of a great hero, Tristan, squarely at the feet of the

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adulteress Isolde. To mention only a few modern commentators: Jaeger asserts that the didactic point of the surveillance episode is directed against Isolde, who “appears in this episode as a woman who abandons moderation with tragic results” (1999, 195). Annette Volfing similarly argues that “Isolde, having done so well for so long finally loses the battle with herself, and consequently slips out of the ranks of ideal women” (98), but Volfing also integrates the erotic paradise imagined in the surveillance episode into her discussion: “The only way that a woman can find universal approbation there (i.e. at Marke’s court) is to be so careful that she never gets caught. The world which will value the woman for what she really is, and which will appreciate being shown ‘ir minnen spor,’ is more likely to be the world of posterity — the select community of noble hearts, including the present readership” (97). Kurt Ruh states that the figure of Isolde is imagined here — again in that image of the union of opposites — in a theological polarity in which she represents both Eve, who brings about the downfall of man, and as Mary, whose suffering redeems him (243–47). This view is certainly upheld by Isolde’s parting words to Tristan, as she poignantly reiterates the philosophy of shared love and suffering, the edele herzen, with which Gottfried opened the work. Dallapiazza has argued from this scene of parting that it is in fact Tristan, and not Isolde as “Eve,” who fails to live up to the philosophy of love advocated in this work. Isolde remains faithful and true to Tristan throughout, he claims, while the later, fragmentary episodes show Tristan betraying Isolde by marrying Isolde of the White Hands, the final Isolde figure, whose story, however, largely falls into that part of the romance which Gottfried did not complete. (Mälzer traces the literary history of this Isolde, as well as the other Isolde figures; Moi comments that “Yseut of the White Hands becomes a terrifying illustration of the catastrophic consequences of frustrated sexual desire in women” [446].) Tristan thus falls away from the romance’s philosophy of love to which Isolde remains true. This explanation fits well with the story’s earlier attention to the grief of Isolde’s mother, Queen Isolde, which foreshadows Isolde’s suffering and at the same time models for young Isolde a way of expressing a human feeling — grief — through socially accepted forms of womanly behavior. When Isolde accepts the pain caused by her separation from her beloved, she holds fast to a religious ideal of constancy in suffering and so redeems the lapse into carnality brought about, the narrator has implied, by Mark’s abuses. Though the Irish seneschal deemed fickleness a woman’s trait, it is Tristan who is inconstant when he marries Isolde of the White Hands.

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Because Gottfried did not complete his work, we cannot know whether Isolde was destined to remain resolute and faithful to Tristan in the face of the immutable sorrow and pain caused by her steadfast love, though his source and the earlier parts of his story strongly support this supposition. Such a reading would sustain the story’s insistent critical representation of the “gender-power relations of the larger society” as “cultural paradigms by which patriarchy reproduces itself” (Schultz 103). It would also accord well with the story’s sympathetic portrayals of Blanscheflur, Queen Isolde, Brangaene, and Princess Isolde as fictional characters who uniquely embody the complexities of medieval understandings of gender.

Works Cited Primary Sources Gottfried von Strassburg. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. With the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. Arthur T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984.

Secondary Sources Blamires, Alcuin (1997). The Case for Women in Medieval Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dallapiazza, Michael (1995). “Männlich-Weiblich: Bilder des Scheiterns in Gottfrieds Tristan und Wolframs Titurel.” Arthurian Romance and Gender: Selected Proceedings of the XVIIth International Arthurian Congress. Ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel. Vol. 10. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 176–82. Dayan, Joan C. (1981). “The Figure of Isolde in Gottfried’s Tristan: Toward a Paradigm of Minne.” Tristania 6/2: 23–36. Deist, Rosemarie (1996). “The Description of Isolde and Iseut and Their Confidantes in Gottfried von Strassburg and Thomas de Bretagne.” Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 48: 271–82. Dick, Ernst (1986–87). “Gottfried’s Isolde: Coincidentia Oppositorum?” Tristania 12: 15–24. Green, Monica H. (1994). “The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading: Women and the Gendering of Medical Literacy.” Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1–74.

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Jaeger, C. Stephen (1971). “The Testing of Brangaene: Cunning and Innocence in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 70: 189– 206. Jaeger, C. Stephen (1999). Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Kucaba, Kelly (1997). “Höfisch inszenierte Wahrheiten: Zu Isolds Gottesurteil bei Gottfried von Straßburg.” Fremdes wahrnehmen — fremdes Wahrnehmen: Studien zur Geschichte der Wahrnehmung und zur Begegnung der Kulturen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Ed. Wolfgang Harms and C. Stephen Jaeger, in association with Alexandra Stein. Stuttgart: Hirzel. 73–94. Mälzer, Marion (1991). Die Isolde-Gestalten in den mittelalterlichen deutschen Tristan-Dichtungen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. McCracken, Peggy (1993). “Women and Medicine in Medieval French Narrative.” Exemplaria 5: 239–62. McNamara, Jo Ann (1999). “An Unresolved Syllogism: The Search for a Christian Gender System.” Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West. Ed. Jacqueline Murray. New York: Routledge. 1–24. Miklautsch, Lydia (1991). Studien zur Mutterrolle in den mittelhochdeutschen Grossepen des zwölften und dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. Erlangen: Palm und Enke. Moi, Toril (1992). “‘She Died Because She Came Too Late [. . .]’: Knowledge, Doubles and Death in Thomas’s Tristan.” Exemplaria 4: 103–31. Reprinted in What is a Woman? 422–50. Moi, Toril (1999). What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP. Rabine, Leslie W. (1980). “The Establishment of Patriarchy in Tristan and Isolde.” Women’s Studies 7: 19–38. Rabine, Leslie W. (1995). “Love and the New Patriarchy in Tristan and Isolde.” Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. Ed. Joan Tasker Grimbert. New York: Garland. 37–74. Rasmussen, Ann Marie (1996). “Ez ist ir g’artet von mir: Queen Isolde and Princess Isolde in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolde.” Arthurian Women: A Casebook. Ed. Thelma Fenster. New York: Garland. 41–58. Reprint New York: Routledge, 2000. Rasmussen, Ann Marie (1997). Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse UP. Ruh, Kurt (1980). Höfische Literatur des Mittelalters. Vol. 2. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Schultz, James A. (1997). “Bodies That Don’t Matter: Heterosexuality Before Heterosexuality in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz. Vol. 11. Medieval Cultures. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

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Tax, Petrus W. (1990). “Wounds and Healings: Aspects of Salvation and Tragic Love in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. London: Brewer. 223–35. Thurlow, Peter (1995). “Gottfried and Minnesang.” German Life and Letters 48/3: 401–12. Volfing, Annette (1998). “Gottfried’s huote excursus (Tristan 17817–18114).” Medium Ævum 67/1: 85–103. Wagner, Wilfried (1973). “Die Gestalt der jungen Isolde in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Euphorion 67/1: 52–59.

Performances of Love: Tristan and Isolde at Court Will Hasty

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HE ABILITY TO CRAFT AND APPRECIATE art has been recognized as a necessary prerequisite for the articulation and comprehension of Gottfried’s literary conception (among the many studies focusing on artistry in Gottfried’s romance are those of Mohr, Jackson, and Kästner). This becomes clear already in the prologue, where Gottfried directs his tale to his audience, the elite group of “noble hearts,” or edele herzen. The implicit references that Gottfried makes here to the literature of antiquity, particularly when he disagrees with Ovid by recommending stories of love to people who are unhappily in love (see Ovid verses 757– 66 and Gottfried’s Tristan 101–10), suggest that the self-understanding of Gottfried’s audience must have been grounded at least in part in a knowledge and appreciation of the literary culture of antiquity — even if Gottfried frequently parts ways with this culture (see Wolf’s chapter in this volume). Gottfried’s close familiarity with antique literature and the liberal arts has long been stressed in the critical literature on Tristan. As Walter Haug points out (207–8), art is inextricably bound in Gottfried’s literary conception to a moral betterment that is achieved by remembering, appreciating, and vicariously experiencing the joys and pains of the lovers Tristan and Isolde (in a manner that is analogous to the way Christians remembered Christ’s suffering by means of the Eucharist; see 33–44). Already in the fourth quatrain of the strophic prologue, art is being closely linked to honor and praise — of which Tristan and Isolde, as the embodiments of an ideal love, and the audience of edele herzen, by virtue of their devoted remembrance of these exemplary lovers, are implicitly deserving:

Êre unde lop diu schepfent list, dâ list ze lobe geschaffen ist: swâ er mit lobe geblüemet ist, dâ blüejet aller slahte list. (21–24)

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(Praise and esteem bring art on where art deserves commendation. When art is adorned with praise it blossoms in profusion. [Translations are from Hatto])

The list mentioned here is frequently and justifiably understood as art (and translated as such, for example by Hatto here), though it might also be seen as referring more generally to any technique or stratagem whereby a pleasing and beneficial effect is achieved by means of the resourceful application of acquired knowledge (for studies of list in Gottfried’s text, see Jacobson and Jupé). Although the lovers Tristan and Isolde have not yet been mentioned at this early point in Gottfried’s romance, it is tempting to view these verses not only as part of the articulation of an understanding between Gottfried and his audience concerning the importance of art in Gottfried’s literary conception, but also as an allusion to the “artfulness” of the lovers, the techniques they employ to realize their illicit love at Marke’s court. Gottfried already seems here to be suggesting that the stratagems of the lovers, even if they are designed to protect the integrity of what might be regarded as a socially destructive, adulterous passion, are nevertheless motivated by and meritorious of honor and praise. Elsewhere in Gottfried’s romance, in the famous episode of the Love Grotto, we are given more important information about the close relationship between love and art in Gottfried’s literary conception, when the physical characteristics of the Grotto are interpreted allegorically (along the lines of contemporary allegorizations of the Gothic style) in terms of aspects of perfect love: si was, als ich iezuo dâ las, / sinewel, wît, hôch und ûfreht, / snêwîz, alumbe eben unde sleht (It was, as I said, round, broad, high, and perpendicular, snow-white, smooth and even throughout its whole circumference; 16928–30). The centerpiece of the Love Grotto is the crystalline bed within it, which underscores a related property of perfect love: diu minne sol ouch cristallîn, / durchsichtic und durchlûter sîn. (Love should be of crystal — transparent and translucent; 16983–84). The aspects of ideal love as here depicted in the interpretation of the Love Grotto — evenness, smoothness, and transparency — are central terms in a quite different discussion elsewhere in Gottfried’s romance. In the famous literary review, or Dichterschau, most clearly in the homage paid to Hartmann von Aue, the terms ebene, sleht, and cristallîn are used to describe not the true essence of love, but rather the literary style to which Gottfried ascribes. Of Hartmann specifically Gottfried states admiringly, wie lûter und wie reine / sîniu cristallînen wortelîn / beidiu sint und iemer müezen sîn! (How clear and transparent his crystal

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words both are and ever must remain; 4628–30), and a bit later Gottfried says that the words of the poet with the greatest right to receive the garland he is bestowing must be vil wol getwagen (well-laved; 4660) and ebene unde sleht (smooth and even; 4661). For Gottfried, poetry should evidently possess many of the same qualities as love. It is perhaps not surprising that Gottfried’s idea of love looks suspiciously like his conception of art, given love’s close associations with art at this time (as in Andreas Capellanus’s famous treatise on love). Of course, Gottfried’s conception of love is generally considered to be different from most, and the poet’s seemingly daring employment of religious imagery may be intended to inspire love in such a way that we have to see in it something deeper and more grandiose than art alone. The proper understanding and even experience of true love and the adequate poetic depiction or performance of it are, nevertheless, closely related in Gottfried’s artistic conception by virtue of their common allegiance to the principles of smoothness, elegance, and transparency. This is consistent with the idea that love, evidently even Gottfried’s grandiose conception of it, realizes itself largely in and by means of art and an appreciation thereof. Now, of what importance is the close association of love and art in Gottfried’s literary conception for understanding events at the plot level of his romance? The principles underlying Gottfried’s more strictly theoretical reflections on love and art would seem to have very little to do with the relationship of the lovers to Marke’s court, where the crystalline transparency of the Love Grotto seems hopelessly utopian in a world of compromise, mistrust, and betrayal. The term list seems to take on a different significance when used to describe the lovers’ relationship to Marke’s court, for example. While it may elsewhere (for instance in the prologue) refer to art, it presumably takes on quite a different significance when employed as a term designating the ways the lovers preserve their illicit love. In this practical social context, list seems to have more to do with obfuscation and misdirection than with transparency and smoothness. The apparent discrepancy between the principle of clarity and transparency in Gottfried’s conception of love and art, and the strategems that shape the lovers’ relationship with Marke’s court may be an unavoidable result of Gottfried’s treatment of the traditional Tristan story as transmitted to him. It could simply be that these two levels of the narrative — Gottfried’s own conception of love and art (or love as art), on the one hand, and the ruses of the lovers to preserve their love and honor (as a set part of the traditional Tristan-story) — are not ultimately reconcilable. It may also be that Gottfried is quite consciously contrasting these two aspects of his romance in order to demonstrate the

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inferiority of the courtly life and the superiority of the life of love at the Love Grotto. Of course, Tristan and Isolde are themselves members of Marke’s court and participate in its basic values (for example, the concern for one’s social status, or êre, for the sake of which they forsake their life of love at the Grotto and return to Marke’s court; 17686–99). The coherence of perfect love seems to be lost, the more Tristan and Isolde (in their “normal” lives at Marke’s court) themselves fall short of that love of which they are presumably the embodiment. Without insisting on a uniform conception behind all aspects of Gottfried’s narrative, one might nevertheless expect that the poet’s conception of love/art, as articulated in the prologue, literary review, and Love Grotto episode, would have shaped his depiction of events at the plot level of the romance to some degree. This chapter will explore the possibility that Gottfried may have endeavored to extend the idea of the “transparency” of love and art from the level of theoretical reflection on love and art as surveyed above to concrete events at the plot level of his romance. I would like to consider that the liste that characterize the lovers’ relationship to Marke’s court might be seen as more consistent with Gottfried’s literary conception to the degree that they can be appreciated — not only by Gottfried’s audience but also by figures in the fictional world of Tristan and Isolde — as art, particularly art of a performative kind (not entirely unlike that of the poet Gottfried himself). This is to say that love as it presents itself practically in the lives of Tristan and Isolde — which means at Marke’s court — is not only something that is experienced, it is also something that is performed. As a performance involving the application of acquired skills (liste), love begins to look less like a socially destructive force, and more like a theatrical display, a performative art, in which all at court are involved with a greater or lesser degree of complicity and critical appreciation, and upon which the court — a social construction that is highly aesthetic in Gottfried’s conception of it — depends for its integrity. The first significant performance with which Tristan is associated occurs upon his birth. During the troubled times in Parmenie following Riwalin’s defeat and death at the hands of Morgan, and the death of Blanscheflur shortly thereafter while giving birth to a son, Rual wisely decides to protect the infant by means of performative artistry: his wife Floraete feigns the pain of labor, which she does most aptly on the basis of her previous experience in childbirth (und wande s’ouch erkande wol, / wie man hie zuo gebâren sol; since she had full knowledge of how to act, 917– 18), the infant is secretly laid next to her, and six weeks later the marshal

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and his wife take the child to church as their own, where he is baptized and christened with the name Tristan. One might maintain that all of this occurs under false pretenses, but as these events are depicted the narrator wishes to make it very clear that there is truth in this performance. When the news is spread far and wide that Floraete has given birth to a son, the narrator goes on to say: ez was ouch wâr, sie tete alsô: si lag des sunes inne dô, der ir sunlîcher triuwe pflac unz an ir beider endetac. (1933–36) (And indeed this was true, she had been in fact. She lay in with a son who held her in filial affection until they were both dead.)

Another eighteen verses are employed in this context (1937–54), and Gottfried returns to this theme on the occasion of Rual and Tristan’s reunion at the court of Marke (3946–55), in order to underscore that the “staging” of Tristan’s birth, while clearly a ruse designed to protect the son of Riwalin from Morgan, is nevertheless also true and is made true by the mutual commitment of Tristan and his foster parents to each other over the years. It seems that the audience is being asked to consider that a performance that is not true in what might be considered a literal sense (Tristan is not the biological son of Rual and Floraete, as which he is presented to the world), might nevertheless be true in another way that is much more important (Tristan is the son of Rual and Floraete, by virtue of the strong loyalty they have to one another). It is not only Gottfried’s audience that is able to appreciate the truth of this performance; when Rual reveals the circumstances of the birth deception at Marke’s court, and when Tristan laments that he has lost a father, Marke shows that he understands the “truth” of the birth deception by continuing to refer to Rual as Tristan’s vater (4450 and 4459). By this time, the paternal bond emerging from the birth deception has been transferred by Rual to the relationship between Tristan and Marke (4385–86), which has the effect of further cementing their already very close relationship (to which we will return later). Here and elsewhere in Gottfried’s romance, a “dramatic” performance that involves a mixture of deception and truth is ultimately rewarded with honor and praise. For all of his efforts on behalf of Tristan, Rual is kissed and embraced by Marke and all the nobles at court and receives a courtly greeting: “willekomen Rûal der werde, / ein wunder ûf der erde!” (“Welcome noble Ruol, you marvel among men!”; 4331–32). If we compare Gottfried’s

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treatment of the birth deception and its consequences with the corresponding passages in the Tristrams saga of Friar Robert, which provides the best idea about the content of the lost parts of the source text by Thomas, it seems Gottfried may have gone beyond his source both in underscoring the theatrical, performative aspect of the birth deception and in insisting that the deception is, when appreciated as a performance with socially constructive consequences, “true.” The events of Tristan’s childhood and youth before Rual’s revelation at Marke’s court all rest on the foundation of the birth deception. The performance of Rual and Floraete provides the first example of a recurring pattern in Gottfried’s romance. What appears illusory or untrue from a given perspective is, upon closer inspection by people with experience and sensitivity enough to appreciate the complexities of things, expressive of truth. In events at the plot level we observe something akin to the typological distinction between literal and allegorical levels of meaning (see Ferrante 177). Characters such as Rual and Marke are obviously in a position to understand and accept that what may be illusory or deceptive when seen literally can nevertheless be true in a more significant way, and that the truth of such performances shapes the course of events in ways that can be fortuitous and constructive. In this case a performance with deceptive intentions has been instrumental in the establishment of order — in the form of the familial bonds between Tristan and Rual and Floraete (however “fictitious” these may be), and later between Tristan and Marke — out of the chaos that surrounded the orphan Tristan shortly after his birth. The performance of Tristan’s birth provides the basic model for the later performances of Tristan in Ireland and of the lovers together at Marke’s court, but the latter will involve the additional element of knowledgeable artistry acquired by means of systematic learning. For this we have again to thank the sage Rual, who equips Tristan with the techniques he will need to face all the challenges that await him by subjecting his foster son to a lengthy training in languages, literature, and music, not to mention in chivalry (2043–148). An attribute of the education to which Rual submits Tristan is that it is associated with cares: der buoche lêre und ir getwanc / was sîner sorgen anevanc (the study of books and all its stern discipline were the beginning of his cares; 2083–86). The difficulty involved in acquiring his arts (which is not mentioned in Eilhart’s Tristrant or in the Tristrams saga) suggests that Tristan’s assimilation of them might be seen as a first, difficult engagement with a world (that of Parmenie subsequent to the wars of Riwalin and Morgan) that is resistant

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to being transformed into something harmonious and pleasing. With art, as with love, there is both pain and joy. The pain of art is the difficulty of mastering it — the necessary engagement with a formless, chaotic, resistant world. The joy of art corresponds to the beautiful, harmonious form in which the world can be rendered according to the skill and degree of one’s efforts (see Eco’s discussion of the medieval aesthetics of proportion; 28–42). Tristan succeeds in joining Marke’s court and eventually in becoming the king’s close friend by means of a performance in which he creatively employs many of the arts he has acquired during his childhood education. Stranded upon the coast of Cornwall after being released by the Norwegian merchants who had abducted him, Tristan encounters two pilgrims and, in response to their question about how he came to be alone in this forest, he tells them that he has become separated from his hunting party (2696–721). We are not told why Tristan deceives the pilgrims in this way. If we view this deception psychologically in terms of the situation in which Tristan finds himself, we might assume that he does not wish the pilgrims to know how vulnerable he is at this point. Whatever the motivation of this ruse may be, Tristan is praised for it in no uncertain terms by the narrator: Tristan der was vil wol bedâht / und sinnesam von sînen tagen / er begunde in vremediu maere sagen (Now Tristan was very shrewd and cautious for his years and started to tell them a pretty tale; 2692–94). The story (that is, that he has been separated from his hunting party; 2696–721) is thus linked by the narrator to a level of caution and wisdom uncommon in a person of Tristan’s tender years. Tristan’s ability to produce a plausible and consistent fiction in the blink of an eye, possibly in the interest of self-preservation, is no doubt based to some degree on innate characteristics, but this ability is also doubtless indebted to the training of mind and speech that occurred in his earlier childhood education. The deception is associated with his past education, and in this context it marks the beginning of a more elaborate performance in which Tristan brings all of his technical skills to bear. From Tristan’s vremediu maere onward, the interaction between the stranded youth and the pilgrims looks somewhat like the theatrical relationship between a performer and his audience:

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Tristan der hovebaere der was mit rede alsô gewar, si vrâgeten her oder dar, daz er des alles antwurt bôt niwan ze staten und ze nôt. er haete sîne mâze an rede und an gelâze sô wol, daz es die wîsen, die getageten und die grîsen ze grôzen saelden jâhen und aber ie baz besâhen sîne gebaerde und sîne site und sînen schoenen lîp dâ mite; sîniu cleider, diu er an truoc, diu gemarcten sî genuoc, durch daz si wâren sêre rîch und an gewürhte wunderlîch. und sprâchen in ir muote: ‘â hêrre got der guote, wer oder wannen ist diz kint, des site sô rehte schoene sint?’ sus gingen sî’n beahtende und allez sîn dinc ahtende (diz was ir kurzewîle) wol eine welsche mîle. (2734–57; emphasis added) (Tristan was so wary of his speech that whichever way they questioned him he answered them no more than need and circumstance required. He had his speech and bearing under such fine restraint that these grey and venerable sages ascribed it to heavenly favour, and studied his ways and demeanor and his handsome person, too, with ever keener interest. His clothes held their attention, for they were very splendid and of marvelous texture. “Good God,” they mused, “who is this boy and where is he from, that has such beautiful manners?” And so, making it their pastime to watch and consider his every peculiarity, they marched for well on a mile. [Emphasis added])

Much is present in this initial description of performance and spectatorship that is reiterated in the next thousand verses, all of which are devoted to a detailed depiction of the many liste by virtue of which Tristan manages to integrate himself into Marke’s court (and a comparison with

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corresponding episodes in the Tristrams saga again suggests that Gottfried proceeds very independently in underscoring the spectacular aspect of Tristan’s performances). The performance of Tristan that begins before a small audience upon his arrival in Cornwall is continued, though before a much larger audience, when he meets up with the hunting party from Marke’s court and exhibits the expert carving of the stag, employing the liste (2956) of the furkie and the curie. The successful employment of these arts is pleasing to Tristan’s admiring audience, as which the hunting party is also cast (2852–61), and it earns him honor and respect. Tristan’s ability to transform the hunt into something orderly and beautiful is compelling. The onlookers from Marke’s court, presumably the most knowledgeable in all of Cornwall, are drawn by the pleasing proportions established by his performance irresistibly into Tristan’s wake. Upon its return to Marke’s court at Tintajol, the hunting party has itself become part of Tristan’s performative artistry (see the article of Brown and Jaeger for a detailed analysis of this procession as a work of art). The young foreigner directs his eager admirers to ride two by two and instructs them how to exhibit the sections of the carved stag in their procession. As the hunting party enters Marke’s castle, everything has been orchestrated to maximum effect. Tristan rides in front, playing his own beautiful music on his hunting horn, and the seemingly enchanted Cornish huntsmen follow along and do their best to emulate his strange, beautiful music (3209–22). Thus begins a performance fit for a king, and the dazzling exhibition continues as Tristan parades his inborn attributes and his many areas of expertise at Tintajol. Tristan continues to impress everyone with his beauty and his courtly bearing, and as he does so expressions of spectatorship abound: an gebaerde unde an schoenen siten / was ime sô rehte wol geschehen, / daz man in gerne mohte sehen (he was so well favoured in presence and manners that it was a joy to watch him; 3348–50). After a repetition of his initial performance of the arts of hunting, Tristan exhibits his ability in music and languages and thus deepens the pleasing impression he has already made. By virtue of the knowledge he obtained during the difficult training to which Rual subjected him in his youth, Tristan’s performance thus transforms an originally strange and threatening place (2505–21) into a courtly home away from home (the neologism gewerldet, used by the narrator in the prologue, seems to be appropriate here). But the effects of Tristan’s artistry go beyond this: Marke’s entire court is changed. Like the huntsmen previously, all at Marke’s court are

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eventually captivated by the beauty of Tristan’s performance and seemingly drawn into his wake. The arts that Tristan so capably displays are something that others wish to emulate; they give a higher degree of polish, beauty, and courtliness to the world. Tristan’s liste represent a principle of good living, and as such they are worthy of admiration, recognition, and status. All of these are eventually conferred by Marke, whose authoritative words would appear to make Tristan’s artistry the foundation upon which courtly life in Tintajol henceforth will be based: Der künec sprach: “Tristan, hoere her: an dir ist allez, des ich ger. dû kanst allez, daz ich wil: jagen, sprâche, seitspil. nu suln ouch wir gesellen sîn, dû der mîn und ich der dîn. tages sô sul wir rîten jâgen, des nahtes uns hie heime tragen mit höfschlîchen dingen: harpfen, videlen, singen, daz kanstu wol, daz tuo du mir. sô kan ich spil, daz tuon ich dir, des ouch dîn herze lîhte gert: schoene cleider unde pfert, der gibe ich dir swie vil du wilt. dâ mite hân ich dir wol gespilt. sich, mîn swert und mîne sporn, mîn armbrust und mîn guldîn horn, geselle, daz bevilhe ich dir. des underwint dich, des pflic mir und wiste höfsch unde vrô!” (3721–41) (“Tristan, listen to me,” said the King, “you can do everything I want — hunting, languages, music. To crown it let us be companions. You be mine and I will be yours. By day we shall ride out hunting, at night here at home we shall sustain ourselves with courtly pursuits, such as harping, fiddling, and singing. You are good at these things; do them for me. For you, in return, I will play a thing I know, which perhaps your heart desires — of fine clothes and horses I will give you all you want! With these I shall have played well for you. Look, my companion, I entrust my sword, spurs, cross-bow, and golden horn to you. Take charge of them, look after them for me — be a merry courtier!”)

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Marke’s promise to play a “tune” of his own by entrusting Tristan with material objects (his own sword, spurs, cross-bow, golden horn) that are suggestive of the conferral of wealth and political power anticipates the later passage, after Rual has found his way to Marke’s court and revealed Tristan’s true identity, in which Marke bequeaths to Tristan his entire kingdom (4479–88). It is important to remember here and elsewhere that artistic performance is linked not only to social status, but also to political power (see Hasty), a point to which we will return in the conclusion. Tristan’s performance before the court of Marke, just as his initial performance before the pilgrims, is largely dependent on fiction. When Marke’s amazed huntsmen ask Tristan to tell them about himself, he spontaneously produces a story about his background that mixes truth with fabrication (3091–123). In what Tristan says about how he acquired his arts, one can make out something vaguely reminiscent of his true history, but his claim to be the son of a merchant is clearly an invention, the higher truth of which — assuming there is one in this case — is not immediately evident (though both Jupé [74] and Ferrante [176] offer intriguing ways of understanding this fiction and the earlier one produced for the pilgrims in allegorical terms). What Tristan conceals with his fabrication is perhaps something to which he is not yet privy himself, and it is the thing that Rual later reveals with such great impact: Tristan is not, in fact, the son of a merchant, but rather of the noble Riwalin and Marke’s sister Blanscheflur, and as such the nephew of King Marke. One effect of Tristan’s fabrication would seem to be to bring about a situation in which Gottfried’s audience can vicariously experience the amazement of Marke’s court upon discovering from Rual that Tristan is not ignoble, but rather the king’s closest male descendant. Besides this, the time spent at Marke’s court by the youthful Tristan posing as the son of a merchant is time during which he ingratiates himself and is pleasing to one and all by virtue of his arts alone. No claims are made by Tristan’s person during this time other than the attention and status that the beauty and proportion of his artistry commands. Thanks to Tristan’s fiction, Marke has the opportunity to get to know him and perhaps already to love him for his artistry alone. Of course, Tristan’s fabrication is not entirely lost on the courtiers surrounding Marke. In a passage that seems to anticipate Isolde’s skepticism about Tantris’s identity when she beholds him in the bath (discussed below), the master huntsman informs Marke about Tristan and adds that he does not believe Tristan is really the son of a merchant:

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“â hêrre, ez ist ein Parmenois sô wunderlîchen cûrtois und alsô rehte tugentsam, daz ich’z an kinde nie vernam, und giht, er heize Tristan und sî sîn vater ein koufman. in geloube ez aber niemer. wie haete ein koufman iemer in sîner unmüezekeit sô grôze muoze an in geleit? solt er die muoze mit im hân, der sich unmuoze sol begân?” (3277–88) (“He comes from Parmenie, my lord, and he is so marvellously wellbred and accomplished that I never knew the like in a child. He says his name is ‘Tristan’ and that his father is a merchant; but I do not believe it. For how could a merchant, with all his affairs to see to, ever have devoted so much leisure to him?”)

For this skeptical observer, Tristan’s story does not stand up to close scrutiny. The discrepancy between the courtly bearing of Tristan and the known characteristics of a merchant’s life is too great for Tristan’s story to be plausible. To the extent that such an awareness of Tristan’s story as fiction is present, his performance becomes “transparent,” that is, visible as such to the knowledgeable observer. But what seems to matter above all in this performance by means of which Tristan integrates himself into Marke’s court is not the element of fabrication in it that is patently visible as such (at least to some), but rather the beautiful life that it seems to make accessible. It is again noteworthy that the master huntsman’s statement is not in the Tristrams saga, which suggests that this way of underscoring the transparency of Tristan’s story might have been a creative embellishment of Gottfried. By means of a performance in which he applies the many liste he acquired as a child, Tristan seems to transform and elevate the quality of courtly life in Cornwall. In the section of Gottfried’s romance involving Tristan’s journeys to Ireland, we have something resembling an encore performance in which many of the same elements are present, including numerous episodes that revolve around performance and spectatorship (7547– 52, 7673–77, 7820–32, 8036–131). The aspect of concealment of the truth (if not of outright deception) is present from the moment Tristan hides the wound he has suffered in his battle against Morold from the

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view of the Irish contingent. When Tristan first hides the true state of affairs about himself (that is, his wound), this is not yet part of any coherent plan, though it is possible, if one may see things in psychological terms, that the resolution to journey to Ireland to be healed by the elder Isolde, which is not consciously made until later (7293–99), is nevertheless already beginning to take shape in Tristan’s unconscious mind. The concealment of Tristan’s wound may also have a broader significance, consistent both with Gottfried’s artistic conception and with the ongoing purpose of Tristan’s many performances. The aim always seems to be the transformation of a chaotic and dangerous world into something harmonious and aesthetically pleasing. In this case, the wound caused by the poisoned spear of Morold, with its stench that eventually makes even the savior Tristan unbearable to those around him (7275–78, 7833–38), is transparently symbolic of the chaotic and dangerous world that Tristan is continually having to engage and transform with his liste. Taking a broad view, this is what is achieved by Tristan’s performance in Ireland. The originally dangerous foreign power, associated initially with the uncourtly and unjust demands of Morold, brings out the ugliest in everyone. Even the nobles of Marke’s presumably “civilized” court are prepared to deliver their own children into a life of servitude by handing them over as hostages (for which they are chastised by Tristan; 6079– 87). The wound, both a concrete and symbolic expression of this ugliness, is first hidden, and eventually healed as the result of a performance with which Tristan appears to transform Ireland from a monstrous and barbaric foreign danger into a place of beauty and courtliness. This beauty is represented by the progress made by Isolde under Tristan’s tutelage, and the following passage, which concludes a longer episode depicting the effects of the “siren” Isolde’s music, shows that this progress coincides with Tristan’s physical recovery: Sus haete sich diu schoene Îsôt von Tristandes lêre gebezzeret sêre. sî was suoze gemuot, ir site und ir gebaerde guot, si kunde schoeniu hantspil, schoener behendekeite vil: brieve und schanzûne tihten, ir getihte schône slihten, si kunde schrîben unde lesen. nu was ouch Tristan genesen

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ganz unde geheilet garwe, daz ime lîch unde varwe, wider lûteren begunde. (8132–45) (Thus, with Tristan for tutor, lovely Isolde had much improved herself. Her disposition was charming, her manners and bearing good. She had mastered some fine instruments and many skilled accomplishments. Of love-songs she could make both the words and the airs and polish them beautifully. She was able to read and write. Meanwhile Tristan was well and fully healed so that his skin and his colour began to clear again.)

While it must be recognized, of course, that Isolde, like Tristan, is intrinsically beautiful to start with, it seems to have required the application of Tristan’s liste to realize her extraordinary potential, to extract some broader social benefit from her beauty, and to make this, rather than the cruelty of Morold and Gurmun, the most prominent feature of Ireland. Tristan thus transforms Ireland by means of a dramatic performance in much the same way he transformed life at Marke’s court after his arrival in Cornwall, though the uncourtly barbarism of Ireland makes the effects of his two-part performance here all the more striking. As in his initial performance at Marke’s court, the practical application of Tristan’s arts has been closely associated with fiction from the very start. Beyond the concealment of his wound discussed above, two more ruses form the foundation for Tristan’s successes in Ireland. Although the first is of relatively minor importance, it is interesting because it involves the complicity of Marke. When Tristan is about to embark for Ireland, he and Marke agree wie man solte sagen maere, / daz er in Salerne waere / durch sînes lîbes genist (how they should spread the rumour that he was in Salerno to be cured; 7329–31). Marke’s complicity in spreading a false rumor no doubt contributes in its own way to Tristan’s later success in Ireland by directing public attention away from his true destination. Beyond this, Marke’s active involvement here shows him to be sensitive to the importance of deception for achieving one’s ends in the face of seemingly overwhelming obstacles. We shall have to consider the possibility that the king may be no less sensitive to the importance of deception later on in the romance, when the lovers are trying to realize their love and he is the seemingly overwhelming obstacle. Of course, the most important and prominent way in which Tristan deceives people in Ireland — long enough to transform them from enemies to friends with his performance — is by pretending to be a former minstrel and merchant named Tantris. Though in this instance the motivations for the deception are clear, the false identity of Tristan in this

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situation of great danger nevertheless reminds us of the maere with which he introduced himself as the son of a merchant to Marke’s court after his arrival in Cornwall. In the later episode as in the earlier one, gaining time in which Tristan’s performative artistry can begin to have its characteristically transformative effect seems to be paramount. And just as in the earlier episode, Tristan’s false identity seems to be transparent as such to a knowledgeable observer, though it takes quite some time before this occurs. In this case it is Isolde, regarding Tristan as he lies in the bath after he has slain the dragon, who first begins to consider the discrepancy between the man’s beauty and his claimed station in life: got hêrre, dû hâst ime gegeben / dem lîbe ein ungelîchez leben (Lord, Thou hast given him a station in life out of keeping with his person!; 10031f.). A bit later, when Isolde considers the minstrel’s sword, discovers the gap that is the same size as the piece removed from Morold’s head, and begins to consider the names Tristan and Tantris, something becomes clear to her — something she claims she has always known in her heart: vür sich sô las si Tristan, her wider sô las si Tantris. hie mite was sî des nâmen gewis. “jâ jâ,” sprach aber diu schoene dô “ist disen maeren danne sô, disen valsh und dise trügeheit hât mir mîn herze wol geseit. wie wol ich wiste al dise vart, sît ich in merkende wart, sît ich an ime lîp unde gebar und sîn dinc allez alsô gar besunder in mîn herze las, daz er gebürte ein hêrre was!” (Forwards she read “Tris-tan,” backwards she read “Tan-tris.” With this she was certain of the name. “I knew it!” said the lovely girl. “If this is how things stand, my heart informed me truly of this deception. How well I have known all the time, since I began to take note of him and study him in every detail of his appearance and behaviour and all that has to do with him, that he was a nobleman born.”)

Isolde’s statement looks much like a prerogative of hindsight. But if it is more than this and there is some truth in her words, she is articulating a response to Tristan’s fabrication that is similar to that of the huntsman discussed above. Tristan’s extraordinary capabilities and attributes make it more than evident that his claim to be an ignoble minstrel and mer-

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chant is a fiction. The deception thus becomes transparent, or has been transparent all along. What seems to have mattered more than pursuing obvious inconsistencies and uncovering conspicuous secrets is allowing Tristan and his arts to have their pleasing and salutary effect. This is apparent now in the case of Isolde. No doubt due at least in part to an acuity of mind that has been sharpened under Tristan’s tutelage, she has been able to obtain certainty about his identity, but probably due to the same instruction, particularly moraliteit (8002–19), she is unable to avenge her uncle by killing him. The transmission of Tristan’s art to Isolde, achieved with the help of a fiction that is visible as such to the knowledgeable observer (which Isolde eventually becomes), breaks the vicious cycle of violence and revenge, so daz der tôtvînt genas / und Môrolt ungerochen was (with the result that her enemy lived, and Morold was not avenged). During their voyage back to Cornwall, Tristan and Isolde drink the love potion that binds them together forever in love and that makes them co-performers in the final part of Gottfried’s romance fragment. The final performance of Tristan, now in collaboration with his lover Isolde at Marke’s court, has basically the same purpose his earlier performances have had. By virtue of knowledge expertly applied, and combined with a degree of deception (which is frequently transparent as such to the knowledgeable observer), a harmonious courtly life — the maintenance of which is closely associated with the conferral of êre — is brought into being. Gottfried’s text suggests that the integrity of love and the stability of Marke’s courtly order are both contingent on successful performances by Tristan and Isolde, which would seem to make it inappropriate to assume that the beginning of love means a “Preisgabe der bisherigen Identität” (surrender of the previous identity; Tomasek 105). It would seem, rather, that the artistry is continued, even if the performances have become quite a bit more complex. Although the performance of the lovers spans the entire final part of Gottfried’s romance, beginning with the wedding night substitution of Brangaene for Isolde and ending with the lovers’ separation after they are discovered lying together by Marke, one can differentiate between a short section at the beginning of this section when the court of Marke remains blissfully ignorant of the adulterous love, and a later and much lengthier section in which the affair of Tristan and Isolde seems to be common knowledge (that is, “transparent”), even if a final proof of it remains outstanding (arguably to the immense relief not only of Tristan and Isolde, but also of Marke; see 13829–52 and 18225–30). The compo-

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nents of the performance remain remarkably consistent in both of these sections, for which the substitution of Brangaene for Isolde and the dramatic performance of the lovers in the grove beneath the eavesdropping Marke and Melot will be discussed here as representative episodes. The episode involving the wedding night substitution of Brangaene for Isolde reminds us that the performance of Tristan and Isolde — and hence the integrity of love — here and later involves the complicity and collaboration of others, such as Brangaene and Curvenal, who have to know the “script.” In this episode the performance proceeds entirely according to plan, as the messinc of Brangaene is successfully substituted for the golt of Isolde. This distinction of value, and the fact that Marke is content with a woman of far less worth (in dûhte wîp alse wîp [to him one woman was as another; 12666]), can be construed as indicative of the king’s deficiency in amatory matters and possibly of a purely lustful approach on his part. But such an understanding is undercut somewhat by Gottfried’s statement that a more valuable “tin” than Brangaene has never been produced (deiswâr ich sazte es wol mîn leben, / daz sît Âdâmes tagen / als edel valsch nie wart geslagen [Indeed I would wager my life on it that false coin of such nobility had never been struck since Adam’s day; 12610ff.]), which has the effect of diminishing the difference between Isolde and her maid servant, and perhaps also our doubts about Marke’s ability to judge women and his aesthetic sensitivity to beauty more generally. (In contrast to the treatment of the Tristan story by Béroul and Eilhart, Gottfried is at pains to cast Marke as a sensitive and sympathetic individual, whose love is not purely sensual [see 16517–26 and 16587– 91] and whose life has also been tragically affected by the consequences of the love potion; see the articles of Batts and Classen). Although the substitution clearly distracts attention away from Isolde’s loss of her virginity to Tristan and thus has the effect of preserving the integrity of their adulterous love, the first effect of the two-part performance of Brangaene and Isolde that Gottfried regards as worthy of mention has to do with the queen’s social status, or êre. Here and elsewhere (even upon the culmination of the Love Grotto episode, in which the crystalline bed becomes the site of a dramatic performance par excellence in which the lovers feign separation from one another, in this of all places, beneath the gaze of Marke, which eventually leads to the restoration of their honor and return to Marke’s court), the result of a successful performance is the conferral of praise and honor. The repetition of this pattern underscores the fact that êre, along with love, continues to be a prominent consequence of a successful performance and one of the primary interests of Gottfried’s romance.

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A final observation that needs to be made about the substitution of Brangaene concerns the manner in which she saves herself from death after Isolde has instructed the squires to kill her. Brangaene saves herself by producing, in a situation of great danger, the ingenious story about the two shifts, the dirty one of Isolde and her own clean one that she lent to Isolde, a story that simultaneously reveals and conceals the truth. The squires themselves are unable to appreciate the significance of this story about the shifts, but Isolde immediately understands not only this, but also that Brangaene will be a trustworthy and capable collaborator in her own ongoing performance (though it might be said that Isolde’s judgement is faulty here, for Brangaene fails her on at least two occasions; 13508–10 and 18186–89). Despite their initial success in concealing their love, the lovers’ passion is so overwhelming that it cannot remain secret for long. Not long after Marjodoc follows Tristan’s footprints through the snow and learns of his nocturnal rendezvous with the queen (though he seems to know about the affair even before this; see 13576–82), the existence of the adulterous love between Tristan and Isolde has become a matter of common knowledge, and not merely of rumor, at Marke’s court. Gottfried’s text shows in a variety of ways, ranging from the results of Marke’s collaboration with Marjodoc and Melot (13626–36, 13708–15, 14261–73) to the signs of love that the lovers themselves manifest despite themselves (14315–47, 16493–506), that Tristan and Isolde’s love is schînbaere (14340), evident to any observer with a basic knowledge of amatory matters. As the truth of the adulterous love is revealed or reveals itself in the final part of Gottfried’s romance fragment, the artistic and performative aspect of the lovers’ liste is underscored as such. Although all of the lovers’ performances are strongly dramatic, perhaps the most theatrical of all is the impromptu dialogue produced by Isolde and Tristan during their assignation by the brook, when they realize they are being observed by two men silently perched above them in an olive tree, whose shadows the lovers perceive on the ground in the full moonlight. With the shadows of the regal spectator and his advisor Melot falling upon the ground where Tristan and Isolde stand, the lovers, along with Gottfried’s audience, can see Marke and Melot for what they are in this episode: the audience of a dramatic performance. Predictably, as soon as she is aware of the spectators’ presence, Isolde’s first thought concerns the preservation of her honor (beschirme uns hêrre trehtîn! / hilf uns, daz wir mit êren / von hinnen müezen kêren; Protect us, O Lord. Help us to leave this place without dishonour; 14706–8), and then she responds in a manner reminiscent of her maidservant Bran-

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gaene by producing, in this moment of great danger, a dramatic declaration that simultaneously conceals and reveals the truth about her relationship with Tristan (14717–92). When Isolde follows up on this brilliant performance in the grove after her husband’s return by telling him that Tristan plans to leave the court because of the suspicions cast upon them (14981–15002), Marke restores his favor to his wife and nephew, says that he will never again doubt the honor of Tristan (15022–27), and even places Isolde in Tristan’s care. A result of their performance, besides the restitution of the impugned honor of the lovers and of Marke’s court, is that the lovers can again dedicate themselves to love: ir beider wunne diu was vol. / sus was in aber ein wunschleben / nâch ir ungemüete geben (the measure of their joy was full. Thus, following after all their troubles, they now had a life of bliss again; 15042–44). The wunschleben resulting from the lovers’ successful performance, though not as elaborately structured as the wunschleben of the Love Grotto (see 16846), nevertheless suggests that the love of Tristan and Isolde is experienced in its full plenitude at Marke’s court and not just beyond its confines. On the surface, Isolde’s intention in her dramatic performance beneath the olive tree is to deceive by building on the deception achieved by the substitution of Brangaene for Isolde on the wedding night. But Isolde’s declaration by the brook is crafted in such a way as to be “transparent.” Much as her oath in the ordeal, Isolde’s words here actually reveal the truth to anyone with the artistic and amatory qualifications to comprehend it. Isolde’s words about loving only the man to whom she lost her virginity seem interdeterminately poised between deception and confession: is she hiding or revealing the truth? This of course depends on the perspective and level of knowledge and understanding of the respective observer. While there is no explicit suggestion that Marke understands and appreciates Isolde’s performance as such in this specific case, we have seen throughout Gottfried’s romance that Marke has been very appreciative of performative artistry and often involved in it himself. Besides Marke’s earlier complicity in Tristan’s performances, which on its own suggests an understanding and appreciation of the importance of liste in the pursuit of higher goals, there is a very telling passage near the end of his romance fragment, which has no counterpart in the Tristrams saga and thus may represent an independent embellishment of the source. In this passage Gottfried makes very clear that Marke knows the truth about the lovers:

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der wiste ez wârez alse den tôt und sach wol, daz sîn wîp Îsôt ir herzen unde ir sinne an Tristandes minne mitalle was vervlizzen. und enwolte es doch niht wizzen. (17747–51) (He knew it as sure as death and saw full well that his wife Isolde was utterly absorbed in her passion for Tristan, heart and soul, yet he did not wish to know.)

The narrator goes on to draw a logical conclusion. Because Marke knows the truth very well (even if he also wishes to deny it), it is impossible to say that the lovers are deceiving him (weder sî entruoc in noch Tristan [Neither she nor Tristan deceived him; 17759]). It is difficult to know how long Marke has possessed the knowledge to which this passage refers (which reminds us of the recognition of Tristan’s transparent fictions by the huntsman and Isolde, discussed above), but there are numerous indications (cited above) that such knowledge has been present for quite some time. A conclusion one might venture on the basis of this knowledge, however close to suspicion it may always remain, is that the liste of the lovers have, for quite some time, taken the form of dramatic virtuoso performances, which are, as Leslie Seiffert says about the placement of the sword between the sleeping lovers in the Love Grotto, “deceptive only to the self-deceiving” (206). If Marke is continually able to persuade himself that the love is not present or to accommodate himself to it, this may have more to do with a capacity for self-delusion aggravated by lust (see 17764–800) or with a desire to allow the lovers’ performance to shape his reality (based on genuine deep affection for them), than with immorality, mendaciousness, or deceit on the part of the lovers. Although the numerous tests to which Marke subjects the lovers ostensibly aim at obtaining such final proof, they are for the most part very poorly suited to achieve this aim (only a test that might catch the lovers in flagrante delicto would seem to serve this purpose). One begins to suspect that, for Gottfried, the primary purpose of the tests of Marke is not to pin down a very elusive final certainty about something that is generally known, but rather to elicit the artistry by means of which the honor, integrity, and reputation of his court — and particularly of the most powerful and illustrious personages in it — can be preserved.

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Gottfried seems to have wanted to suggest that these various performances, though they may be mendacious or deceptive in their intent on the surface, are nonetheless expressive of truth, or constitutive of good (see the references to guot in the first four quatrains of the prologue), at another, arguably higher level of understanding. The performance of Floraete giving birth to Tristan establishes orderly and lasting relationships of great loyalty and keeps the son of Riwalin and Blanscheflur alive during a dangerous time so that he can later be reunited with his uncle. The performances of Tristan and Isolde at Marke’s court enable them, at least for a while, both to realize their love and to maintain the integrity and happiness of Marke’s court (which is also obviously the home of the lovers as well). We have drawn attention throughout this chapter not only to love, but also to a beautiful and ordered courtly life as an aim of the performances, both for the performers and their “audiences” — no easy task in view of the many forces aligned against beauty and order. The significance of artistry at the plot level of Gottfried’s romance clearly goes far beyond the numerous structured exhibitions of musical and linguistic expertise whereby Tristan and Isolde make themselves valued and beloved at court (and with which the heroes may strike us as interesting courtly variations of the heroes of the Spielmannsepen — see Jackson and Kästner), in a way that seems to be generally consistent with the narrator’s more theoretical discussions of love and art in the prologue, literary review, and Love Grotto episode. From the very beginning the court in Cornwall looks upon Tristan as a performer, someone who is able to make the kind of courtly life in which all would like to participate. In the final part of the romance the court continues to depend on Tristan and Isolde as performers, who manage to reconcile the demands of love with the demands of society by means of their innate abilities and the liste they have acquired. We have seen that this artistry is frequently manifest or transparent as such; the lovers’ art is recognized, or recognizable, as something that is made and that is, hence, not necessarily true from a religious or philosophical standpoint (indeed, to the extent that the performances are understandable as art, it seems somewhat questionable to apply such standards). The transparency of the performances is the result of obvious discrepancies between what one knows to be the case (Tristan’s stature and bearing are too noble for him to be the son of a merchant; the glances exchanged by Tristan and Isolde are too full of love and passion for them not to be in love with each other) and the specific claims of the respective performances. It is perhaps in this transparency that we can see how events at the plot level of Gottfried’s romance may have been rendered in a manner that is consis-

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tent with the author’s more theoretical expositions about the transparency of art and love.

Works Cited Primary Sources Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Gottfried von Strassburg. ‘Tristan’ with the Surviving Fragments of the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. A. T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Ovid. “Cures for Love.” The Erotic Poems. Trans. Peter Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Secondary Sources Batts, Michael (1990). “The Role of King Marke in Gottfried’s Tristan — and Elsewhere.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 117–26. Brown, Margaret, and C. Stephen Jaeger (1990). “Pageantry and Court Aesthetic in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 29–44. Classen, Albrecht (1992). “König Marke in Gottfrieds von Strassburg Tristan: Versuch einer Apologie.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 35: 37–63. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1990). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP. Decker, Frances (1982). “Gottfried’s Tristan and the Minnesang: The Relationship Between the Illicit Couple and Courtly Society.” The German Quarterly 55: 64–79. Eco, Umberto (1986). Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Trans. Hugh Bredin. New Haven: Yale UP. Ferrante, Joan M. (1990). “‘Ez ist ein Zunge, dunket mich’: Fiction, Deception and Self-Deception in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 171–80. Jackson, W. T. H. (1971). The Anatomy of Love: The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg. New York: Columbia UP. Hasty, Will (1998). “Tristan and Isolde, the Consummate Insiders: Relations of Love and Power in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Monatshefte 90/2: 137–47.

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Haug, Walter (1997). Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages. Trans. Joanna M. Catling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Originally published in Darmstadt, 1985. Jacobson, Evelyn (1982). “The Liste of Tristan.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 18: 115–28. Jupé, Wolfgang (1976). Die List im Tristanroman Gottfrieds von Strassburg: Intellektualität und Liebe oder die Suche nach dem Wesen der individuellen Existenz. Heidelberg: Winter. Kästner, Hannes. Harfe und Schwert: Der höfische Spielmann bei Gottfried von Strassburg. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1981. Mohr, Wolfgang (1973). “Tristan und Isold als Künstlerroman.” Gottfried von Strassburg. Ed. Alois Wolf. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 248–79. Seiffert, Leslie (1990). “Finding, Guarding and Betraying the Truth. Isolde’s Art and Skill, and the Sweet Discretion of Her Lying in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 181–208. Stevens, Adrian (1990). “The Renewal of the Classic: Aspects of Rhetorical and Dialectical Composition in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 67–90. Tomasek, Tomas. Die Utopie im ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Strassburg. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985.

Duplicity and Duplexity: The Isolde of the White Hands Sequence Neil Thomas

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HE LEGEND OF A PASSION strong enough to defy the most vigilantly patrolled social conventions provided a rich quarry for medieval artists working in various media. Scenes from the Tristan and Isolde story left their mark on medieval buildings such as the floor tiles of Chertsey Abbey, on medieval embroideries and tapestries and in the form of sculptures on ivory and wooden caskets. The spatial demands of the pictorial and plastic media typically dictated a selective procedure in which key scenes were chosen (the Orchard Scene was a favorite) capable of compressing the legend into a form epitomizing its essence as individual artists perceived it (see Curschmann). Even in the field of literature a long and rather complex story was sometimes distilled into one episode, as in Marie de France’s Lai de Chevrefueil, which advances a summa of the lovers’ plight in the image of a hazel branch entwined with honeysuckle, the symbiosis illustrating how together the lovers may prosper but parted they must die (see the introduction of Grimbert ed., esp. xxix–xxxiii). The impulse towards compression is clearly observable in the best-known modern realization of the theme, Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde (1859) where we find the conception distinctive to that composer of the Liebestod (informed by conceptions derived from Novalis and Schopenhauer) taking center-stage. In the music drama the lovers’ intense spiritual union achieves its highest consummation when they are transposed from the material sphere to the realms of Night and Death, where they win redemption from the imperfections of their mortal condition. Wagner’s abbreviated and highly subjective treatment of his medieval material was quite unlike that of his medieval predecessor, Gottfried von Strassburg (see the studies of Curtis and Groos), who set himself the task of conveying to German soil a faithful version of the legend based on the French romance of Thômas von Britanje (an author about whom little is known beyond the fact that he was a clerc who had passed through the schools and that he had some knowledge of England — see Bromiley 14–21). This version held for Gottfried the status of a received imagina-

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tive truth with which he claimed it would be wrong to tamper (die rihte und die wârheit [the true and authentic version; line 156]). Hence whilst Wagner felt free to leave the figure of Isolde of the White Hands out of his account (although the Problematik of the ancient theme of “the man between two women” is treated in Tannhäuser), Gottfried begins in good earnest the story of the second Isolde, and a majority of scholars believe that he would have continued this sequence in the same vein as Thomas had not death (or perhaps a lesser calamity) halted his endeavors. Our ignorance of the ways in which the early Tristan tradition was formed makes it unclear whether the story of the second Isolde was a Breton continuation of a once briefer, insular version (ending with the return of the lovers from the forest) or an organic part of the insular legend. It is possible that the Tristan story might have been rehandled by Breton storytellers when relocalized in French-speaking areas of Eastern Brittany, in which case the introduction of a Breton co-heroine would have been a natural innovation catering to the tastes of a new ethnic and cultural milieu (see Bromwich). But it is also conceivable that the Breton exile suggested itself ab initio as a means of allowing the hero to escape the amorous triangle and Marke’s consequential wrath. Given that the main story is set in Cornwall, another location would have had to be found for the flight, preferably transmarine, and for this Brittany might have seemed as apt a location as South Wales (see Padel), the venue chosen by Marie de France in her Lai de Chevrefueil. Archaeological evidence (although it must be used with the utmost caution) indicates that the two caves of love featuring in the Thomas/Gottfried version (the Love Grotto and Hall of Statues) may have been inspired by the quite substantial prehistoric caves (“fogous”) found in Cornwall on the Land’s End peninsula (see Harris and Polak). And whilst Brittany too boasts prehistoric crypts (“souterrains”), these are considerably smaller corridor-like structures through which only one small person would have been able to pass at a time (see the section on “Les Souterrains Armoricains” in Giot ed., 292–300 — I am indebted for this reference to Dr. Jean-Jacques Tilly). The Tristan saga with the Breton exile could have been developed in Britain and thence spread to Brittany. Whatever its provenance, however, the folkloric theme of the man between two women was a familiar one in both medieval France and Germany and is one that finds literary expression for instance in the late twelfth-century Le Bel Inconnnu of Renaut de Beaujeu (where La pucele as Blances Mains is Blonde Esmérée’s rival for the affections of the hero, Guinglain) and in the Rival Sisters sequence of the Middle High German Diu Crône of ca. 1225–30 (see Zach 77–80 and the two articles of Brault).

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Both Thomas’s version (the incomplete manuscript tradition of which means, as it happens, that the main body of the French account excepting the newly discovered Carlisle fragment “starts” where Gottfried’s torso ends) and the only known complete version of the Tristan saga, the Tristrant of Eilhart von Oberge, contain an important sequel to the story of the sexual triangle. Here Tristan — forced into Breton exile after Mark becomes convinced of his betrayal — meets a second woman with the same name as his first inamorata, Isolde “of the White Hands,” the sister of Tristan’s friend and military ally, Kaedin. The triangle becomes a “quadrilateral” (A. T. Hatto) when Tristan marries the second Isolde in the hope of easing his sense of longing for the Cornish Isolde. The plan fails when rueful memories of the first Isolde frustrate his attempts to consummate his marriage to White Hands. In the Thomas version the sexual failure induces a psychological regression in Tristran that forces him into a lonely, subterranean chamber of remembrance where he has had fashioned effigies of the first Isolde and of other persons reminding him of his happy time in Cornwall. In Thomas’s version we gain a well-rounded portrait of Isolde of the White Hands as “the charming, innocent young maiden (who) has turned into a person of unnatural wickedness and cruelty” (see Brault 1997, 48) — for Tristran’s long absences from his bride when immured in his secret erotic fastness lead her to develop feelings of bitterness and jealousy culminating in the final scene where she intimates that the first Isolde is not aboard the ship approaching their shore. By denying her husband his last chance of physical and emotional survival she sends him to his doom rather than to her rival. This conduct compares unfavorably with that of the first Isolde who, when faced with the prospect of permanent separation from her exiled lover, accepts her plight stoically rather than have him risk his life to rejoin her, an attitude that she explains in terms possessing some dramatic irony for her Breton namesake: wan weizgot swer ze sînem vromen / mit sînes friundes schaden wil komen, / der treit im cleine minne (By God whoever for his own advantage seeks to benefit at the expense of his beloved bears him little love; 18589–91. [All translations are my own.]) In Gottfried’s version, because of its incompleteness, we get a less full picture of the second Isolde figure (the German version lacks for instance the important “Bold Water” episode where White Hands reveals her anger and disappointment at her husband’s sexual neglect). Even in the German version, however, the Breton Isolde plays an important role as a foil shedding oblique light on the love between Tristan and her namesake. Unfortunately for her, she comes to represent “the wide gulf

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that separates the [. . .] extraordinary love of Tristan and Isolde and the unrequited, mundane love of the second Isolde” (Mitsch 83; for other studies of the second Isolde, see also Newstead, Scully, Mälzer, and Trindade). When we first hear of the second Isolde in the German version, it is in the context of a roll-call of her noble family, each of whose members is mentioned by name (18710–13). This enumeration, together with a sketch of her family’s exemplary history, marks her out as an eminently suitable marriage partner for a young knight of aristocratic pedigree seeking a mariage de convenance; and the first extended description in fact evokes a personage bland enough to suggest an ironic allusion to the type of Caesar’s wife: Kâedînes swester Îsôt, diu mit den wîzen handen, diu bluome von den landen, diu was stolz unde wîse und haete sich mit prîse und mit lobe sô vür genomen, daz s’al daz lant haete überkomen, daz daz niht anders seite wan von ir saelekeite. (18956–64) (Kaedin’s sister Isolde [she of the white hands], an exemplar to all her people, was lofty and discerning, and had become the recipient of so many plaudits that she had won the respect of all her subjects, with the result that people spoke of little else than the blessings bestowed upon her by fortune.)

The difference is palpable between that perfunctory description and the first extended description of the Cornish Isolde: Wem mag ich sî gelîchen die schoenen, saelderîchen wan den Syrênen eine, die mit dem agesteine die kiele ziehent ze sich? als zôch Îsôt, sô dunket mich, vil herzen und gedanken în die doch vil sicher wânden sîn von senedem ungemache. [. . .]

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diu gefüege Îsôt, diu wîse, diu junge süeze künegîn alsô zôch sî gedanken în ûz maneges herzen arken [. . .] sô was der tougenlîche sanc, ir wunderlîchiu schoene, diu mit ir muotgedoene verholne unde tougen durch diu venster der ougen in vil manic edele herzen sleich und daz zouber dar în streich, daz die gedanke zehant vienc unde vâhende bant mit sene und mit seneder nôt. (8085–93; 8106–9; 8122–31) (To whom might I compare this beautiful, wondrous creature than to one of the Sirens drawing ships towards them as if with the power of a sexual lodestone? In just this way, I believe, did Isolde capture hearts and minds customarily immune from such fatal temptations [. . .] The elegant and cultured young princess drew emotions from the very recesses of people’s hearts [. . .] Her soft melodies combined with her physical beauty in such a way that her heart-felt song crept as if through a secret passageway through eyes to noble hearts. There she spread her magic so as to make her listeners languishing prisoners of her love.)

The translation offered above gives only one possible version of a lyrical description rich in neologism (Gottfried’s English translator Hatto, for instance, renders the formulation muotgedoene [8124] as “rapturous music,” whilst the verb streich [stroked; 8128] has associations of love’s caresses (Middle High German strîchen = rub, massage). Even what we might today term the mixed metaphor of the lodestone and the Sirens (implying that Isolde’s charms exercise a compulsion to which it would be futile to offer resistance) is put to creative use as an omen of the later love-potion, which also induces a physical, as opposed to merely psychological “addiction.” Meanwhile, the references to “noble hearts” (8127) and Isolde’s fine musicianship (her “magic” is a powerful blend of the sexual and the aesthetic) foreshadow the Grotto of Love where amorous and aesthetic pursuits combine harmoniously to produce a union of minds as well as of bodies.

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These fine erotic evocations are in marked contrast to the muted introduction of the second Isolde, whose initial feelings for Tristan are aroused more by word-of-mouth reports of his prowess in battle than by an irresistible sexual attraction: sît sî gehôrte unde gesach, daz man im sô vil lobes sprach über hof und über lant, sît was ir herze an in gewant. (19071–74) (Since she heard and witnessed people speaking so highly of him both at Court and further afield, her heart inclined towards him.)

The bathetic nature of the couple’s love becomes even more apparent on comparing the essentially asexual responses to each other of Tristan and the second Isolde (which must surely have been penned somewhat tongue-in-cheek) with the irresistible physical compulsion unleashed by the philtre: si sach in gerne und was im holt. er meinde sî, sî meinde in: hie mite gelobeten s’under in liebe unde geselleschaft und wâren ouch der vlîzhaft ze iegelîchen stunden, sô si mit vuoge kunden (19122–28) (She viewed him with great pleasure. He liked her, she liked him, and so they vowed to give each other love and companionship and made every effort to make good their vows at all times provided that their conduct did not infringe the tenets of decorum.)

Nu daz diu maget und der man, Îsôt unde Tristan, den tranc getrunken beide, sâ was ouch der werlde unmuoze dâ, Minne, aller herzen lâgaerîn und sleich z’ir beider herzen în. ê sî’s ie wurden gewar, dô stiez s’ir sigevanen dar und zôch si beide in ir gewalt. (11707–15)

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(Now that the woman and the man, Isolde and Tristan, had both drunk of the potion, the Disrupter of the World was upon them: the goddess of love, waylayer of all hearts, crept upon them all unawares, planting her victory banner in their hearts and making both of them submit to her control.)

In his Armorican exile Tristan had vowed to make a name for himself by knightly deeds, an undertaking that he had been able to make good in a formal sense in a series of military campaigns where he had offered support to Whitehands’ brother, Kaedin. Yet even if we imagine the somewhat conventional White Hands drawn to him by the aphrodisiac of power, Tristan’s previous biography shows her being drawn to what is in reality a false image of himself. In his early life at Marke’s court in Tintagel he had experimented with a number of identities as a huntsman, chess-player, and harpist. More than one commentator has suggested that as poet-in-residence in Tintagel he assumes the role of spilman or minstrel (see W. T. H. Jackson, Mohr, and Ferrante), a kind of entertainer who, like Walther von der Vogelweide and other lyric poets, did not become permanently integrated into any one society but rather chose to ply his arts in a variety of courts. With regard to Tristan, the role of spilman is emblematic of his freedom to establish an identity independent of his hereditary caste. It is in fact only when his guardian, Rual, manages to track down his wayward charge after his abduction to Cornwall by the Norwegian seafarers that a knightly identity is thrust back upon him as Lord of Parmenie, an identity that is at odds with what is clearly his preferred role in life as an artist. His early experiences set up a conflict between personal freedom and “honor” (in the sense of Middle High German êre, social approbation) later exacerbated by the drinking of the love potion and the conflict between sexual self-expression and honor that flows from that action. Similarly, in his exile we may imagine that the métier of cavalry soldier, in which he has to perform such tasks of practical polity as fetching reinforcements for Kaedin from the ranks of Rual’s descendants, was not one natural to him. On the contrary, as he himself enunciates in an interior monologue, it is an occupation chosen faute de mieux in order to be able to survive emotionally at all after his expulsion from Cornwall: nû gedâhte er, solte im disiu nôt iemer ûf der erden sô tragebaere werden, daz er ir möhte genesen, daz müese an ritterschefte wesen. (18438–42)

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(Now he calculated that, if this distress [i.e. the memory of the first Isolde] were ever to be borne to the point where it might at least be endurable, then this would have to be through the performance of chivalric exploits.)

There is little indication that these rather abstract plans to launch himself into a new life are successful except in the most superficial sense, for even after his successfully negotiated military campaigns in Germany, he is driven to seek emotional support from Rual, in order to be able to “tell him his troubles” (18617), namely that his attempts to forget Isolde in the heat of battle have had little success since he has arrived at an emotional impasse: waz half, daz er der quâle entweich von Curnewâle und s’ime doch ûf dem rucke lac alle zît naht unde tac? (18427–30) (What help was it that he was able escape the torment of Cornwall when it only clung to his back all the time, night and day?)

In the light of this reverse the person of Isolde of the White Hands appears to represent Tristan’s second, rather calculated attempt to shoehorn his emotional affairs into a state of normalcy. In one sense she forms part of a grand campaign of rehabilitation and restitution of prestige which Tristan had mooted even in the ideal conditions of the Grotto of Love. Although in the Thomas/Gottfried version and in the Norwegian derivative of Thomas the lovers enjoy there a paradisal existence free from societal intrusion, they are not able to lay aside their desire, as would be necessary to resume their erstwhile respected roles in society. On the one hand we are told that they are able to feast on their mutual love as richly as if seated at King Arthur’s Round Table (16859–65) but then the narrator unleashes a Parthian shot: sine haeten umbe ein bezzer leben niht eine bône gegeben wan eine umbe ir êre (16875–77) (They would not have given a jot for a better life, save in respect of their honour.)

The immediate sequel shows that it is to retrieve their honor (the quality which at first they think they can do without) that they return to court at Tintagel. The idyllic conditions of the Grotto in this branch of the tradition (contrasting with the Béroul/Eilhart version where the lovers

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become stricken starvelings cast down by the harsh elements) mean that they are not physically impelled to return but do so for moral and psychological reasons bearing on their desire to regain the approval of their peers. They are subsequently forced to acknowledge that the conditions of surveillance (huote) under which they are set to live in society brook no replication of the conditions of the Love Grotto. When attempting to recreate their blissful bower by drawing their bed into Marke’s orchard, they are caught and thwarted, their discovery in flagrante delicto leading to their final separation. It is after this terminal reverse to their hopes that they are led to “reframe” their perceptions of their past life and hopes for the future. In the Minnegrotte no conflict of interests between the lovers and society is possible since they are unfettered from the here and now of social regulation and are transported to a country of the imagination (their wunschleben). Tristan is restored to that bohemian condition that he enjoyed before Rual defined for him his social role, whilst Isolde is free to enjoy the cultural life for which Tristan’s tutelage (in the guise of the minstrel “Tantris”) had prepared her. Here the power of music is not used for pragmatic purposes (as in the Gandin episode where the Irish baron used music in the attempt to inveigle Marke’s wife from him) but to set the seal on the lovers’ emotional harmony. Each of the architectural features of their cave is allegorized in terms redolent of ecclesiastical exegesis to glorify an aspect of pure love, and only true initiates (edele herzen) can pass through the door of a location many of whose features suggest a cathedral of love melded with Classical reminiscences of the locus amoenus or pleasance (see Chinca 86–92). In short, they are free to enact the exalted credo of love, with all its Eucharistic associations, that Gottfried had laid out in his prologue and commended as an exemplum to all future lovers: ir tôt muoz iemer mêre uns lebenden leben und niuwe wesen; wan swâ man noch hoeret lesen ir triuwe, ir triuwen reinekeit, ir herzeliep, ir herzeleit, Deist aller edelen herzen brôt. (228–33) (Their death must always be able to give new life to the living. For wherever people hear of their fidelity — the sheer purity of their fidelity — and their joy and sorrow of heart, there will be found bread for each and every noble heart.)

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In the throng of society, on the other hand, their perspectives change and they are forced to recognize the impracticability of a vow made in the context of a quasi-sacral idealism. Isolde states: “wir zwei sîn iemer beide ein dinc âne underscheide. dirre kus sol ein insigel sîn daz ich iuwer und ir mîn belîben staete unz an den tôt, niwan ein Tristan und ein Îsôt.” (18353–58) (“We two must always be a body undivided. This kiss shall be a seal that you will always be mine and I always yours till death do us part — only one Tristan and one Isolde.”)

Even at the height of their felicity the narrator had entered a sardonic running commentary in which he had poured the cold water of skepticism on the notion that their sojourn in the grotto could be anything but a temporary affair. Quipping about the lovers’ apparent capacity to subsist on their love alone (rather than, as in the versions of Béroul and Eilhart, having to hunt for game to stay alive), the narrator at first pretends to endorse the idea that no better food exists than love. But then, with the revelation that it had been a long time since he (the narrator) had enjoyed such ambrosia, appears a hint of bathos relegating such a notion to the credulity of youth: ich treip ouch eteswenne / alsûs getâne lebesite / dô dûhte mich genuoc dermite (I too at one time led such a life which seemed perfectly good to me at the time; 16920–22). Parted, the lovers are forced to conclude that the joys of illicit love can in the nature of things be only ephemeral and that they have no other choice but to temporise with society’s shibboleths, Isolde by consenting to joyless couplings with her husband, Tristan by seeking an alternative sexual outlet in order to forget his first love (see Hunt 41–61). Tristran’s resignation to the societal status quo (albeit accompanied by considerable bitterness) is illustrated in a speech he makes in Thomas’s version:

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Aimt sun seignur, a lui se tienge, Ne ruis que de mei li sovienge! Ne la blam pas s’ele mei oblie, Car pur mei ne deit languir mie: Sa grant belté pas nel requirt, Ne sa nature n’i afirt, Quant de lui ad sun desir, Que pur altre deive languir. Tant se deit deliter al rei Oblier deit l’amur de mei, En sun seignur tant deliter Que sun ami deit oblier. 1 (Sneyd Ms., lines 95–106, Wind ed.) (Let her love her lord and remain with him. I do not blame her if she forgets me — she ought not to languish for me. It is not suitable for a person of such great beauty or of a nature such as hers to have to pine for another when she may enjoy her lord. She should delight in the King so much that she forget her love for me, delight in her lord so as to forget me, her lover.)

For himself he sees no choice but to lend credence to a cynical piece of Ovidian lore according to which an obsessive love may be attenuated by a lovelorn partner’s willingness to consort sexually with another person: gewende ich mîne sinne mê danne an eine minne, ich wirde lîhte dervan ein triurelôser Tristan. Nu sol ich ez versuochen. wil mîn gelücke ruochen, sô ist zît, daz ichs beginne. wan diu triuwe und diu minne, die ich ze mîner frouwen hân, diu enmac mir niht ze staten gestân. (19461–70) (If I turn my feelings towards more than simply one love, I will perhaps be freed of my burden. I shall make the attempt! If Fortune smiles, then it is about time I should make a start, because the loyalty and love I owe to my mistress cannot help me in any way.)

Having planned his campaign in this premeditated way, Tristan’s dealings with the second Isolde hardly proceed from a position of good faith,

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and soon develop a note of duplicity that appears to fool not only White Hands but even to confuse the plotter himself (see Burns). In what may be a philosophical gibe by the narrator against the nominalist school of thought (which defined the relationship of language to reality in the doctrine that the names [nomina] given to things reflect the essence of the referents), Tristan toys with an idea he seems half to believe, namely, that the identity of names of the two Isoldes should mean that he can love the one as easily as the other: “mir ist Îsôt verre und ist mir bî, ich vürhte, ich aber gîsôtet sî zem anderen mâle. ich waene, ûz Curnewâle ist worden Arundêle, Karke ûz Tintajêle und Îsôt ûz Îsôte.” (19005–11) (“Isolde is both near to me and far. I fear I have been ‘Isolded’ once again. To me it seems that Cornwall has become Arundel [i.e. the second Isolde’s ancestral seat], Tintagel has become Karke [imagined capital of Arundel] and Isolde has become Isolde.”)

His confusion over this issue even leads to self-reproach over his seemingly discreditable emotional lability: “ine weiz, waz mich verkêret hât. waz hân ich mich genomen ân, ich triuwelôser Tristan! ich minne zwô Îsolde und hân die beide holde und ist mîn ander leben, Îsolt, niwan einem Tristande holt.” (19152–58) (“I don’t know what has corrupted me. What have I done, faithless man that I am! I love two Isoldes. Whilst both are dear to me, the one I once called an extension of my own life cleaves to only one Tristan.”)

Deeper instincts presently put him right on the score of his true emotional allegiance, and the moral tension resolves itself when he is minded of what is termed “the love that he was born to” (sîn erbeminne, 19179). This temporarily halts the self-engendered charade in his own mind; yet the moral duplicity resumes at another level when he continues to use the identity of names to practice deceit on the Breton Isolde and her

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kinsmen. For now he takes up the Lay of Tristan and uses its refrain (“Îsôt ma drûe, Îsôt m’amie, / en vûs ma mort, en vûs ma vie!” [Isolde my love, Isolde my darling, in you is my death, in you my life]) as a means of adding a spurious authenticity to his wooing of the second Isolde and of gaining (false) credit from her kinsmen for his attentions to one of their own (19205–29). The narrator calls his deceit höfscheit (19182), a rare instance of this honorific being used in the pejorative sense of “empty form, social ritual”— since in this case Tristan knows that the woman he hymns is not the maid of Arundel. This deceit leads on to consequential confusion when White Hands, having been encouraged to believe the false premise that she has excited Tristan’s fond attentions, begins to play the role of seductress in her turn — and to such effect that Tristan begins to wonder whether he might not love her even yet: Diu maget diu wart sich wider den man sô rehte lieplîch machende, smierende unde lachende, kallende unde kôsende, smeichende unde lôsende, biz daz s’in aber enzunde, daz er aber wider begunde mit muote und mit gedanken an sîner liebe wanken; er zwîvelte an Îsolde, ob er wolde oder enwolde. ouch tet ez ime entriuwen nôt, Dô sî’z ime alsô suoze bôt. (19240–52) (The woman made herself seem so attractive to Tristan with smiles and laughter, friendly banter, flattery and teasing that in the end his passions were once again inflamed, and these emotions began to make him ask questions about his love once more. He was divided in his mind whether he wanted this Isolde or not, for her honeyed words disturbed him considerably.)

The upshot of this whole imbroglio of deceit is that Tristan falls into a quandary of paralyzing doubt (zwîvelnôt, 19352) for which he is able to find an ad hoc resolution only when his disturbed mind resorts to yet another self-deluding practice, that of rationalization. For in order to justify his embarking on the affair with the second Isolde he casts unwarranted slurs on the good name of the first:

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“nu bin ich trûric, ir sît vrô. sich senent mîne sinne nâch iuwerre minne und iuwer sinne senent sich, ich waene, maezlîch umbe mich. die vröude, die ich durch iuch verbir, owî, owî, die trîbet ir als ofte, als iu gevellet. ir sît dar zuo gesellet. Marke, iuwer hêrre und ir, ir sît heime unde gesellen alle zît. sô bin ich vremede und eine.” (19484–95) (“Now I am cast down and you are joyful. All my senses strain to gain your love, but it seems to me that you are scarcely concerned with me. That sweet joy I can no longer enjoy with you, alas, you indulge in as often as you please. You and your partner, Marke, are there on the spot at all times, whilst I am in exile and alone.”)

The hero’s analysis is totally at odds with the moral state of a woman who, at home with her husband, confesses herself reht innerthalp des herzen tôt (completely dead to the core of my heart; 18553) and one who, moreover, shows the keenest sympathy for the relatively greater woes of her exiled lover (18559). But perhaps the closeness of Tristan’s mental state of tortured vacillation to that of the unfortunate Marke (for a sympathetic analysis of the king, see Classen), the perpetual zwîvelaere before the Orchard scene, ought to make us sympathize with the psychological pressures that elicit such slanders from Tristan and make all the actors in the quadrilateral act in strange and self-destructive ways. The French Turin fragment of Thomas broaches an important theme when it announces that none of the four actors involved in the adultery (directly or indirectly) was happy with his or her lot. Of the two innocent parties, Marke, the once powerful sovereign, is reduced to the status of a roi fainéant no longer able to act with any degree of regal decisiveness (see Peters, esp. 170–208), whilst the second Isolde, who initially strikes us as being somewhat prim and frigid, has little chance to develop more spontaneous and positive traits because of her husband’s damaged sexuality. She too is affected negatively by what Brangaene’s prescient description of the philtre had termed daz leide, veige vaz (the dreadful, doom-laden vessel; 11693). A particular feature of the Thomas/Gottfried version is that the effects of the love potion are said to be eternal (rather than merely a matter

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of some years, as in the Béroul/Eilhart branch). This innovation prolongs the metaphorical vitality of the draught, so that the first Isolde becomes the eternal embodiment of its thrall. Tristan’s attempt to escape her enchantment by taking another woman as his wife is indeed doomladen, and the Breton maid has no chance of developing a true marriage with one so stricken. This becomes all too obvious on the tragic wedding night, when Tristan’s fear that his desire to consummate his marriage could be overridden by the “psychosomatic” effects of his love for the Cornish Isolde is borne out by events. He concludes that the lovers’ bodies have been too “maltreated by love” (noz cors en amur malmis 1 [Sneyd Ms., line 66, Wind ed.]) to be capable of further sexual unions with other parties. The behavior of her husband is in fact so bizarre that White Hands has little opportunity to build even a companionate relationship with her new groom. Gottfried’s continuator, Ulrich von Türheim, expresses a contemporary reception of Tristan’s conduct that indicates that medieval audiences might have viewed it as a fine form of madness (on this motif see Schaefer). Ulrich has his Tristan address himself in the terms of a man attempting to resist folly (unsin), the narrator himself endorsing that diagnosis when he summarizes his story as being about a man robbed of his wits by the potion: Ine gehôrte nie bî mînen tagen Weder gelesen noch gesagen Von sô wol gelobetem man, Als was der werde Tristan. Heite in daz tranc der minne Niht braht ûf unsinne! (3577–82) (I never heard or read of any man more fit for praise than noble Tristan — had not the love potion robbed him of his wits!)

The theme of Tristan’s supposed madness was a popular one, being taken up in the two episodic poems, the Folie Tristan d’Oxford and the Folie Tristan de Berne, and whilst Gottfried did not expatiate on the theme of madness at length, Tristan’s plaint concerning the “love that so distracts me, that robs me of life and reason” (19426f.) suggests that he might have developed the theme in greater detail had it been granted to him to do so. It would certainly have become apparent had he been able to treat the second innovation of the Thomas branch, the Hall of Statues (salle aux images), where Tristran deserts his wife for long periods in order to worship Isolde’s statue in his remote and solitary crypt.

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The French Turin fragment, which contains this sequence, is itself mutilated, but the Norwegian derivative of Thomas makes clear the extent of Tristan’s psychopathology when it links his failure to relate sexually with his wife to his strange subterranean rituals: When Tristram had completed his work (sc. tricking out the hall with effigies of his lover), he rode home to his castle, as was his custom, and ate and drank and slept beside his wife, Isodd, and was pleasant to his companions. But he had no desire to have conjugal relations with his wife. (Schach trans.)

Doubtless Tristran’s wife would have supported the moral opprobrium heaped on the hero’s Classical predecessor, Pygmalion, by Arnolf of Orleans (ca.1150, the first commentator to give an allegorical interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) for indulging in illicit solitary sexual practices as a substitute for lawful marriage (see Polak). The sequence involving Isolde of the White Hands arguably presents the beginnings of the process of “Arthurianization” of the Tristan story (see McDonald). It is at the stage of his Armorican exile that the hero, like Hartmann’s Erec or Iwein, consciously strives to rehabilitate himself from a previous failing, deciding that the way forward lies in building up his knightly credibility (êre) with Kaedin’s knights. Yet whereas the heroes of the Arthurian romances are able to use their increase of experience and moral advances to rectify their faults, Tristan is held back by deep, unfathomable forces, and his tortured awareness of the philtre as a psychological force countermanding the rational part of his mind (raisun) epitomizes his plight in his Breton exile. His involuntary failure to consummate his marriage comes to overshadow his distinctively knightly prowess, and his reaction to his impotence implies a recognition on his part of this deeper implication of the sexual failure: Si jo m’astinc de la faisance, Dolur en avrai et pesance, E ma proeice et ma franchise Turnera a recreantise; Ço que ni conquis par ma valur Perdrai ore par cest’ amur. 2 (Sneyd Ms., lines 525–30, ed. Wind) (If I do not do this thing I shall have to endure deep distress, and my prowess and nobility will be exchanged for ignominy. All that I have won by force of arms will be lost by my failure in the domain of love.)

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Despite the considerable moral and cognitive advances that Tristan makes at Kaedin’s court, the knightly rehabilitation to which he directs his conscious efforts is undermined by the “subconscious” power of the philtre, for the hero’s rational faculties fall victim to deeper forces in his nature. Tristan’s experience on his wedding night triggers a reversion that is epitomized in his auto-erotic retreats to his lover’s effigy. The other Thomas fragments, which include the return to Cornwall under disguise, and the hero’s death, in part induced by his disappointment that he cannot be reunited with his beloved, reinforce the theme of psychological regression. He dies in thrall to the force that his reason would abjure. Where in the prose Tristan the love of Tristan and Isolde is inducted into a new, chivalric context at the Arthurian court where “it forms part of a wider universe where chivalry and the conquest of glory seem more important than love” (Curtis, xxii), the earlier Tristan poems retain to the end the sense of love as an inscrutable power capable of planting her victory banner at any court she chooses.

Works Cited Primary Sources “The Carlisle Thomas Fragment.” Ed. and trans. Ian Short. Tristan et Yseut: Les Premières Versions Européennes. Ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. 123–27. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Gottfried von Strassburg. ‘Tristan’ With the Surviving Fragments of the ‘Tristran’ of Thomas. Trans. A. T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. The Romance of Tristan: The Thirteenth-Century Old French ‘Prose Tristan.’ Trans. Renée L. Curtis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. The Saga of Tristram and Ísönd. Trans. Paul Schach. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1973. Thomas. Les Fragments du Roman de Tristan. Ed. Bartina H. Wind. Geneva: Droz, 1960. Ulrich von Türheim. Tristan. Ed. Thomas Kerth. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979.

Secondary Sources Brault, G. J. (1996). “‘Entre ces quatre ot estrange amor.’ Thomas’ Analysis of the Tangled Relationships of Mark, Isolt, Tristan and Isolt of the White Hands.” Romania 114 (1996): 70–95.

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Brault, G. J. (1997). “The Names of the Three Isolts in the Early Tristan poems.” Romania 115: 22–49. Bromiley, Geoffrey (1986). Thomas’s ‘Tristan’ and the ‘Folie Tristan d’Oxford.’ London: Grant and Cutler. Bromwich, Rachel (1955). “Some Remarks on the Celtic Sources of Tristan.” Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. Session 1953. 32–60. Burns, E. Jane (1995). “How Lovers Lie Together: Infidelity and Fictive Discourse in the Roman de Tristan.” Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. Ed. Joan Tasker Grimbert. New York: Garland. 75–93. Chinca, Mark (1997). Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Classen, Albrecht (1992). “König Marke in Gottfrieds von Strassburg Tristan: Versuch einer Apologie.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 35: 37–63. Curschmann, Michael (1990). “Images of Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. London: Brewer. 1–18. Curtis, Renée L. (1983). “Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: The Transformation of a Medieval Legend.” Tristania 8: 3–14. Ferrante, Joan (1979). “Artist Figures in the Tristan Stories.” Tristania 4: 25– 35. Giot, Pierre-Roland, Jacques Briard, and Louis Pape, eds. (1979). Protohistoire de la Bretagne. Rennes: Ouest-France. Grimbert, Joan Tasker, ed. (1995). Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. New York: Garland. Groos, Arthur (1990). “Goethefried von Strassburg? Appropriation and Anxiety in Wagner’s Tristan libretto.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. London: Brewer. 91–104. Harris, Sylvia (1977). “The Cave of Lovers in the Tristramssaga and Related Tristan Romances.” Romania 98: 306–30, 460–500. Hunt, Tony (1981). “The Significance of Thomas’s Tristan.” Reading Medieval Studies 7: 41–61. Jackson, W. T. H. (1995). “Tristan the Artist in Gottfried’s Poem.” Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. Ed. Joan Tasker Grimbert. New York: Garland. 125–46. Mälzer, Marion (1991). Die Isolde-Gestalten in den mittelalterlichen Tristandichtungen: Ein Beitrag zum diachronischen Wandel. Heidelberg: Winter, 1991. McDonald, William C. (1995) “Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan and the Arthurian Tradition.” Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook. Ed. Joan Tasker Grimbert. New York: Garland. 147–86.

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Mitsch, Ruthemarie (1994). “The Other Isolde.” Tristania 15: 75–83. Mohr, Wolfgang (1973). “Tristan und Isold als Künstlerroman.” Gottfried von Strassburg. Ed. Alois Wolf. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 248–79. Newstead, Helaine (1965/6). “Isolt of the White Hands and Tristan’s Marriage.” Romance Philology 19: 155–66. Padel, Oliver J. (1981). “The Cornish Background of the Tristan Stories.” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1: 53–81. Peters, Edward (1970). The Shadow King: Rex Inutilis in Medieval Law and Literature. New Haven: Yale UP. Polak, Lucy (1970). “The Two Caves of Love in the Tristan by Thomas.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33: 52–69. Schaefer, Jacqueline (1977). “Tristan’s Folly: Feigned or Real?” Tristania 3: 5– 15. Scully, Terence (1977). “The Two Yseults.” Medievalia 3: 25–36. Trindade, W. Ann (1996). “Nouvelles Perspectives sur le Personnage d’Iseut aux blanches Mains.” Tristan-Tristrant: Mélanges en l’honneur de Danielle Buschinger à l’occasion de son 60ème anniversaire. Ed. André Crépin and Wolfgang Spiewok. Greifswald: Reineke-Verlag. 521–30. Willson, H. B. (1990) “Senen and Triuwe: Gottfried’s Unfinished Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. London: Brewer. 247–56. Zach, Christine (1990). Die Erzählmotive der ‘Crône’ Heinrichs von dem Türlin und ihre altfranzösischen Quellen. Ein kommentiertes Register. Passau: Richard Rothe.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Marke kisses Tristan. A scene from the Tristan story as depicted on the Chertsey Tiles.

III. Gottfried’s Narrative Art

Between Epic and Lyric Poetry: The Originality of Gottfried’s Tristan Daniel Rocher

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epic genre are per definitionem narrative texts. This is true of antique epics such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, it is true of medieval heroic epics such as the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied, and it is also true of the medieval romances, especially the French Arthurian romances along with their German reworkings. The romances, however, manifest a significant new feature: the story is no longer sung, but rather in all likelihood presented without music. The role of the music has thus been taken over in the romances by verse, prior to the transition to prose that occurs later in the Middle Ages. The narration of events, whether historical or fictional in their origin, is of paramount importance in the romances. We are supposed to be interested primarily in the manner in which figures are characterized, the nature of the relationships among them, the situations that result from these relationships, etc. This is not to say that narration rests exclusively in the development of plot. There are also pauses in which the narrator communicates his opinion about important aspects of the narrated events and articulates general considerations of different kinds, whether philosophical, moral, or didactic, that are relevant to these events. There are other pauses in which the situation of the figures is depicted with great depth of feeling, either by the narrator or by the figures themselves, in such a way that the narration becomes something close to song. In the latter case we may speak of lyrical passages. Such passages can already be found in Virgil’s Aeneid, when Dido expresses her loyalty to her dead husband Sychaeus, the temptation of a new love (for Aeneas), and later her rage and despair when she learns of Aeneas’s plans to leave her. To be sure, these emotions contribute decisively to the development of the plot, so that one can scarcely speak of “pauses.” In the Arthurian romances in Germany one finds similar moments, for example in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (an adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain), when the hero is deeply moved by the beauty of the young widow whose husband he has just killed in combat (1610–90). I EXTS BELONGING TO THE

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mention this specific example, because it is precisely Hartmann’s art that is praised by Gottfried in the famous literary excursus in Tristan (4621– 37). A comparison of the complaint of the widow as depicted by Chrétien and by Hartmann sheds light on the art of the latter. With Chrétien, the nameless woman’s mournful suffering is brief, sober, conventional. She recommends the soul of her husband Esclados (as he is called in Chrétien’s version) to God because he has been such a perfect knight! (Le Chevalier au Lion 1288–99). No word expresses her own suffering, though she does faint and subsequently tears her clothing (1300ff.). Such a depiction makes us aware of a distance between the depicted lady and the depicting narrator. It is quite different with Hartmann (1454–75), who gives this character the name Laudine. Six verses at the beginning of her deploratio praise her husband as a perfect knight and five verses at the end recommend his soul to God (as with Chrétien), but there are eleven verses in between, exactly half of the entire passage, which give full and heartfelt expression to Laudine’s pain and feeling of abandonment, and which give good reason to us modern readers to think of Hartmann’s fan Gottfried. Having said this, it must be stressed that Hartmann’s lyricism does not match that of Gottfried. Even if we find further monologues, such as Iwein’s when he beholds Laudine’s grief (1599–1690), the length thereof is not demonstrative of elegiac sentiment. In this case Iwein is expressing his hope that Minne, or personified love, will soon win Laudine for him, and he is expressing his wonderment over the mourning woman’s great beauty (1681–83). It is difficult in this case to speak of genuine empathy, particularly in view of verses such as Ouwê, daz diu guote / in selhem unmuote / ist sô rehte wünneclîch! (Alas, the good lady is so beautiful in her suffering!). It almost seems as if her condition of mourning were a welcome opportunity to make her beauty even more striking. Such a frivolous depiction, in which the effects of beauty are seemingly being more important than sympathy or condolence, is not imaginable with Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde. When one of these sees the other in a similar mournful state, something quite different occurs, as we can see when Tristan consoles Isolde, who, aboard the ship that bears them from Ireland to Cornwall, mourns her departure from her homeland and people:

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sô trôste sî Tristan ie, sô er suozeste kunde. ze iegelîcher stunde, alse er zuo z’ir triure kam, zwischen sîn arme er si nam vil suoze unde lîse und niuwan in der wîse, als ein man sîne vrouwen sol. (11554–61) (Tristan consoled her every time as dearly as he could. When he found her sorrowful, he took her between his arms very sweetly and lightly, but only in a way that was appropriate for a vassal. [Translations are my own.])

Suoze (dearly, sweetly) is used twice in these verses, and this is one of Gottfried’s most frequently used words, whether it is used to describe Riwalin and Blanscheflur (1151, 1179), the young Tristan during his first appearance before Marke (3257f.), the musician Tristan on the Irish coast (7516–19), or the sweet linden tree and the sweet winds that Tristan and Isolde enjoy as the sun rises on the Love Grotto (17174, 17177), to mention only a few instances. This continual and quite intentional employment of sentimental language is one of the clearest signs that Gottfried himself has a deep personal interest in his characters, especially in their feelings and emotions, and it is the depth of this interest that separates Gottfried’s treatment of the Tristan story from that of his predecessors. Before we attempt to define the aspects that characterize Gottfried’s lyricism and thus to distinguish his work from other contemporary romances, we must first ask whether there had already been a strong lyrical component in the works of Béroul, Thomas, and Eilhart, in which case we might assume that lyricism is an integral part of the Tristan story in all of its different manifestations. The kernel of the story has nothing to do with ordinary “courtly” love. It is the story of a profoundly uncourtly love that corresponds neither to the social nor to the moral-religious norms of the audience to which it is being presented (possibly on account of its originally Celtic roots). Because this love is envisioned less as aggression against court society, and more as the poetic demonstration of an asocial experience with which courtly audiences might possibly identify, it carries from the very start a deeply sentimental side, an appeal to the empathy of the audience that we might call “lyrical.” The question now is how this lyricism is developed concretely in Gottfried’s narration.

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With Béroul there are only a few brief passages that appeal to the empathy of the audience, for example when the people in Marke’s city hear that Tristran is to be executed (831ff.), or when Yseut tearfully witnesses Tristran’s arrest (904–8) in a way that anticipates the lyricism of Thomas’s (and after him Gottfried’s) version courtoise: “Qui m’oceist, si garisiez, / Ce fust grant joie, beaus amis” (“If I were killed and you remained alive, that would be a great joy to me, dear friend,” 906f.). Later on Tristran responds: “En l’art por moi, por li morrai” (“She will be burned on account of me, for her I will die,” 988). The chiastic structure of the French verses underscores that the readiness of the lovers to sacrifice themselves for one another is mutual, and thus the deeply moving effect or pathos of the declaration is achieved. Beyond this, the life in the forest is related very soberly, no Love Grotto is depicted because the couple cannot spend two nights in the same place (1430), and Yseut even cries out before the hermit Ogrin: “Il ne m’aime pas ne je lui, / Fors par un herbé dont je bui / Et il en but [. . .]” (“He doesn’t love me and I don’t love him, if it had not been for a spiced wine of which I drank, and he also drank of it [. . .]” 1413ff.). Granted, there are also more lyrical passages with Béroul, as when Tristran says that his love for Yseut is depriving him of sleep (1401f.), or when we read that the partners share their common lot to such an extent that it helps them to forget their suffering (1649f.). But the forest life as depicted by Béroul is not the idyllic time that it will later be with Thomas (based on the Tristrams saga, chapter 64) and with Gottfried in the Love Grotto episode. With Béroul it is a trying time of deprivation, and when the effects of the love potion end after three years, the two immediately yearn for their previous courtly positions (2161ff.). When Yseut asks Tristran to help defend her against accusations by appearing at the end of the wooden bridge at the Malpas, she reminds him of all the suffering that she has endured on his account (3290). Tristran’s answer expresses his willingness to do this service, but ends with a turn that is more suggestive of a predilection for jest than the pain of departure: “De moi li porte plus saluz / qu’il n’a sor moi botons menuz” (“Send her so many greetings as there are marks on my skin,” 3352f.). The marks are those of the leper, as which Tristran is supposed to disguise himself in order to play his role in Yseut’s defense. A jest here serves as part of the greeting of love, which consequently generates little empathy. With Eilhart, who like Béroul produces a Tristan story of the version commune (possibly based on one of the manuscripts of Béroul’s work), we find more lyrical outpourings, among which is the long love complaint of Isalde after she has drunk the potion (2398–598). But in the

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same passage we also find much that is conventional. In a long sequence she appeals to God, frauwe Amur (2464), Cupido (2467), Minne (2480 and later repeatedly), frauwe Minne (2505), and the declaration of her sudden love for Tristrant because of his knightly qualities is so conventional that it is difficult to perceive the expression of any deeper feeling. When they find their way to each other, the poet tells us he does not know what they said to each other before beginning to “cultivate” their love (2715ff.). This is very different from the dialogue on board the ship as depicted by Thomas (in the Carlisle fragment) and Gottfried (11935– 12028). The forest life is devoid of any lyricism, and in the separation we hear a few moving words from Tristrant (4968–71), which are strongly reminiscent of Béroul (2681f.), but from Isalde not a single one! In the final episode, when Tristrant asks Isalde for help, he reminds her of everything he has done for her, which has a less than touching effect. When Isalde asks Tristrant’s wife to make space for her at Tristrant’s bier because she loved him more (9427–31), this has an equally prosaic effect. It is difficult to imagine a dryer language, and one further from the version courtoise of Thomas and Gottfried. This version courtoise of Thomas and Gottfried, to which we now turn, deserves its name not so much because of its affiliation with a particular social domain, that of aristocratic courts, but rather because of its desire to present a finer, “higher” conception of the Tristan material, which of course presupposes a sophisticated and consequently aristocratic audience that is capable of understanding it (Béroul’s and Eilhart’s audiences were certainly also aristocratic, but the version commune suggests audiences that would have been less sophisticated, more archaic). Unfortunately we do not possess the first half of Thomas’s version, but the recently discovered Carlisle Fragment confirms Gottfried’s loyalty to his source, Thomas von Britanje (149ff.). The Icelandic translation of Thomas’s work by Friar Robert, the Tristrams saga ok Isöndar, which Robert undertook in the year 1226 at the behest of King Hakon of Norway, permits us not only to examine how closely Gottfried followed his source, but also to see what changes and additions the German poet made. Gottfried added quite a bit of his own, but the question is whether these additions suggest a different approach to the material, a different poetic conception. Thomas’s romance, as we know it on the basis of the ten preserved manuscripts (including the Carlisle Fragment), often sounds didactic rather than lyrical, as when Thomas analyzes Tris1 tan’s inner conflict concerning the two Isoldes (Sneyd Ms., lines 183– 232, ed. Wind), upon which a moralizing commentary on human inconstancy immediately follows (233–304). In the Hall of Statues, the depic-

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tion of Tristan’s emotional response to the images of Brigvain and Ysodt is followed by a more extensive commentary, which first involves the 1 struggle in Tristan between jealousy and love (Turin 51–70), and then a comparison of the different situations of the four lovers, Tristan, Ysolt, Ysolt as Blanches Mains, and Marques (71–180), with their respective advantages and disadvantages. The audience is then asked to decide which of the four is happiest and unhappiest, a kind of logical problem that has little to do with generating empathy with the characters. Of course, there are also lyrical passages in Thomas’s Tristan, especially at the end, when Kaherdin reports to Ysolt about Tristan’s suffering and fear (Douce Ms., lines 1435–86, ed. Wind), and when Ysolde’s emotions aboard the ship bringing her to Tristan (Douce 1615–94) and her death 2 (Douce 1771–1818, Sneyd 783–819) are depicted. The final greeting, 2 A tuz amanz (to all lovers, Sneyd 820ff.) is also full of pathos. But Thomas generally gives more room to didactic commentary about the plot than to the expression of his characters’ or his own feelings. Or to put this somewhat differently, he seems to prefer a logical and moral analysis of situations to a depiction of emotions crafted to elicit empathy. It is precisely this, the intensive and extensive depiction of love, of love’s tests, joys, and pain, sympathy with the lovers, the participation of the poet in the inner life of his characters and in the dialogue of their love, his spiritual commitment to the expression of their intertwined fates, that lends Gottfried’s unfinished story its power to move people to the present day (even if contemporary audiences are more likely to know the Tristan story from Wagner’s opera or from Joseph Bédier’s retelling than from Gottfried’s version, which is due largely to the barrier medieval languages unfortunately pose even to educated readers these days). The power that has made Gottfried’s romance resonate beyond its own age is fundamentally lyrical in nature. Unfortunately we assess Gottfried’s achievement only on the basis of a “torso” that probably represents about four-fifths of the work that Gottfried intended to write. Even incomplete, there are still more than 19,500 verses, many more than in Béroul’s fragment (not quite 4500 verses), in Thomas’s fragments (now about 3300 verses), or even in the complete romance of Eilhart (a bit over 9500 verses). Friar Robert’s prose Tristrams saga in Old Norse (1226; based on the version of Thomas) is also significantly shorter. However unsatisfactory comparisons with fragments may be, these proportions tell us something: Gottfried, as already suggested, has committed himself totally to his work, he is intent on expressing everything that he considers to be important for his subject, and an effect of this is that his epic narrative becomes a hymn devoted to love and to the community

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of noble hearts who believe in this love and derive spiritual sustenance from it. The prologue, as is generally known, is Gottfried’s passionate avowal of the world of the edele herzen, that is, the noble hearts, who want not only to enjoy the pleasures (53), but also to experience “sweet bitterness” and “dear pain” (60) as integral aspects of love and to accept these in their own hearts: der werlt wil ich gewerldet wesen, / mit ir verderben oder genesen (I want to be part of this world, for better or worse; 65f.). Gottfried goes on to tell us that he has spent his life till now with that world that is dedicated not only to joyous festivities, but rather also to the discovery of the truth about love. There are two other passages in the romance where Gottfried’s profession of love is repeated, though in a different way. In the Love Grotto episode, after Gottfried has described the nourishment miracle involving the lovers, who sustain themselves only from their mutual gazes of love and from the loyalty of their hearts, the poet asserts, in anticipation of possible objections from “realists” that one cannot live only from love, that he has experienced this in his own life: ich treib ouch eteswenne / alsus getâne lebesite. / dô dûhte es mich genuoc dermite (Earlier in my life I lived this way myself, and it was enough for me; 16920ff.). A bit later, after the allegorical explication of the physical properties of the Grotto, Gottfried dedicates no less than thirty-nine verses (17100–38) to saying that he knows everything he has said about the Grotto to be factually correct, for he has been to this place himself and danced the dance of love there, so that one might still discover diu wâren spor der minne (the genuine marks of love; 17124), if green Nature has not already covered them. The passage closes with these verses: ich hân die fossiure erkant / sît mînen eilif jâren ie / und enkam ze Curnewâle nie (I discovered the Grotte when I was eleven, though I have never been to Cornwall; 17136ff.). Whether this discovery was real or occurred in love literature is hard to say, given the lack of further information about Gottfried’s life. But this reiteration of Gottfried’s portrayal of himself as someone who is involved in the world of the edele herzen strengthens his commitment to that select community that we heard in the prologue. However the reality of the Love Grotto might be construed on the basis of this passage, it is clear that Gottfried is here committing himself personally to love in a manner that is consistent with his avowal of the world of the edele herzen in the prologue. Because he has avowed himself to this world and because he is a poet, he has composed his maere (story; 73) for the edele herzen so that they can occupy themselves with what is most important to them and begin to assuage their love-suffering. Not

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just any story will do: it must be a special story that functions almost as a kind of homeopathic treatment by means of literary art, by means of a story that presupposes a high degree of empathy from the audience for the main characters, and for the main characters and the audience on the part of the poet. In this way the poet responds to the objection that a story about unhappy love will only further burden the hearts of his audience. As paradoxical as it sounds, love pain can only be assuaged by the (empathetic!) depiction of the suffering love involves: diz leit ist liebes alse vol, / daz übel daz tuot sô herzewol, / daz es kein edele herze enbirt (This pain is so full of joy, this sickness is so good for the heart, that no noble heart can do without it; 115ff.). Gottfried’s sentimental homeopathy of love is clear in these verses. Because he seems to consider it his mission to offer this help to the community of noble hearts, he does not present himself in the same way as the other especially gifted storytellers of his time, such as Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, or the “finder of wild tales” (4665) who is probably Wolfram von Eschenbach. These poets told suspenseful stories, profound in their own way, in which love also always played a major role, and from which lessons could be drawn for a better life at court (though it is entirely possible that their major function was simply entertainment, however controversial this view might be among literary scholars). Gottfried wants to achieve more than this, and for this reason his prologue is so rhythmic, as lyrical as music. He wants to show Tristan and Isolde to be an instance of reiner sene (true longing; 127) and of pure passion: ez liebet liebe und edelet muot / ez staetet triuwe und tugendet leben (it makes love dear and ennobles the spirit, it makes loyalty steady and life more worthy; 174f.). Hence, Gottfried’s story is not only supposed to assuage the pain of love (the word sene means both love and longing for the beloved, hence a simultaneous plenitude and lack), but also to improve the quality of the amorous feelings of the edle herzen. This is a new goal of Gottfried’s hymn of love: assuagement of the suffering of love by means of empathy is embellished by an improvement in the quality of one’s ability to feel, and in this respect Gottfried is not merely a lyrical but also a didactic poet, thus resembling Thomas somewhat more closely. The last statement that Gottfried makes in his prologue is also of great significance. It is the powerful statement of community with lovers of the past, in this case Tristan and Isolde. The relation of the story of their joys and pains in love, of their loyalty and purity, gives new life both to the dead lovers of the story and the living lovers of the audience: hie mite sô lebet ir beider tôt (their death lives on in the relation of this story; 234). This means that their sorrowful story receives new life, its presen-

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tation guarantees the lovers a kind of worldly immortality (as long as there is an empathetic audience for it!): und ist uns daz süeze alse brot (and for us this is as sweet as bread; 236). The story nourishes its empathetic audience in the same way as the lovers sustain themselves with love at the Grotto. When the lovers sit in the morning before the Grotto they think of unhappy lovers of bygone days, such as Phyllis of Thrace, Canacea, and Dido (17182ff.). This memory of illustrious predecessors in the domain of love has the same function as that which Gottfried ascribes to his own story in the prologue. In the Grotto it enables the antique heroes to live on (or, at least, to live again), but it also allows those of the “present” — Tristan, Isolde, the poet and his audiences — to live fuller lives on account of these past heroes of love, just as it assures them in turn a place in the pious memory of future generations. With these references to the continuity of a tradition of love and stories about love, the poet is asking his audience to believe, and herein lies the prologue’s moving lyricism. Formal aspects of Gottfried’s poetic language also play an important role in the prologue, as we shall see later on when we examine these aspects in Gottfried’s work as a whole. Since the poet so intensively commits himself to the lovers and their experience of love, one might expect that he would frequently have them speak of their experience, but there are actually very few love monologues in Gottfried’s Tristan, six to be exact, and some of these are not quite what one might expect. First there is the monologue of Tristan’s mother Blanscheflur, when she falls in love with Riwalin (982–1076), and then, a bit later, after they have found their way to each other and fallen in love, there is the complaint of Blanscheflur when she discovers that Riwalin is preparing to depart (1396–1417). From Riwalin we have no statement, but rather a depiction of his experience of love by the poet (915–56). With respect to the story of Tristan and Isolde, we have no love monologue at all before Tristan’s final departure, when we hear the complaint of Isolde, who has been left alone and whose gaze follows the sails of her lover’s ship (18490–600). The remainder of the monologues are those of the tormented Tristan when he thinks of Îsôt as blansches mains, at a point when the love story proper is already over (18994– 19040, 19142–66, 19424–548). There are other moving monologues that are not directly concerned with love: Tristan abandoned by the Norwegian merchants on the Cornish coast (2589–619); Tristan regaining consciousness after his battle with the dragon and marveling at the three beautiful women (the elder Isolde, her daughter, and Brangaene) who are attending to him (9450–60); Isolde marveling at Tristan’s beauty as he lies in the bath (10009–32); shortly thereafter an enraged Isolde, when she understands the significance of the piece

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when she understands the significance of the piece missing from Tristan’s sword (10123–42). There are also dialogues about love, like the first one on the ship between Ireland and Cornwall after the lovers have drunk the love potion (11958–12028). But none of these scenes manifests an expression of innermost thoughts and feelings. It is above all on the basis of the poet himself, rather than on the words of his characters — however strongly emotional these may also sometimes be — that one builds the best case for the unique lyricism of Gottfried’s work. It is the poet himself who depicts the feelings of his characters in the most intensively emotional manner. There are at least twenty-seven instances of such emotional depiction, among which are the beginnings of Riwalin’s love (915–56); Blanscheflur’s frame of mind after her first embrace with Riwalin (1331–53); Riwalin and Blanscheflur’s death (1681–1798); and love when it first takes possession of Tristan and Isolde after they have drunk the potion (11707–857). Other noteworthy examples of Gottfried’s highly lyrical depiction of love are the dialogue involving the play on the words la meir / l’ameir / l’ameir — the sea, bitterness, love (11985–12028, precisely the content of the Carlisle fragment); Tristan’s acceptance of the love-death foretold by Brangaene (12494–502); the scene in which Isolde breaks the bell on the collar of Petitcru, because it brings her a joy Tristan cannot share (16359–402); the whole depiction of the life in the Love Grotto as a utopia of love, especially verses 16807–908 (the nourishment miracle) and verses 17139–241 (the daily activities of the lovers in the idyllic landscape); and, finally, the departure scene (18266–358). In all of these depictions we see the poet expressing himself directly about love, and not just through his characters. Gottfried commits himself to love with scenes and imagery of his own creation. This is not to say that other great poets of the High Middle Ages did not also produce scenes, characters, and images that are demonstrative of a commitment to love — one need only think of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Sigune! The difference with Gottfried is their frequency and length, and the intensity with which they are rendered. This intensity of depiction we find also in other parts of Gottfried’s romance, as in the description of the sweet summertime with which the depiction of the festival in which Riwalin and Blanscheflur fall in love begins (546–86). This is a typological correspondent of the depiction of the morning on which the birds of the forest greet Tristan and Isolde, before they retire into the interior of the Love Grotto, where they will be discovered by Marke. All of this is depicted with rhythm and phrases evocative of artistry (17370ff. — these verses are discussed below) which suggest that this passage is designed to have

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the same effect on listeners as music. When the young Tristan (he will be designated as a knabe or kint [child] for quite some time, until his fight with Morold) plays music before Marke (3547–688), when he plays the harp in the boat outside of Dublin (7515–42), when Isolde — la dûze Îsôt, la bêle (8071) — sings her pastourelle, when Tristan reports of Isolde’s great beauty at Marke’s court (8253–300), we seem to hear hymns rather than spoken verses. Passages such as these involve the enchantment of an audience by means of music or words in such manner that the audience of Gottfried’s poem must be enchanted too. In case the examples cited to this point do not sufficiently document the intensity of Gottfried’s lyrical approach to his subject (“intensity” being a somewhat difficult quality to assess), there is something else in Gottfried’s romance that permits us to see this quality very concretely, and this is the language he uses. Gottfried uses language much as musicians use their instruments. The prologue already contains nearly all the poetic means with which Gottfried lends intensity to his work: chiasm, oxymora, repetition, alliteration, assonance, and affect-laden terms. An example is the penultimate quatrain of the strophic prologue: Hei tugent, wie smal sint dîne stege, wie kumberlîch sint dîne wege! die dîne stege, die dîne wege, wol ime, der si wege unde stege! (37–40) (Oh excellence, how narrow are your paths, how difficult your ways! He fares well who walks your ways and treads upon your paths!)

The words stege and wege are used here three times, and the word dîne four times in only four verses. The aim of the repetition is not to clarify the meaning, but rather to generate a musical effect that embellishes and gives additional power to the meaning of the passage. Here it is still relatively playful, but in the subsequent verses it becomes more serious. The poet says that he has undertaken a certain task, edelen herzen z’einer hage, / den herzen den ich herze trage, / der werlde in die mîn herze siht (in order to give joy to noble hearts, the hearts to which my heart turns, the world into which my heart sees; 47–49). Here the word herze is used four times in three verses, and the intensity discussed above is more than evident. The poet here expresses his intention to speak for and with the heart with such great emphasis that the listener, enraptured by the musical repetition, is emotionally placed in the domain of the heart, which is to say in the community of the edele herzen. The poet goes on to desig-

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nate the characteristics of this community of noble hearts who, as we know, are not seekers merely of pleasure: ein ander werlt die meine ich, diu samet in eime herzen treit ir süeze sûr, ir liebez leit, ir herzeliep, ir senede nôt, ir liebez leben, ir leiden tôt, ir lieben tôt, ir leidez leben. (58–63) (I mean another world, which carries together in a single heart their sweet bitterness, their dear pain, their heartfelt joy, their yearning pain, their dear life, their painful death, their dear death, their painful life.)

Here we have not just a repetition of words, but rather a more complicated rhetorical alternation of oxymora (60, 63) and “natural” associations (61, 62). The use of oxymora suggests that the association of opposing feelings is more frequent in the emotional life of the chosen community than the “natural,” more common connections. Beyond this, the rhythmic recitation of this series of different connections (eight in four verses!) is doubtless supposed to put listeners in its spell and predispose them to the favorable reception of a story, the emotional content of which will require genuine empathy on the part of the audience. In these few verses we also discover three other ways in which the sensitivity of the audience is fostered: the repetition of words (as in 47ff.), alliteration (liep/leben/leit), and chiasm (leben/tôt, tôt/leben). Gottfried uses these rhetorical devices frequently and throughout his romance. Chiasm in particular is a way to stress the mutualness of love along with the “interchangeability” of the lovers that is at the heart of Gottfried’s epic conception. It is a symbolically effective device that was already present in the romances of Béroul and Thomas, but Gottfried uses it systematically in order to keep his audience attuned to the essence of love. When Gottfried introduces his lovers, he does so by means of a double chiasm: ein senedaere unde ein senedaerîn, ein man ein wîp, ein wîp ein man Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan (128ff.) (A longing man and a longing woman, a man a woman, a woman a man, Tristan Isolde, Isolde Tristan.)

Later on we again see three chiasms employed in the depiction of the love of Tristan’s parents Riwalin and Blanscheflur:

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sus was er sî uns sî was er. er was ir und sî was sîn. dâ Blanscheflûr, dâ Riwalîn, dâ Riwalîn, dâ Blanscheflûr. (1358–61) (And so he was hers and she was his, he was she and she was he, here Blanscheflur, here Riwalin, here Riwalin, here Blanscheflur.)

The similarity between this passage and the one from the prologue cited above again shows us the “typological” relationship between the story of Tristan’s parents and that of Tristan and Isolde, with the latter of course being the more perfect antitype. Beyond these methods — the repetition of names and words, alliterations, oxymora, and chiasms that are used throughout Gottfried’s romance — there are other means by which Gottfried embellishes the lyricism of his poetry. The word “sweet” is used more than a hundred times, which complements and contributes to the sentimental tone of his poetry. The youth of the wounded Riwalin is “sweet” (1151), his beloved Blanscheflur is also “sweet” (1179 and 1180); Riwalin presses Blanscheflur suozeclîche an sînen lîp (sweetly against his body; 1444). After the death of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, Rual and Floraete look after Tristan’s upbringing, and this task is accomplished by Floraete with süezem vlîze (sweet diligence; 2052). Later on Tristan will play his songs suoze unde wunneclîche (sweetly and pleasingly; 3624) at Marke’s court, thereby enchanting his courtly audience, which silently attributes suoze to him (3709). This “sweet” singing will be repeated by the wounded Tristan off the Irish coast (especially 7516–19), and then again for the citizens of Dublin who have collected around him (7676). Even the pfaffe, or preacher, who has educated Isolde to this point is amazed, “daz ein sterbender man / als inneclîche suoze kan / geharpfen unde gesingen” (“that a dying man can play the harp and sing so beautifully”; 7747ff). The same word is used to explain why Isolde, diu süeze, diu guote (10237), is unable to kill the killer of her uncle Morold. Her süeze wîpheit is stressed another three times in this episode (10255, 10265, 10277), and this “sweet womanliness” even intercedes sweetly (suoze; 10266) to prevent her from taking Tristan’s life. “Sweet” is also the designation of Tristan in the eyes of Isolde after they have taken the love potion (11808). “Sweet” is the sound of the little bell of Petitcru (15871). These examples among many others show Gottfried’s endeavor to underscore the quality in people, animals, and natural phenomena — dem süezen vogelsange (17156), the süeze linde (17174), and the süeze[n]

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winde[n] (17176f.) in the specific case of the Love Grotto — that accords most harmoniously with a life dedicated to love. The last example of a linguistic device that contributes to the lyricism of Gottfried’s romance is related to what seems to have been a courtly fashion: the frequent use of French words, which lends a melodic quality to Gottfried’s verses when blended with the sounds of the poet’s native German. When Tristan is abducted by the Norwegian merchants, his adoptive parents and the whole population lament this in French: bêâs Tristant, curtois Tristant, tun cors, ta vie a dê commant! (Fair Tristan, courtly Tristan, God be with you!; 2397f.) Later, when he lands in Cornwall and arrives at Marke’s court, Tristan greets the king in French: deû sal le roi et sa mehnîe! (God bless the king and his household; 3259), after which the German translation follows. What is important is not the meaning of the French, but rather its melodic sound. This can be seen even better earlier in the text, when one of Marke’s hunters expresses his amazement about the “sorrowful” name of such a talented young boy as Tristan: du waerest zwâre baz genant / juvente bêle et la riant, / diu schoene jugent, diu lachende! (A better name for you would be juvente bêle et la riant, beautiful laughing youth; 3139ff.). One can imagine the power that these “sweet” words must have had on the audience (by the way, the adjective “sweet” is again not far away — it was used to designate Tristan’s “sweet youth” in line 3127). Later on “sweet” is rendered in French when Isolde is called “la dûze Îsôt la bêle” (8071) while singing her different songs, all of which have French titles. Many more examples of such “sweet” sounding French phrases at the courts of Marke and Gurmun, which would have made Gottfried’s romance more attractive to its German audiences, could be cited. Most interesting is their frequent occurrence in the depiction of the place that, at least in principle, has nothing to do with court society and its fashions (including the influence of French lyric and epic poetry), the fossiure a la gent amant (17224). There Tristan and Isolde refresh themselves with a walk in the küele prâerîe (17151), they listen to the sound of the spring, dâ er hin ûf die plaine gie (where it flowed through the glade; 17161). Later Marke’s master hunter comes zer fontaine / ûf Tristandes plaine (to the fountain on Tristan’s glade; 17345f.), and on the same morning there is a greeting to the lovers from diu wilden waltvogelîn, in ir lâtine (the wild forest birds, in their lâtine; 17359ff.), a somewhat humorous phrase given that this “Latin” shortly thereafter appears suspiciously French: dâ was manc süeziu zunge, / diu dâ schantoit und discantoit / ir schanzûne und ir refloit (There were many sweet tongues which sang and descanted their songs and their refrains; 17370ff.). All of this is at the Love Grotto.

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When the lovers have later returned to Marke’s court and are caught by the king in the garden, Tristan must take leave from Isolde and his last words to her are: dûze amîe, bêle Isôt, / gebietet mir und kûsset mich! (dûze amîe, bêle Isôt, command me and kiss me; 18284f.). Gottfried was clearly intent on capturing the hearts and minds of his audience, and the ways in which he proceeded to do this seem more akin to lyric than to epic poetry. A final aspect of Gottfried’s poetry that needs to be mentioned are the narratorial interventions that comment on events at the plot level. These interventions, in contrast to the decidedly lyrical narratorial declarations about love, are basically didactic and somewhat similar to contemporary didactic poetry (Spruchdichtung). There are no less than thirty such interventions in Gottfried’s text. They begin with the metaphor about love being like a glue in which one is stuck, which is used in the depiction of Riwalin when he falls in love with Blanscheflur (841–70). The metaphor turns up again, when Isolde — after having drunk the love potion — is unable to detach her thoughts from Tristan (11789ff.). The poet is appearing in these cases as an authority who explains the significance of the experiences of his fictitious characters for the members of his audience, so that they can obtain a better understanding of, and wisdom about, their own life experiences. In the same way, Gottfried explains the reason for Tristan’s name (2003– 22) so that his listeners will understand the close relationship between the name and the life and will be prepared to understand the story of Tristan accordingly. In the case of the “literary review” (4621–820), we have something different: the expression of the poet as artist about the most famous poets of the time and their poetry. The use of the word poetry, rather than epic or romance, is here quite appropriate, because the epic poets Hartmann von Aue, Heinrich von Veldeke, the unknown Bligger von Steinach, and the famous unnamed vindaere wilder maere are joined by the poets of the love lyrics, Minnesänger such as Reinmar and Walther von der Vogelweide. The enthusiasm with which Gottfried speaks of the love poets, the hymn that he devotes to them, the hopes that they raise in him (daz sî ze vröuden bringen / ir trûren unde ir senedez clagen; 4818f.), reveal what is important in Gottfried’s own poetry and is therefore what one might consider a lyricism once removed. The following excursus (4821–974) demonstrates the obligatory humility of the poet in the matter of depicting Tristan’s knighthood ceremony and thus competing with the proven poets of the past. Gottfried here plays the role of the inexperienced poet, who must turn to Apollo and the Muses in order to fulfill his task. It is a virtuoso performance, which has nothing to do with the story proper. But this is not the case with the

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allegorical depiction of the Love Grotto, even if this is also a case of virtuosity (16923–17099): just as the earlier discourse on love (rede von minnen; 12183–57), this allegory offers us what amounts to a theory of love. The earlier discourse was critical and contained for the most part a satire on contemporary amatory practices, while the allegory of the Grotto lays out a sentimental teaching of perfect love. “Sentimental”: this is, of course, a word that sounds very lyrical. It is not possible here to analyze all of Gottfried’s interventions in his story. I wish merely to suggest, in view of the observations made to this point, that Gottfried endeavored with different means and methods to move beyond the specific dimensions of epic narration. In the place of “normal” epic narration he seems to have put something that seems a hybrid of romance, lay, and song. Of course, what is most significant is not this heterogeneity, but rather the unifying harmony that underlies Gottfried’s work and that is also the inner music of the edele herzen. Translated by Will Hasty

Works Cited Primary Sources Béroul. Le Roman de Tristan. Ed. L. M. Defourques. 4th ed. Paris: Champion, 1966. Hartmann von Aue. Iwein. Ed. G. F. Beneke and Karl Lachmann. Revised by Ludwig Wolff. 7th ed. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980. Thomas. Les Fragments du Roman de Tristan. Ed. Bartina H. Wind. Geneva: Droz, 1960.

Secondary Sources Consulted Blodgett, E. D. (1994). “Music and Subjectivity in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Analogon rationis. Festschrift für Gervin Marahrens. Edmonton: U of Alberta P. 1– 18. Gnaedinger, Louise (1967). Musik und Minne im ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Strassburg. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann. Huber, Christoph (1989). Gottfried von Strassburg: ‘Tristan und Isolde.’ Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: Artemis.

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Jaeger, C. Stephen (1992). “Höfisches Fest und Hofästhetik in Gottfrieds Tristan. Die Dichterschau als Zelebration.” Bildhafte Rede im Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Ed. Wolfgang Harms et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 197–214. Ranke, Friedrich (1948). “Zum Vortrag der Tristanverse.” Festschrift KluckhohnSchneider. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 528–39. Sawicki, Stanislaw (1932). Gottfried von Strassburg und die Poetik des Mittelalters. (German. Stud. 124). Berlin: Ebering. Reprint Neudeln, Lichtenstein, 1967. Scharschuch, Heinz (1938). Gottfried von Strassburg: Stilmittel — Stilästhetik. (German. Stud. 197). Berlin: Ebering. Reprint Neudeln, Lichtenstein, 1967. Schirok, Bernd (1994). “Handlung und Exkurse in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan.’” Texttyp, Sprechergruppe, Kommunikationsbereich: Festschrift für Hugo Steger. Berlin: de Gruyter. 33–51. Thurlow, Peter (1995). “Gottfried und Minnesang.” German Life and Letters 48: 401–12. Tomasek, Tomas (1999). “Überlegungen zum truren im ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Strassburg.” Lili 29: 9–20. Wolf, Alois (1989). Gottfried von Strassburg und die Mythe von Tristan und Isolde. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ——— (1993). “Die ‘Grosse Freude.’ Vergleichende Betrachtungen zur Erosexsultatio in Minnekanzonen, im Erec und im Tristan.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 34: 49–79.

History, Fable and Love: Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain Adrian Stevens

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N HIS PROLOGUE,

Gottfried implies that one of the reasons why he took Thomas as his principal source was that Thomas was the only author to have presented a historically reliable account of the Tristan story (see Chinca 46–60). It was Thomas alone, according to Gottfried, who an britûnschen buochen las / aller der lanthêrren leben / und ez uns ze künde hat gegeben (read in British books the lives of all the rulers of the country [i.e. Britain], and made them known to us; 152–54 [All translations are my own]). Gottfried’s formulation makes it appear as if Thomas’s version of the Tristan story is written in the form of a historical chronicle. Yet this is utterly misleading. It is clear from the extensive surviving fragments of his poem that Thomas does not do what Gottfried claims: he does not write early British history in the sense of offering a record of the lives of all the rulers of Britain. The two twelfth-century authors who did write histories of Britain matching Gottfried’s description were Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace (Le Saux 18–22). Geoffrey’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1138) is composed in the form of a regnal narrative (see Davies 4); it gives Britain an unbroken succession of kings arranged, in Geoffrey’s own words, “continuously and in order” (“continue et ex ordine,” ed. Wright, ch. 1). Wace’s Roman de Brut, the Norman French adaptation of Geoffrey’s Historia completed in 1155, carefully preserves the regnal form of its Latin source. In the prologue to the Roman de Brut, Wace announces that he will present the early history of Britain “from king to king and from heir to heir” (De rei en rei e d’eir en eir, 2; ed. and trans. Weiss); he promises to identify all those kings, and also to specify in what order they ruled (Quels reis i ad en ordre eü, 5). In introducing Thomas as a historian of early Britain, Gottfried seems to be mischievously conflating him with Geoffrey and Wace; and in speaking of Thomas reading “British books,” he may well be making a playful intertextual allusion to Geoffrey, who famously cites as

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the principal source for his history “a very ancient book in the British language” (quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum; ed. Wright, c. 2) supposedly given him by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford (see Echard 33–35 and Short). The passing hint that Thomas was an even more scrupulous historian than Geoffrey in that he consulted not just one venerable Celtic source but a number of “British books” is itself deliberately undercut. Gottfried prefaces his reference to Thomas as an authority on British history by a description of him as a “master” of the presumably fictitious form of “adventure” or romance narrative (âventiure meister, 151); and just a few lines after he speaks of Thomas consulting British history books, he proceeds to complicate matters further by characterizing the Tristan story as a “fiction” or “invention,” using the term tihte (162) to refer both to Thomas’s text and to his own. This raises some important questions: if he regards the Tristan story as an invention, why does Gottfried commend Thomas in his prologue as an authority on the early history of Britain and its rulers? And why does he signal that the Tristan story as Thomas writes it, and as he proposes to write it himself, in imitation of what he terms Thomas’s “correct manner” (in siner rihte, 161), is at best a hybrid, a mixture of history and fiction?

2 Thomas, as has long been recognized, makes extensive use of the Roman de Brut as an intertext (see Pelan 71–97), going so far as to interpolate entire scenes from Wace’s history that feature the giant-killing exploits of Arthur, the greatest of the early kings of Britain. The function of these interpolations is fictional rather than historical: Thomas’s purpose in establishing carefully marked parallels between Wace’s portrayal of Arthur and his own portrayal of Tristan is to reinvent Tristan as Arthur’s double and symbolic heir (see Baumgartner 80, Blakeslee 100–106, McDonald 55–112, and Mertens 365–79). The major and most obviously contrived resemblance between Thomas’s Tristan and Wace’s Arthur is that Thomas’s Tristan is a giant killer. In the Roman de Brut, Arthur slays the giant Rithon, who terrorizes kings and princes by collecting their beards to decorate his cloak; Thomas borrows this episode, deliberately referring his audience back to Wace in order to show Tristan imitating and replicating Arthur by slaying a giant related to Rithon — Rithon’s nephew, Orguillus, who sets out to repeat his uncle’s career as a collector of royal beards by demanding that Arthur should contribute his own whiskers. In so conspicuously re-enacting Arthur’s exploit,

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slaying the nephew where Arthur had slain the uncle before him, Tristan symbolically assumes the role of Arthur’s heroic successor (see Pelan 85 and Stevens 409–17). The reprise of the Rithon episode, preserved in its entirety in one of the surviving fragments of Thomas, looks like part of a carefully contrived narrative pattern. On the evidence of Tristrams saga, the Old Norse adaptation of Thomas’s text written in 1226, Thomas was clearly at pains to make a whole series of intertextual connections between the Roman de Brut and his own version of the Tristan story. Tristrams saga (The Saga of Tristram and Ísönd, trans. Schach, 118–19) contains what is clearly another lengthy interpolation from the Roman de Brut: Wace’s account of Arthur’s slaying of the giant of Mont-SaintMichel. Tristrams saga specifies that it is the giant of Mont-Saint-Michel who, before he is slain by Arthur, constructs the vault in which Tristram installs the statues of Ísönd and Bringvet. In order to gain possession of this vault, and also to secure the services of the craftsmen who renovate it and craft the statues, Tristram has to fight and defeat another giant, Moldagog, who describes himself as a “kinsman” of Orguillus — and also as the nephew of Urgan, the giant Tristan kills in Tristrams saga (see The Saga, trans. Schach, 116) as in Gottfried in order to win the magic dog Petitcru for Isolde. Tristan’s heroic dealings with giants not only make him the double and symbolic successor of Arthur; they are also integrated into the story of his love for Isolde, and they provide crucial indicators of the way in which Thomas figured that love in his text. It is important to note that Thomas’s interpolation of episodes from the Roman de Brut that feature Arthur as a giant killer involved him in making drastic changes to the received chronology of the Tristan story. Béroul and Eilhart, following what looks like the dominant tradition, locate the story firmly within the period of Arthur’s reign (see McDonald 23–54). In their versions, Mark and Arthur are contemporaries who know and interact with one another; Tristan keeps company with the knights of the Round Table, and Arthur even aids and abets Tristan’s adultery with Isolde during a visit to Mark’s court. In relocating the Tristan story in the post-Arthurian age, Thomas places it within a changed interpretive frame. The interpolations from Wace are subordinated to a design that uses the Arthurian past as a means of interpreting the present of Thomas’s narrative. The relationship established by Thomas between Arthur, Mark, and Tristan is symbolic, and so, too, is the revised chronology that makes it possible. The true significance of Mark’s reign as Thomas defines it is that it is inferior because it is post-Arthurian: the age of Mark, in stark contrast to the age of Arthur, is an unheroic age presided over by an unworthy king.

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Thomas’s Tristan lives in a time when rulers no longer follow the example of Arthur by fighting their own duels with the giants who threaten them. As his symbolic heir, Tristan is condemned to repeat Arthur’s heroic giant-killing feats as the representative of men who may be kings and rulers in name, but who are not by any stretch of the imagination heroes. He kills the giant-like Morold on behalf of Mark; he defeats the nephew of Wace’s Rithon in Spain in the service of an emperor who, like Mark, will not fight for himself; he wins Petitcru by killing the giant Urgan, fighting in place of Duke Gilan, another ruler too cowardly to challenge a giant; and in Tristrams saga he defeats yet another giant, Moldagog, Urgan’s nephew and the kinsman of Rithon’s nephew Orguillus, of whom his friend Kardín (Thomas’s Kaherdin) and his father live in terror. As far as it is possible to judge, Thomas made the Tristan story into the story of a hero who is the successor of Wace’s Arthur in deed, but not in title, and of an unheroic king, Mark, who is the successor of Wace’s Arthur in title, but not in deed. The family resemblance between Arthur and Tristan (and the absence of any such resemblance between Arthur and Mark) makes it possible to draw a crucial interpretative inference: Tristan as Arthur’s true heir is the hero fit to be king and have Isolde as his queen; Mark, the nominal successor of Arthur, is not a hero; and because he is not a hero like Arthur and Tristan, he is unfit to be king and, by analogy, unfit to be Isolde’s husband. Just how selective Thomas was in his use of early British history as recorded by Wace may be gauged by his omission of any reference to the tragic end of Arthur’s reign as it is presented in the Roman de Brut. In Wace, the agent of Arthur’s downfall is his nephew Modred, who foments rebellion in Britain and steals Arthur’s wife Guenevere just as Arthur is on the verge of conquering Rome. The parallel between Modred and Tristan is so compelling that Thomas cannot have missed it. Modred, the son of the king’s sister, who wrongfully takes his uncle’s wife, is a much more obvious double of Tristan than Arthur. Wace leaves no doubt that Modred functions in his history as an exemplar of evil (see Wulf); he is forthright in condemning him both as a sinner and a traitor, someone who breaks God’s law and feudal law by daring to take the wife of a man who is not only his lord, but a member of his close family: “Against Christian law, he took the wife of the king into his bed: he treacherously took the wife of his uncle and lord” (Brut, trans. Weiss, 13027–30). Had Thomas drawn the obvious analogy from the Roman de Brut and associated Tristan with the felon Modred rather than with the hero Arthur, his interpretation of the Tristan story would have been very different. Presented as the new Modred rather than the new Arthur,

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Tristan would have become the villain in a simple cautionary tale, and his love for Isolde would have constituted precisely the kind of unambiguous negative exemplum that some critics have perceived it to be (see Hunt 41–61, Baumgartner 82–84, and Bruckner 37–59). But Thomas deliberately does not present Tristan as the double of Wace’s villain. By choosing to ignore the self-evident parallel between Mordred and Tristan as adulterers and lovers of the wives of their respective uncles, Thomas gives himself the scope to invent a hero whose story, unlike Mordred’s, is too nuanced, too complex, to sit easily with the passing of condemnatory moral judgments.

3 Although Mark, like the other central characters in the Tristan story, does not feature in the Roman de Brut, it seems that Thomas deliberately invented a place for him in Wace’s regnal narrative. When Mark first appears in Tristrams saga, he is described as “the sole lord and ruler over all the English and the men of Cornwall” (The Saga, trans. Schach, 4), king both of Cornwall and of England. Gottfried, evidently taking his cue from Thomas, notes that when Tristan’s father Riwalin first visits Mark’s court, Cornwall is already Mark’s by inheritance, and Mark has become king of England as well: “At that time he ruled over Cornwall and England. Cornwall was his by heritage” (der haete dô ze sîner hant / Curnewal und Engelant. / Curnwal was aber sîn erbe dô, 425ff.). According to Gottfried, the reason why Mark has become king of England as well as Cornwall is that the English, tired of warring among themselves, agreed to ask him to become their ruler: dô die daz lant besâzen und ez under sich gemâzen, dô wolten si alle künegelîn und hêrren von in selben sîn: diz wart ir aller ungewin. sus begunden sî sich under in slahen unde morden starke und bevulhen ouch dô Marke sich und daz lant in sîne pflege. (437–45) (When they had occupied the land [England] and divided it up amongst themselves, they [the English] all wished to be petty kings and their own lords; but this was to the detriment of all of them. They took to killing and murdering one another, and ended by entrusting themselves and the country to Mark’s care.)

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No trace of the story of how Mark became king of England survives in Tristrams saga, but the Roman de Brut contains an obvious intertext for this passage. Wace reports that the English fight amongst themselves after they have wrested control of England from the native British because they have no single ruler to unite them; but crucially, the Roman de Brut makes no mention of them agreeing to ask any king of Cornwall called Mark to become their king. According to Wace: The English wanted to appoint a king, but they were unable to agree that they should have only one king and all be subject to one king. They did not agree on one, and so, by common consent, they made several kings in several countries and divided up the lands. Many times they made war, and many times they made peace. As each grew stronger, he conquered the weaker ones. And so for a long time matters remained this way, and they had no crowned king. (Brut, trans. Weiss, 13663–76; compare Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Thorpe, 265).

It would seem that Thomas simply inserted Mark into Wace’s account, and that Gottfried followed him in amending the established version of British history. But far from conceding that his story about Mark and England is pure fiction, Gottfried chooses to stress at this point that it is taken from a source that he explicitly defines as historical: “The history also relates of him [ Mark] that in all the neighbouring lands in which his name was known, there was no king who was more highly esteemed than he was” (ouch saget diu istôrje von im daz, / daz allen den bîlanden, / diu sînen namen erkanden, / kein künec sô werder was als er; 450–53). Since the “history” that tells of Mark as a king held in high esteem by his contemporaries is neither the Roman de Brut nor Geoffrey’s Historia, the reference to diu istôrje (450) can only be taken as an allusion to Thomas’s text. This means that the Mark who in Gottfried is asked by the English to be their king is not, for all Gottfried’s sleight of hand, a historical figure; he is an actor in Thomas’s fiction about post-Arthurian Britain. The implication is far-reaching: it is safe to assume that Thomas was working in the knowledge that many of the members of his extratextual audience were familiar with the Roman de Brut, and that they would have been in a position to realize that the story of Mark being chosen by the English to be their king was just Thomas’s fictional elaboration of Wace. So Thomas must have intended to signal that, in amending the Roman de Brut so as to make room for Mark in the received regnal narrative, he was writing not history, but historical fiction. The inference is that Thomas regarded it as perfectly legitimate to depart from the written history of Britain and reinvent it for his own narrative

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purposes. But what of Gottfried? Did he know Wace or Geoffrey well enough to realize that Thomas’s story about Mark being king of England was fiction? And if he did know either or both of the standard accounts of early Britain, why would he want to sustain the pretense that Thomas’s text was history by citing it as diu istôrje? Did he wish to mislead his own audience as to the historicity of his narrative? There is one crucial piece of evidence in Gottfried’s text that suggests that the history of Britain as recorded by Geoffrey and Wace may have been known not only to Gottfried himself, but also to at least some members of his target audience. Gottfried introduces the episode of the cave of lovers by giving a brief outline of the cave’s early history. He notes that the cave had originally been hewn into a mountain in the wilderness by the giants who ruled Britain before the time of Corineus, and goes on to explain that they used it when they wanted privacy to make love: daz selbe hol was wîlent ê under der heidenischen ê vor Corinêis jâren, dô risen dâ hêrren wâren, gehouwen in den wilden berc. dar inne haetens ir geberc, so s’ir heinlîche wolten hân und mit minnen umbe gân. (16689–96) (A long time in the past, under heathen law, before the days of Corineus, when giants were lords there [in Cornwall and Britain], this same cave had been hewn into the wild mountain. In it they had a hiding place when they wanted privacy to make love.)

It is possible, as Bédier conjectures, that Gottfried took the allusion to Corineus and the giants from Thomas (see Thomas, Le Roman de Tristan, vol 1, ed. Bédier, 234–36; The Saga, trans. Schach, 101, merely speaks of Tristram and Ísönd finding shelter in a cliff “that heathen men had hewn out and adorned in ancient times with great skill and beautiful art”). But even if Thomas did refer to Corineus and the giants at this point, Gottfried would hardly have included them in his own narrative without knowing their story; and the only sources for that story were Geoffrey and Wace. Moreover, Gottfried’s mention of Corineus and the giants is, to say the least, cryptic. The fact that he feels able to allude to Corineus without explaining who he was suggests that Gottfried was sure that at least some his target audience were familiar with the history of Britain as told by Wace (the Roman de Brut is preserved in thirty-two

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manuscripts and fragments; see Brut, ed. and trans. Weiss, xxv–xxix), or more probably Geoffrey, whose Historia, which survives in at least twohundred and fifteen manuscripts, is “the most reproduced historical work written in the Middle Ages” (Ingledew 669, fn. 15). Either way it would seem that Gottfried, like Thomas, wrote with readers and listeners in mind who were familiar with the received account of early Britain; if so, he cannot have expected that his claim that he was recycling established historical fact by introducing Mark as king of England would be taken at face value. But why, in that case, did Gottfried bother to characterize his story of Mark as being historical at all? And why do he and Thomas appear to have had so little compunction in rewriting the version of events given by Geoffrey and Wace and replacing it with a fiction of their own devising?

4 It needs to be remembered that the twelfth-century clerics who alluded to the matter of Britain — the stories about Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, and Tristan — generally classified them as fables (see Green 249–51 and Sargent-Baur). Aelred, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in Yorkshire, referred in his Speculum Caritatis (1142– 43), to the fables commonly made up about some Arthur or other (fabulis, que vulgo de nescio quo finguntur Arthuro), and he described those fables as mendacia (“lies”; ed. Hoste and Talbot, 2.17.51). Peter of Blois noted with alarm that even members of the clergy were habitually moved to tears by “the public recital of fables” (fabule recitatione) and lamented the popularity of the “fabulous stories” (fabulosa) about Arthur, Gawain, and Tristan (cit. Kelly 85–87). One result of the conventional association of Arthurian story and the matter of Britain with fable was that some of its early readers refused to accept that Geoffrey’s Historia was history at all (see Dean 3–31, Fichte, Sargent-Baur, Echard 31–67, and Barron 11–57). In the preface to his Historia rerum Anglicarum (1196–98) William of Newburgh refers to Geoffrey as a “maker of fables” (fabulator), and attacks him for weaving a web of “ridiculous fictions” (ridicula figmenta; ed. Howlett, 11) around the Britons. As William sees it, Geoffrey, in assuming the role of fable maker, abandons all “faithfulness to historical truth” (fidem historicae veritatis), and “lies shamelessly about more or less everything” (impudenter fere per omnia mentiatur; ed. Howlett, 11–13). In much the same vein, Gerald of Wales asserts bluntly in his Descriptio Kambriae (1193–94) that “the fabulous history of Geoffrey is a lie” (fabulosa Galfridi mentitur historia; ed. Brewer et al., I.7).

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It is, of course, possible that Thomas and Gottfried shared the view of Geoffrey’s critics that the received account of early British history was no more than a collection of fables, and so felt free, in making up the story of Mark as king of England, to expand the corpus by adding to it a fable of their own. But if Gottfried thought that the entire history and matter of Britain, including the Tristan story, was no more than fable, what could have been the reason for his repeated insistence that Thomas was not only an inventor of fictions, but also a historian? To try to answer this question, it is necessary to turn once more to the Roman de Brut. In the much cited passage in which he describes how the stories still told about Arthur originated during the twelve-year period of peace that followed his defeat of the Saxons and the consolidation of his rule, Wace adopts a notably more conciliatory attitude towards the matter of Britain than the clerical skeptics who derided it as a tissue of inventions. It has been suggested that Wace only mentions the Arthurian stories in the Roman de Brut in order to dismiss them as fables and lies (see Putter), but he actually defines them much more circumspectly, as “not all lies, and not all truth” (ne tut mençunge, ne tut veir: Brut, ed. and trans. Weiss, 9793; see Le Saux 18–22). Scholarship has been slow to recognize that in describing the genre of Arthurian story as a mixture of truth and falsehood, Wace is tacitly identifying it not just as fable, but as history, and associating it with the most prestigious narrative and literary model inherited from classical antiquity. According to the commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid written by the fourth-century grammarian Servius, whose work played a decisive role in the transmission of the techniques of textual interpretation from late antiquity to the Middle Ages (see Irvine 126), one of the defining features of the Aeneid as an epic poem is that it combines truth with fiction or invention (continens vera cum fictis; In Vergilii Aeneidos commentarii, ed. Thilo and Hagen, I.4). Servius’s characterization of the Aeneid as a work that mixed truth with fiction came to enjoy canonical status. The commentary on the Aeneid attributed to Anselm of Laon (ca. 1055-ca. 1117), widely copied and adapted in the twelfth century (see Baswell 63–68) follows Servius in presenting the Aeneid as a blend of fact and fiction. It repeats verbatim the description of the Aeneid as a mixed or hybrid narrative that combines truth with fiction or invention (continens uera cum fictis, ed. Baswell, 313). Such was the authority of Servius’s gloss that it could even form the basis of an anonymous twelfthcentury introduction to Lucan’s Pharsalia, which assimilates it to the narrative mode of the Aeneid on the grounds that it “contains true things with fictitious things” (continens vera cum fictis). The anonymous

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Lucan commentator then adds his own explanatory gloss to Servius’s phrase continens vera cum fictis, saying that the Pharsalia “contains things which are true together with falsehoods and fables” (continet et vera [. . .] cum falsis et fabulosis; cit. von Moos 120, fn. 57). The Pharsalia is validated by being brought into conformity with the authoritative model of the Aeneid: according to the anonymous glossator, Lucan tells the “truth” of history, but like Virgil, he mixes it with the false inventions of fable (see Chinca 61–85). Although the medieval commentary tradition, taking its lead from Servius, routinely spoke of Virgil mixing historical truth with the falsehoods of fable, it legitimized Virgil’s fictitious deviations from history as a proper and integral part of his narrative design. The commentary on the Aeneid attributed to Anselm of Laon notes that Virgil, “because he wrote in praise of Augustus, and therefore suppressed much of the truth of history, quite becomingly added certain poetic fictions” (quia ad laudem augusti scripsit, idcirco de ueritate historie multa reticendo poetice quedam figmenta satis competenter apponit; ed. Baswell 1995, 313 [my translation]). The “Bernard” who is the author of the early twelfthcentury allegorical commentary on the first six books of the Aeneid attributed to Bernardus Silvestris notes that Virgil does not write “according to the truth of history, as Dares Phrygius describes it” (non usque secundum historie veritatem, quod Frigius describit), and then adds, “rather, he extols the deeds and the flight of Aeneas [from Troy] by means of poetic fictions” (Enee facta fugamque ficmentis extollit; ed. Jones and Jones, 1 [my translation]). The point is expanded in the discussion of Book II of the Aeneid, where “Bernard” observes that the story of the sack of Troy that Aeneas tells Dido mixes the truth of history with the falsity of fable: “Some speeches are true and some are false, and this is figured by the way in which, in Aeneas’s narration, the falsity of fable (falsitas fabule) is mixed with the truth of history (veritati historie admiscetur). It is history (Est enim historia) that the Greeks destroyed Troy, but Aeneas’s probity is a fable (fabula est), for Dares Phrygius relates that Aeneas betrayed his city” (ed. Jones and Jones, 15 [my translation]). When Aeneas tells Dido the story of the sack of Troy and his flight from it, he (or rather Virgil as the author of his speech) mixes history with fable. Although, according to “Bernard,” it is “history” that Troy fell to the Greeks, the historical Aeneas betrayed Troy; in turning him from a traitor into an honorable man, Virgil substitutes fiction for history; the probity of Aeneas is Virgil’s invention and therefore a prime example of the “falsity of fable.”

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It was not only in his depiction of Aeneas that Virgil was widely perceived to have deviated from history. According to both the classical and the medieval commentary traditions, the celebrated story of the love affair between Dido and Aeneas is entirely Virgil’s invention (see Desmond 23–73). Servius emphasizes the fictitious nature of the relationship, noting with reference to Aeneid 4.36 that the historical Dido committed suicide not, as she does in Virgil, because Aeneas abandoned her, but because, “as history has it” (ut habet historia; In Vergilii Aeneidos commentarii, ed. Thilo and Hagen) she was determined not to marry Iarbas, the king of Libya, who waged war against Carthage to force her to take him as her husband. St. Augustine in the Confessions describes Virgil’s story that Aeneas came to Carthage as false, and sees the love of Dido for Aeneas as one of Virgil’s “poetic fictions” (poetica figmenta; ed. O’Donnell, I.13.22). St. Jerome and Tertullian commend the historical Dido, who preferred the pyre to marriage with Iarbas, as an example of chastity (see Desmond 1994, 55–58); and Macrobius, too, is careful to stress that Virgil’s Dido is a fictional creation, not to be confused with the historical Dido. In his Saturnalia, he speaks of “the fable of the lustful Dido, which all the world knows to be false” (fabula lascivientis Didonis, quam falsam novit universitas), explaining that the beauty of the Aeneid is such that people “turn a blind eye to the fable” (coniveant tamen fabulae), and choose to regard “as true” (pro vero) what “the sweetness of [Virgil] the maker of fictions” (dulcedo fingentis) has implanted in their hearts (ed. Willis, 17, 5–6 [my translation]). John of Salisbury also distinguishes between the chaste historical Dido and the lustful Dido invented by Virgil. John notes in his Policraticus that Virgil, “using poetic license to overturn faithfulness to history (poetica licentia fidem peruertens historiae), persuaded posterity that Dido, although she was extremely chaste, had been destroyed by an impure love for a guest whom, according to the logic of time, she could never have seen” (ed. Webb, 8.14 [my translation]). That Virgil could use poetic license to change what was thought to be the historical “truth” about Dido and Aeneas, and that the Aeneid, despite its generous use of fable, could be regarded, in part at least, as fact, has important implications for the Tristan story as Thomas and Gottfried write it. In departing from the received account of early Britain and making Mark the king of England, Thomas and Gottfried are doing what, according to the commentary tradition, Virgil does in the Aeneid: they are replacing history (or what passes for history) with fable. In presenting Thomas as a historian who is also an inventor of fictions, and in referring to his own version of the Tristan story sometimes as history

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and sometimes as fiction, it looks very much as it Gottfried is tacitly associating both his text and Thomas’s with the narrative mode identified with — and authorized by — the Aeneid. The corollary is that when they replace what passes for history with inventions or fables of their own making, Thomas and Gottfried may well have thought of themselves as continuing the practice adopted and legitimized by Virgil. It may at first seem surprising that Thomas and Gottfried should connect the early history of Britain with Virgil’s heroic poem of Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the Aeneid functions as a key intertext for the Roman de Brut, as it does for Geoffrey’s Historia. Wace follows Geoffrey in adapting defining elements of Virgil’s narrative of the origins of Rome to his own narrative of the origins of Britain. Early British history as Geoffrey and Wace present it is modeled on the imperial and dynastic vision of Roman history that informs the Aeneid. In the Historia and in the Roman de Brut, Brutus, the first king of Britain, is a Trojan and the great-grandson of Virgil’s Aeneas; but the link between Brutus and Aeneas is not merely genealogical. In the figure of Brutus, British history is given its own alternative Aeneas: Brutus, like his great-grandfather, is “exile, wanderer, conqueror-hero, nation founder, executant of a divine programme” (Ingledew 677). In the Aeneid, it is “Rome’s beginnings in the city of Troy and in the figure of Aeneas, and the genealogical succession from Aeneas, that generate and guarantee its imperial mission” (Ingledew 671). By analogy, Britain’s origins in the Trojan royal house and the direct linear descent of its rulers from Aeneas give legitimacy to the imperial aspirations of its hero-kings, the greatest of whom, in the Historia regum Britanniae as in the Roman de Brut, is Arthur.

5 Gottfried’s cryptic allusion to the story to the story of Corineus and the giants assumes a particular significance in this context. In the Roman de Brut, Wace, following Geoffrey, names Corineus as one of the leaders of the Trojans, who, under the generalship of Brutus, successfully invade and occupy Britain. The Trojans drive the giants, the original inhabitants of Britain, into caves in the mountains, and divide the land among themselves. Corineus becomes the ruler of Cornwall, where there are more giants than in any other part of Britain. The Trojans and the giants fight, and after initial losses, the Trojans slaughter all the giants with the exception of Gogmagog, their lord, whom Corineus wrestles and kills (Brut, ed. and trans. Weiss, 1063–1168). The slaying of Gogmagog by Corineus is a decisive turning point, in that it marks a translation of

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empire in Britain from the giants to the Trojan descendants of Aeneas, and ushers in a new historical age. The notion of the translation of empire (translatio imperii) would have been familiar to the audiences of Thomas and Gottfried alike. The medieval Western emperors from Charlemagne onwards had attempted to legitimize and reinforce their authority by styling themselves as the successors of the ancient Roman emperors, and by claiming that the old empire and the power it symbolized had been translated to them. An integral part of the translation of empire was the translation of learning (translatio studii). Charlemagne’s empire, the first modern or translated empire, was in an important sense “a Latin empire, and since translatio studii accompanies translatio imperii the Carolingian ‘renascence’ was a revival of Latin learning in the interests of Western Christianity. The translated secular authority and the translated learning would be used to ensure a renovation of the old Roman civility” (Kermode 30). When the empire passed from the Franks to the Germans at the coronation of Otto I in 962, Otto and his successors “styled themselves as revivers of empire, continuators of the emperors of ancient Rome and of the Carolingian empire” (Jaeger 119). Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, each significant imperial reign in Germany would bring its own affirmation that it was renewing both the political and cultural heritage of Rome (see Jaeger 113–26). What bearing does all this have on Gottfried’s presentation of the Tristan story? The answer is to be found in Gottfried’s invention of a symbolic translation of empire and learning in the cave of lovers. According to Gottfried, the first inhabitants of the cave were giants who, “before the time of Corineus” (vor Corinêis jâren, 16691), had ruled Cornwall “under heathen law” (under der heidenischen ê, 16690). With the passing of power in Britain from the giants to the Trojans, Britain becomes the double of Rome; it is, like Rome, a Trojan foundation, and its founder, Brutus, is a direct descendant of Aeneas. The translation of empire from the giants to the Trojans, and the shift from one historical era to the next which is symbolized by it, are prominently signaled both in Geoffrey’s Historia and the Roman de Brut; but since Thomas used Wace as an intertext, the remarks that follow will concentrate primarily on Wace’s version of early British history. After the defeat and destruction of the giants, Brutus, mixing genealogy with etymology in a way designed to commemorate his role as founding father and genitor of a royal lineage, changes the name of the newly conquered country from Albion to Britain, and renames the Trojans Britons after himself: “The country was called Albion, but Brutus

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changed its name. He gave it its name from Brutus, his name, and had it called Britain. The Trojans, his companions, he called Britons from Brutus” (Brut, trans. Weiss, 1175–80). To emphasize still further the Trojan origins of his new kingdom, Brutus has the city he founds on the banks of the Thames named “New Troy” in memory of his ancestors (1223–24). The model for Wace’s mix of genealogy and etymology is clear: in the Aeneid, Jupiter prophesies that “Romulus will take over the race and found the Martial walls, and call [the people] Romans from his name” (Romanosque suo de nomine dicet; ed. Mynors, I. 276–77). Just as Romulus, a descendant of Aeneas, names the Romans after himself (see Fowler), so Brutus, another descendant of Aeneas, calls the Trojans Britons after his own name. In drawing this parallel, Wace is establishing a clear equivalence between the founding and naming of Rome and the founding and renaming of Britain. The destruction of the giants, and the translation of empire in Britain from them to their Trojan conquerors marks the ending of one historical era and the beginning of another. Gottfried is as interested as Wace in historical eras and the way in which they are defined by the translation of empire; but his version of the ages of the history of Britain, centered as it is on his depiction of the cave of lovers, is radically different from Wace’s. In a startling innovation, Gottfried makes the cave into the symbolic site of the three eras into which, according to a highly original scheme of his own devising, the history of Britain is divided. After the ending of the first, “heathen” era of the giants, the lordship of the cave passes not to Troy, but to Rome, the symbolic successor to Troy in Geoffrey and Wace. Phyllis, Canace, Biblis, and Dido, the lovers associated with the cave after the age of the giants, are heroines of the Roman poets Ovid and Virgil, and so they can be taken to represent the second historical era: the era of Roman dominion. But with the passing of Roman lordship, the lovers of Ovid and Virgil are themselves succeeded and superseded in the cave at the beginning of the third, post-Latin and vernacular age, by Gottfried’s modern lovers Tristan and Isolde. In writing the history of the cave, Gottfried borrows the age of the giants from Geoffrey and Wace, but then invents his own fable of the translation of empire in Britain. In Gottfried’s scheme of the three ages of British history, the translation of empire in the cave is accompanied by a translation of learning from Rome to Cornwall and Britain. It is in the third, post-Roman, and modern age of history that the art of writing love poetry is translated from Latin to the vernacular. The modern British lovers Tristan and Isolde replace the lovers of Latin antiquity; and the inference is that Gottfried, the modern

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German author of their story, succeeds and supersedes the old Latin authors Ovid and Virgil.

6 As Gottfried presents it, the translation of empire from Rome to Britain that marks the beginning of the modern age is effected at the point when Tristan slays the giant-like Morold. In making Tristan into a translator of empire, Gottfried seems to be following Thomas; if so, Thomas must have radically changed the story of Gurmun and of relations between Britain and Ireland as recorded by Wace and Geoffrey (see Metzner). Geoffrey introduces Gormund abruptly into his narrative as the king of the Africans, who assembles an enormous fleet, sails to Ireland, conquers it, then helps the Saxons in the war they are waging against the British king Keredic (The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Thorpe, 263). Wace enlarges on Geoffrey’s account, adding a story intended to explain the circumstances of Gormund’s move from Africa to Ireland (see Pelan, 81–85). In the Roman de Brut, Gurmunt is the heir to a kingdom in Africa, but he renounces his right of succession in favor of his younger brother on the grounds that he wishes not merely to inherit a kingdom, but to conquer one for himself. Gurmunt raises an army and a fleet and subdues many countries by force, including Ireland, where he has himself proclaimed king. The Saxons, who are fighting for the lordship of Britain, promptly invite Gurmunt to help them in their war against the British king, whom Wace calls Cariz. Gurmunt agrees, conducts a savage military campaign, and lays waste to much of Britain. Cariz retreats to Wales, and promptly disappears from Wace’s narrative (Brut, trans. Weiss, 13385–662). Gurmunt gives Britain, the kingdom he has conquered and devastated, into the power of the Saxons: “When he had ravaged the country, burnt the towns and seized all possessions, he gave the kingdom to the Saxons. He had promised them he would hand it over if he conquered it, and he did so, doing them justice. They acquired the land which they had so ardently desired” (13635–42). At this point, Wace inserts a lengthy passage into his narrative that has no counterpart in Geoffrey, in which he explains that as soon as Gurmunt hands Britain over to the Saxons, they give it the new name “England.” The change of name from “Britain” to “England” is important to Wace because it marks the second translation of empire in Britain; power passes from the British descendants of the Trojans to the English, as the Saxons now begin to call themselves. Gurmunt is the agent, though not the beneficiary, of this translation of empire:

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Because of their lineage and descent, those who first received the land called themselves “English” in memory of their origins, and they called the land which had been given to them “England.” It is called “Engleterre” in French and “England” in English; the name means “land of the English,” that is its explanation. From the time Brutus came from Troy, Britain retained its name, until the period of which I am telling you, when it lost its name because of Gurmunt, and acquired new inhabitants, new kings and new lords. (Brut, trans. Weiss, 13643–58)

In destroying the British and handing over their ancestral realm to the Saxons, Gurmunt translates empire in Britain to a foreign people who can trace neither their ancestry nor their language back to Troy. The change of the country’s name from “Britain” to “England,” and the change of its language from the British spoken by the Trojans to the English spoken by the Saxons, mark the beginning of a new era in the history of Britain. Gottfried, who tells the story of Gurmun very differently from Wace and Geoffrey, indicates that Thomas is his source. It seems safe to assume that Thomas rewrote and fictionalized the story of Gurmun, and that Gottfried did follow Thomas’s version of it as he suggests. The difficulty is that Tristrams saga seems to have truncated Thomas, as it makes no reference to Gurmun’s conquest of Ireland and Britain, and does not even give the Irish king a name. In Gottfried and, according to Gottfried (5880), in Thomas’s account, Gurmun subdues Ireland and has himself proclaimed king there, just as he does in Wace and Geoffrey, and he then goes on to conquer England and Cornwall. But the Gurmun of the Tristan story is not invited to England by the Saxons, as he is in the Historia and the Roman de Brut; and crucially, he does not simply abandon Britain to the Saxons after he has conquered it, so that he does not effect the translation of empire from the Britons to the English described in such detail by Wace. Instead, he retains the de facto lordship of England and Cornwall after his victorious campaign, and makes the infant Mark — who does not, of course, feature in either Wace or Geoffrey — into a subject king who is obliged to pay him tribute: in disen selben dingen betwanc er ouch ze sîner hant Curnewal und Engelant. dô was aber Marke ein kint, als kint ze wer unveste sint, und kam alsô von sîner craft und wart Gurmûne zinshaft. (5924–30).

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(Meanwhile, he also forced Cornwall and England to submit to his rule. Mark was a child at the time, too weak to defend himself, as children are, and so he lost his power and was obliged to pay tribute to Gurmun.)

Despite the fact that he has been no more than a client king subject to Gurmun since infancy, Mark enters Gottfried’s narrative as a young man with a high and rapidly growing reputation. It is interesting that when he comes to tell the story of Gurmun and cites Thomas as his source, Gottfried refers to Thomas’s narrative both as “the history” and as “the correct story”: der dô z’Îrlanden künic was, als ich’z an der istôrje las und als daz rehte maere seit, der hiez Gurmûn Gemuotheit und was geborn von Affricâ und was sîn vater künic dâ. (5879–84) (The man who was then king of Ireland, as I read in the history and as the correct story says, was called Gurmun the Brave. He was born to the house of Africa, and his father was king there.)

It may be that in citing Thomas’s text at this particular point both as “history” (istôrje, 5880) and as the “story” (maere, 5881) of Gurmun, Gottfried is hinting that Thomas’s account of Gurmun mixes history with fiction. If it can be inferred from his delphic reference to Corineus and the giants that Gottfried had read Geoffrey or Wace, it can also be assumed that he was fully aware that Thomas, by making Mark subject to Gurmun, was consciously deviating from the received version of British history and inventing what Servius and medieval commentators on the Aeneid described as “fable.” The Gurmun who comes from Africa, conquers Ireland, makes himself its king and then conquers Britain is the historical Gurmun; but the Gurmun who, far from translating empire in Britain to the Saxons, retains lordship over England and Cornwall and forces the boy king Mark to pay him tribute is a fictional character of Thomas’s making.

7 There is one crucial respect in which Gottfried, in rewriting the received history of Britain as fable, may have gone beyond anything he found in Thomas. Gottfried has his fictional Gurmun negotiate an agreement with the Roman senate that effectively makes him a client king of Rome. Like

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Wace’s Gurmunt, Gottfried’s Gurmun leaves his African kingdom to his brother, and embarks on a voyage of conquest that takes him to Ireland and then to England and Cornwall (5885–903). But Gottfried adds an episode that has no counterpart in Wace: before he begins his military adventures, Gurmun formally obtains permission from the Romans to rule any territories he may take by force in return for conceding to Rome certain unspecified rights of sovereignty over them: sus kêrte er dannen zehant und nam von den maeren, den gewaltigen Rômaeren urloup unde botschaft, swaz er betwünge mit craft, daz er daz z’eigen haete und ouch in dâ von taete eteslîch reht und êre. (5904–11) (So he quickly made his way from there [i.e. Africa], and obtained from the famed and powerful Romans permission and authority that he should have power over whatever territory he might conquer by force, on condition that he conceded to them certain rights and privileges over it.)

The narrative does not specify the precise nature of the “rights and privileges” (5911) that Rome will enjoy in whatever territories Gurmun conquers, but it seems clear that Gurmun accepts that Rome has ultimate sovereignty over them, and also a right to payment of tribute from them (see Combridge 149). In practical terms, the effect of the agreement between Gurmun and the Romans is that Gurmun becomes a client king — a privileged agent, but an agent nonetheless — of Rome and the Roman senate. When he conquers Cornwall and England and forces Mark to pay him tribute, the fictional Gurmun makes Mark subject to his own personal authority as king of Ireland, but at the same time he makes him subject also to the authority of Rome. Mark is obliged to pay tribute in a recurrent cycle. In the first year, the tribute is three hundred marks of bronze; in the second, it is silver; in the third, gold; in the fourth year, thirty sons of barons from England and thirty sons of barons from Cornwall are surrendered to Gurmun’s champion Morold to be taken as serfs to the Irish court (5942–69); but in the fifth and final year of the cycle, Gurmun’s requirement is that England and Cornwall should formally and publicly renew their submission to Roman rule. In recognition of their subject status, Mark’s two kingdoms are to send envoys to Rome

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to pay tribute and to be instructed by the senate what new laws they must implement, and to how they are to govern themselves in the interests of Rome: und alse der zins ûf sîne vart hin wider Îrlant geschicket wart und daz vünfte jâr în gie, sô muosen aber diu zwei lant ie iemer ze sunnewenden die boten ze Rôme senden, die Rôme wol gezaemen, und daz die dâ vernaemen, welch gebot und welhen rât der gewaltege sênât enbüte unde sande einem iegelîchem lande, daz undertân ze Rôme was. wan man in alle jâr dâ las und tete in ouch kunt mit maeren, wie sî nâch Romaeren loys unde lantreht solten wegen wie s’ir gerihtes solten pflegen. und muosen ouch reht alsô leben, als in dâ lêre wart gegeben. diz zinsreht unde disen prîsant den liezen disiu zwei lant in dem vünften jâre ie schouwen die werden Rôme, ir vrouwen. doch buten s’ir dise êre niht ellîche alsô sêre weder durch reht noch durch got sô durch Gurmûnes gebot. (5979–6006) (And when the tribute had been sent back to Ireland and the fifth year had come round again, always at the solstice the two countries had to send to Rome envoys acceptable to Rome to learn what laws and counsel the mighty senate might decree and impose on every country which was subject to Rome. For each year proclamations were read and explanations given to them as to how they were to dispense the laws and statutes of the land according to Roman custom, and how they were to conduct their courts of justice. And they were obliged to live in strict accordance with the instructions they were given in Rome. Thus these two countries submitted their lawful tribute and their presents to noble

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Rome, their mistress. But they did her this honour neither because it was the law nor because it was the will of God, but rather because it was Gurmun’s command.)

This remarkable passage has received less attention from commentators than it deserves. The situation it outlines is complicated: although Mark is a client ruler obliged to pay tribute to Gurmun, Gurmun himself is effectively a client king of Rome. He rules the countries he has conquered because Rome has given him permission to rule them, and although he benefits from his conquests, he governs in the interests of the Roman senate, in which final sovereignty seems to reside. When Gurmun seizes Ireland, and then Cornwall and England, it is on Rome’s authority and with Rome’s prior consent. Although Cornwall and England have to pay tribute to Gurmun for four years in every five, ultimate power lies with Rome. It is the Roman senate, not Gurmun, which at regular fiveyear intervals collects tribute and prescribes to the English and Cornish envoys the entire system of administration and justice to be implemented in their countries; and it is in Rome’s interests and ultimately at Rome’s dictation, not Gurmun’s, that Cornwall and England are governed (5993–98). It is emphasized that Cornwall and England are “subject to Rome” (undertân ze Rome, 5991); and it is explicitly stated that Rome is the “mistress” or sovereign of both kingdoms (ir vrouwen, 6002). Gurmun, whose rights and privileges as ruler are granted by Rome, acts in respect of Cornwall and England both as the agent of Rome and as the guarantor of Roman power: it is at Gurmun’s command (6006) that Britain and Cornwall send envoys to Rome every five years to pay tribute and to receive the senate’s instructions on how they are to be governed. The inference is that, by enforcing the subjection of Cornwall and England to the legal and political authority of Rome, Gurmun is acting as the agent of the Roman senate, and enforcing Rome’s claim to sovereignty in Mark’s two kingdoms. But why this stress on Gurmun’s effective status as a client of Rome, who acts in Cornwall and England not simply on his own behalf, but as the agent of the Roman senate? It may be that the connection between Gurmun and Rome, of which Wace and Geoffrey know nothing, is Gottfried’s invention rather than Thomas’s, since Tristrams saga makes Britain and Cornwall directly subject to the rule of the king of Ireland, and says nothing of any formal agreement between Gurmun and the senate that would cede sovereignty over his territories to Rome: Now the story of Tristan tells us here that the Irish at that time were exacting tribute from England, and that they had done so for many

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years. For the Irish greatly loved England because the English king who reigned then was unable to protect himself, and therefore England was tributary to Ireland for a long time. Formerly a tribute of three hundred pounds of pennies was paid to the king of Rome. The first tribute that the Irish took was brass and copper, the second year it was pure silver, and the third year it was refined gold, and this was to be kept for common needs. But in the fourth year the king and nobles of England were to assemble in Ireland to hear the laws, to dispense justice, and to fulfill the punishments of all men. But in the fifth year the tribute should consist of sixty of the most handsome boys who could be found and delivered up, whom the king of Ireland desired as his male servants. Lots were cast among the vassals and other nobles, as to which ones should give up their children. And those on whom the lot fell had to surrender them as soon as the tribute was sent for — even though it might be an only child. (The Saga, trans. Schach, 37)

Bédier conjectures that Gottfried follows Thomas’s version of the Gurmun story, and that Tristrams saga at this point muddles Thomas (see Le Roman de Tristan, ed. Bédier, vol. 1, 74–76); but it may equally be that Thomas made England and Cornwall simply into client kingdoms of Ireland, subject to Irish, not Roman law. The version of relations between England and Ireland given in Tristrams saga is perfectly coherent: England did once pay tribute to Rome, but since its conquest by Ireland, it is to Ireland that England has been paying tribute; and it is Ireland, not Rome, that prescribes the laws and governance of England. This may well have been Thomas’s version of the story, which Gottfried complicated by inventing a political relationship between Gurmun and Rome. What is certain is that Gottfried offers a version of the five-year cycle of tribute that differs sharply from the account given in Tristrams saga. In Gottfried, the sons of the barons are sent to Ireland every fourth year, not every fifth, as in Tristrams saga; and the cycle culminates every fifth year with the dispatch of envoys to Rome for the determination of British law by the Roman senate, whereas in Tristrams saga, Mark and his barons are forced to go to Ireland every fourth year to have their laws dictated to them by the Irish. By making the dispatch of the Cornish and English envoys to Rome into the culminating stage of the tributary cycle, Gottfried highlights the importance of the Roman connection: he emphasizes the subjection of Mark’s kingdoms to Rome, and at the same time diminishes the importance of Gurmun by making him into the agent of the Roman senate. What is at stake in all this is not the exculpation of Gurmun. The requirement that the English and Cornish barons send their sons to Ireland to act as serfs is presented by Gottfried as shaming and degrading

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(5966); but even more importantly, it is presented as unjust. Gurmun acts as he does with Rome’s agreement, and the fate of the barons’ sons symbolizes not only his cruelty, but the capricious, tyrannical, and selfserving nature of Rome’s exercise of power. When Gurmun insists that the envoys of Cornwall and England travel to Rome every five years to have their laws and system of government prescribed to them by the senate, it is emphasized that he and Rome are acting in accordance “neither with the law nor with the will of God” (weder durch reht noch durch got, 6005). When Morold arrives in Cornwall to renew the demand for the barons’ sons to be sent as serfs to Ireland as tribute, he is acting not only as Gurmun’s champion and the representative of Ireland, but also as the symbolic presence of Roman authority in Cornwall and England. Morold personifies the tyrannical abuse of power by Gurmun and by the senate from which he derives his legitimacy. When Tristan challenges Morold on behalf of Mark and his barons, and denies Ireland’s right to the tribute Morold has come to claim, he repeatedly emphasizes that he is acting as the agent both of God and of justice (6059–472). But in challenging Morold, Tristan is also challenging Rome’s claim to dominion over Britain. In acting as the champion of Cornwall and England against Rome, Tristan is re-enacting a role assigned by Geoffrey and Wace to the hero kings of Britain, the greatest of whom is Arthur. In the Historia, as Francis Ingledew writes: Belinus subjugates Rome with his brother Brennius; Constantine seizes the imperial city in the fourth century and is made “overlord of the whole world”; Maximianus creates his own empire and defeats two Roman emperors; and of course Arthur, having established a comprehensive dominion over the various island kingdoms and the Continent, is about to crush Rome when Mordred’s treachery recalls him to Britain. From Troy to Arthur, the history spells the military equivalence of Britain to its genealogical sister power. (677–78)

This applies equally to the Roman de Brut. Wace presents Arthur’s climactic battle against the armies of the Roman emperor Lucius as the direct consequence of his refusal to accept that Rome has any authority over Britain, or any right to claim tribute from it. Lucius sends messengers to Arthur bearing a charter in which he asserts the sovereignty of Rome over Britain. The charter claims that Britain has been subject to Rome since Julius Caesar conquered the Britons and forced them to pay tribute: “Our ancestor Julius Caesar, of whom you perhaps have a low opinion, conquered Britain and took a tribute from it which our people have received ever since. We have long taken tribute from the other islands round about” (Brut, trans. Weiss, 10675–80). Lucius argues that

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the requirement to pay tribute imposed by Caesar is still in force, and that because Britain is still Rome’s tributary, Rome’s claim to have dominion over Britain remains valid. The emperor’s letter demands that Arthur should acknowledge Roman lordship by journeying to Rome, submitting himself to the judgment of the senate, and restoring to Rome the lands and tribute of which he has unlawfully deprived her. If Arthur fails to comply, Lucius threatens that he will cross the Alps with his army and wrest France and Britain from him by force (see Brut, trans. Weiss, 10681–710). In his reply, Arthur concedes that Julius Caesar did conquer Britain and coerce it into paying tribute, but he contends that might is not right, and questions the lawfulness of Rome’s demand for the resumption tribute: “The Britons could not defend themselves, and he [Julius Caesar] made them pay tribute by force. But might is not right, but overweening pride. A man does not rightfully hold what he has taken by force” (Brut, trans. Weiss, 10827–32). Arthur then gives his own alternative version of the history of relations between Rome and Britain, in which he presents Britain not just as Rome’s equal, but as her superior. Citing the examples of his ancestors Brennius, Constantine, and Maximianus, all of whom conquered and ruled Rome long after the days of Julius Caesar, Arthur makes the case that if Britain was once forced to pay tribute to Rome, Rome for its part was more than once forced to pay tribute to Britain. Arthur identifies the quarrel over tribute as a quarrel over lordship and dominion, and declares that it can only be decided, as it has always been in the past, by force of arms: Belinus, who was the king of the Britons, and Brennius, duke of the Burgundians, two brothers born in Britain, courageous and wise knights, marched on Rome and besieged it. They attacked it and took it; then they hanged twenty-four hostages in full view of all their kin. When Belinus left, he made Rome over to his brother. I will say no more of Brennius and Belinus, and shall speak instead of Constantine. He was from Britain, the son of Helen, and he held Rome and had it in his power. Maximianus, king of Britain, conquered France and Germany. He crossed the Alps and Lombardy and had lordship over Rome. These men were my close kin, and each of them had Rome in his hands! Now you can hear and know that I have as much reasonable right to Rome as Rome to Britain, if we look at our ancestors. The Romans received tribute from us, and my kinsmen received it from them. They lay claim to Britain, and I to Rome! The sum of my advice is this: let him who can conquer the other have both the money and the land. (Brut, trans. Weiss, 10855–84)

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The quarrel between Arthur’s Britain and Lucius’s Rome in the Roman de Brut resembles the quarrel between Cornwall, England, and Ireland as it is presented in Gottfried’s version of the Tristan story and in Tristrams saga. The similarity is no coincidence. In all three texts, the dispute over tribute is a dispute over lordship and dominion. In the Roman de Brut, conquest gives conquerors, whether Julius Caesar or the kings of Britain, de facto lordship over the conquered and allows them to exact tribute. When Arthur stresses that the most illustrious of his ancestors conquered Rome and forced it to pay tribute, he is trying as emphatically as he can to make the point that they exercised power and therefore effective dominion over it: Constantine “held Rome and had it in his power” (tint e out Rome en demeine; Brut, trans. Weiss, 10868); Maximianus “had the lordship of Rome” (de Rome out la seignurie,10872). As Arthur sees it, power and lordship are symbolized by the conqueror’s ability to exact tribute from the conquered. If Rome at the time of Julius Caesar was in a position to exact tribute from Britain, Arthur’s own ancestors have in the more recent past been able to exact tribute from Rome (10879–80). When he refuses to acknowledge the authority of Rome, defies the emperor Lucius and challenges him to battle, Arthur is clear that the victor will enjoy de facto lordship over the territory of his enemy, and will exercise the power that comes from conquest through the imposition of tribute (10883–84). Like Wace’s Arthur, Tristram in Tristrams saga links power with the capacity to force the payment of tribute. When he challenges Mórold, he acknowledges that the dominion of Ireland over England and Cornwall is symbolized by Markis’s payment of tribute to the Irish. In refusing on behalf of Markis and his barons to continue paying that tribute, Tristram is refusing also to accept the continuation of Irish lordship over Markis’s kingdoms: The Irish came to England to harry and wage war, and the inhabitants of this country could not defend themselves or secure peace against them in any other way than by submitting to pay tribute, and this has been so ever since. But tyranny is not justice, but lawlessness and an obvious shame and injustice. Therefore it is not right to pay the tribute, since it has always been exacted wrongfully, for it was always surrendered under duress and fear of pillage if this be justly judged. (The Saga, trans. Schach, 40)

In arguing that might is not right, Tristram speaks as the double of Wace’s Arthur. When he makes his reply to Lucius’s envoys, Arthur accepts that Julius Caesar’s conquest of Britain gave him the power to force the Britons to pay tribute (Brut, trans. Weiss, 10828); but he, too,

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invokes the principle that “might is not right” (force n’est mie dreiture, 10829). It is unlikely that this intertextual parallel is coincidental. The probability is that in presenting Tristan’s challenge to Morold, Thomas deliberately interpolated key elements of Arthur’s speech to the Roman envoys in the Roman de Brut with the intention of using this early but crucial episode to present Tristan in the role of the heroic double of Arthur — the role that Thomas has him resume when he slays Orguillus/Rithon in Spain. Gottfried’s treatment of the scene lends support to this hypothesis. Like Wace’s Arthur and the Tristram of Tristrams saga, Gottfried’s Tristan contests the principle that might is right, while at the same time accepting that the question of dominion and tribute can only be settled in practice by recourse to arms. Tristan is clear that Ireland exacts tribute from Cornwall and England by virtue of the power it enjoys as a result of military conquest; and in disputing Morold’s right to continue to claim that tribute on behalf of Gurmun, he is also clear that the situation can only be reversed (and right re-established) by the use of force. His refusal on behalf of Mark and the English and Cornish barons to continue to pay tribute to Ireland constitutes a denial of Gurmun’s claim to lordship over Mark’s lands, and it is tantamount to a declaration of war: “man hât den zins nu manegen tac von hinnen und von Engelant z’Îrlanden âne reht gesant. dar zuo brach ez sich lange mit michelem getwange, mit manegem gewalte; wan man den landen valte beidiu bürge unde stete und in ouch an den liuten tete sô grôzen und sô manegen schaden, biz daz si wurden überladen mit gewalte und mit unrehte, unz daz die guoten knehte, die dannoch wâren genesen, die muosen undertaenic wesen alles des man in gebôt, durch daz si vorhten den tôt und enmohten, alse in was getân, die zît niht anders ane gegân.” (6266–84)

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(“For many a day now, tribute has been sent from here and from England unlawfully. This happened only after a long time, and under great duress and because of great violence. Both castles and towns were destroyed in these countries, and such great and numerous losses were inflicted on the people that in the end they were overcome by violence and injustice, and the noble warriors who had managed to survive were forced to submit and accept to do as they were ordered, for they feared death, and given what had happened to them, they could not act in any other way.”)

In Gottfried’s text, as in Tristrams saga and the Roman de Brut, the payment of tribute entails a de facto loss of dominion: the Cornish and English who survive the devastation of their countries by Gurmun are forced to become the subjects of Ireland (6280), and are powerless to resist the dictates of their new master. But just as Wace’s Arthur argues that the question of tribute, and therefore of lordship, can only be decided by war between Britain and Rome, so Gottfried’s Tristan proposes to settle the matter of the Irish claim to tribute either by war (lantstrit, 6381, 6393, 6408) between Cornwall, England, and Ireland, or by a judicial combat between himself and Morold as Gurmun’s champion and representative. In the formal declaration in which he sets out the grounds of his challenge to Morold, Tristan makes an implicit connection between lordship and the payment of tribute: “daz mîn hêr Môrolt, der hie stât, noch der in her gesendet hât, noch mit gewalt kein ander man zins ze rehte nie gewan ze Curnewal noch z’Engelant: daz wil ich mit mîner hant wâr machen und wârbaeren.” (6461–68) (“That neither Lord Morold who stands here, nor he who sent him, nor any other man ever rightfully obtained tribute from Cornwall or England by force, I will prove and demonstrate to be true with my own hand.”)

When he defeats Morold, Gottfried’s Tristan is not only putting an end to the payment of tribute by Cornwall and England to Ireland, he is also putting an end to Gurmun’s dominion over Mark’s kingdoms. And in this he, like the Tristram of Tristrams saga and doubtless Thomas’s Tristan, is acting as the heroic double of Wace’s Arthur. In the Roman de Brut, Arthur defeats Lucius and the Roman armies in pitched battle (see Brut, trans. Weiss, 11609–12999). He returns the emperor’s body to Rome, sending with it the message that Lucius’s

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corpse is the only tribute owed by Britain to Rome: “He sent it on a bier to Rome and informed the Romans that he owed them no other tribute from Britain, which he governed, and that whoever required tribute from him would be sent back in the same way” (12987–94). Again, the intertextual parallels with Tristrams saga and Gottfried’s Tristan are striking. After he has killed Mórold, Tristram in Tristrams saga “commanded Mórold’s companions to convey his body to Ireland and to make known that never again would the Irish collect tribute from England, neither gold nor silver, except for this gift” (The Saga, trans. Schach, 43). This message is duly conveyed, although Mórold’s followers attribute it to Markis rather than to its real author, Tristram: “The emissaries spoke to the king with loud voice and bold words. ‘Markis, the king of England, sends you this message, that he is rightfully obliged to pay you no other tribute than this dead knight. But if you again demand tribute and send an emissary there, he will return him to you dead’” (44). Gottfried’s Tristan returns much the same message to the Irish when he kills Morold: “ir hêrren” sprach er “kêret hin, enpfâhet jenez zinsreht, daz ir dort ûf dem werde seht, und bringet iuwerm hêrren heim und saget im, daz mîn oeheim der künic Mark und sîniu lant diu senden ime den prîsant unde enbieten ime dâ bî: swenne ez an sînem willen sî, daz er’s geruoche unde ger, daz er sîne boten her nâch solhem zinse sende, wir enlâzen s’îtelhende niemer wider gekêren. mit sus getânen êren sende wir s’im hinnen, swie kûme wir’z gewinnen.” (7114–30) (“My lords,” said Tristan, “go and collect the lawful tribute which you see there on the island, take it home to your lord and tell him that my uncle, King Mark, and his countries send him this present. And inform him further that whenever it is his royal will and desire to send messengers here for tribute of this kind, we shall not let them return emptyhanded. We will send them back to him with honours such as these, however difficult we may find it to win them.”)

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In Gottfried, the slaying of Morold and the return of his body to Ireland in place of the tribute he had come to collect symbolizes the end of the dominion that Gurmun has enjoyed over England and Cornwall by right of conquest. When Isolde and her mother kiss the head and the hands of the brother and uncle killed by Tristan, they mourn not only a blood relative, but the passing of the man who had ensured the subjection of the kingdoms of England and Cornwall to Ireland: “They kissed the head and the hands which had made peoples and kingdoms subject to them” (daz houbet kusten s’und die hant, / diu in liute unde lant / haete gemachet undertân, 7177–79). In Tristrams saga (and so, it may be assumed, in Thomas) as well as in Gottfried’s Tristan, the slaying of Morold marks a translation of empire from Ireland to England and Cornwall, and Tristan is the agent of that translation. But there is a crucial difference between Gottfried’s text and Tristrams saga: in Gottfried, Tristan is responsible for translating empire not just from Ireland, but from Rome. It is impossible to be sure if it was Gottfried rather than Thomas who fictionalized the historical Gurmun by making him into a client king of Rome; but the fact that Tristrams saga makes no connection between Rome and Ireland suggests the possibility that the subjection of Gurmun and Mark to Rome was a fable invented by Gottfried. If so, then Gottfried’s Tristan outperforms even Thomas’s Tristan in the role of Arthur’s heroic double. Tristan’s return of Morold’s corpse to Dublin symbolically re-enacts Arthur’s return of Lucius’s corpse to Rome. The death of Morold puts an end to Rome’s claim to tribute and to lordship over England and Cornwall, just as the death of Lucius puts an end to Rome’s claim to tribute and to lordship over Arthur’s Britain in the Roman de Brut. Gottfried’s (but perhaps not Thomas’s) Tristan imitates Arthur in freeing Britain from its subjection to Rome, and so becomes the effective translator of empire from Rome to Britain.

8 If the Roman senate receives no further mention in Gottfried’s narrative after the death of Morold, it is because Gottfried’s rewriting of the postArthurian history of Britain is not motivated primarily by an interest in power politics. The deeper significance of the fable of Tristan’s translation of empire is that it is followed by a translation of love from Rome to Britain; and in Gottfried’s fictionalized version of British history, the translation of love assumes a greater importance than the translation of empire. Gottfried subsumes the history of Britain within a providential scheme according to which love is divided into three ages, and he associ-

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ates the three ages of love with the cave of lovers, which is “dedicated to Love” (der Minnen benant, 16699), with “Love” (Minne, 16723) being personified as a “goddess” (gottinne, 16723). According to Gottfried’s scheme, the first age of the history of love is the age of the giants who lived “before the time of Corineus” (vor Corinêis jâren, 16691); the age of the giants is succeeded by the age of Trojan dominion, which begins in Britain with the slaying of Gogmagog by Corineus; and the Trojan age, subsumed in the history of the cave within the Roman age, is followed by the age of Tristan and Isolde, which marks the beginning of the modern era. Gottfried sketches his own secular variation on the traditional Christian division of human history into three ages: the time “before the [Mosaic] law” (ante legem); the time “under” that law (sub lege); and the time of “grace” (sub gratia) which begins with the Incarnation (see Brackert 169 and Southern). The giants who originally fashioned the cave of lovers lived in the “heathen” age or, more precisely, “under heathen law” (under der heidenischen ê, 16690). By analogy, Phyllis, Canace, Biblis, and Dido, the heroines of Ovid and Virgil whose stories Tristan and Isolde rehearse for one another outside the cave (17182–99), lived in the age of Roman law, the age that commences with Aeneas, the founder of the dynasties that ruled Rome and Britain, its sister country and rival. And finally, with Tristan and Isolde, the third and present age of Love, the secular period of grace, begins. The cave is the symbolic site of the translation of love; but although the goddess Love has been the mistress of the cave throughout the age of the giants and the age of the Trojans and Romans, she does not become its “true mistress” (diu wâre wirtinne, 17229) until it is occupied by Tristan and Isolde: swaz aber von der fossiure von alter âventiure vor hin ie was bemaeret, daz wart an in bewaeret. diu wâre wirtinne diu haete sich dar inne alrêrste an ir spil verlân. swaz ê dar inne ie wart getân von kurzewîle oder von spil, dazn lief niht ze disem zil. ezn was niht von meine sô lûter noch sô reine, als ir spil was under in. (17225–37)

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(All that had ever been told previously about the cave in old stories was fulfilled in them. This was the first time that the cave’s true mistress had given herself fully to playing her game inside it. Whatever kind of enjoyment or play had taken place in there before, it was no match for this. None of it had been so pure and transparent in affection [intention, meaning, significance] as their playing together was.)

The old love stories set in the age of the giants and the Trojan-Roman era are said to have taken place inside the cave. Phyllis, Biblis, Canace, and Dido played Love’s “game” (spil, 17231; 17233) in the cave (dar inne, 17230; 17232), just as the giants made love in it (dar inne, 16694) in the time before theirs. The goddess Love, to whom the cave is dedicated, entertained them all in her capacity as its mistress, but the implication is that she entertained them according to the law, whether the “heathen” law of the giants or the law of Rome, which obtained in the earlier ages of its history. Once Tristan has effected the translation of empire from Rome to Britain, he and Isolde displace the lovers of classical antiquity who had themselves displaced the giants, and the history of love and of the goddess Love, which is encapsulated in the history of the cave, moves into its third and culminating age: the age of grace, which is the present of Gottfried’s narrative. Just as Britain is liberated from the lordship of Rome, so is the cave; it is only when Dido and the rest have left the cave and Love has the chance to entertain Tristan and Isolde as her guests that she can play her game fully for the first time (17230–31); and it is not until she plays that game to the limits of her capacity — and so reveals her true potential through Tristan and Isolde — that Love becomes the “true mistress” (17229) of the cave. Gottfried is insistent: before Tristan’s and Isolde’s occupancy of the cave, Love’s game had never been played with such purity or to such perfection (17235–37). It is only when the goddess entertains Tristan and Isolde that the true “meaning” (meine, 17235) of love is finally revealed. The implication is that the “true” mistress of the cave is not the old Roman Venus who presided over it in the second age of its history, but the new, modern and German Venus who plays hostess to Tristan and Isolde. In Gottfried’s lovers Love is “fulfilled,” or “brought to completion” (bewaeret, 17228) in a way that she never was either in the time of the giants or in the time of the lovers of Latin antiquity who followed them. The verb bewaeren, like the adjective wâr (17229) is used in this passage to establish a typological relationship between the past of the cave and its present (see Wolf 1974 and 1989, 219–20, and Wisbey). Just as none of the lovers who preceded them in the cave (17232) in the first two ages of history ever played Love’s game to the level of perfec-

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tion which Tristan and Isolde achieved, so none of the old love stories told about the cave in the past (17225–27) can rival Gottfried’s vernacular story of the first lovers in whom Love finds fulfillment (17234). It is no coincidence that the new Venus who presides over the cave in its third and modern age is no longer known by her Latin name (which Gottfried never uses), but by her German name: Minne (17222). The translation of love symbolized by the replacement of Virgil’s and Ovid’s lovers in the cave by Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde is accompanied by a translation of learning. The old Latin narratives give way to Gottfried’s modern vernacular narrative, which supersedes and completes them. The stories of Phyllis, Canace, Biblis, and Dido written by Ovid and Virgil in the second age of the history of Love cannot match the story of Tristan and Isolde written by Gottfried in Love’s third and culminating age (dazn lief niht ze disem zil, 17234); nor, by inference, can Ovid and Virgil match Gottfried. If Gottfried’s new lovers are the first to master Love’s game and the first in whom Love finds fulfillment, the implication is that Gottfried himself is the first author to produce a version of the Tristan story that does Love justice by revealing her design for history. The record of Tristan’s translation of empire from Rome and of the subsequent beginning of Love’s modern age in Cornwall has no place in the chronicles of Geoffrey or Wace; it is the invention of Gottfried’s Tristan, which rewrites much of the received history of Britain as fable in order to integrate it into a symbolic history of love.

Works Cited Primary Sources Aelred of Rievaulx. Speculum caritatis. Ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971. “Anselm of Laon.” “The ‘Aeneid’-accessus.” In Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the ‘Aeneid’ from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 313–14. Augustine. Confessions. Ed. J. J. O’Donnell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568. Ed. Neil Wright. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1966.

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Gerald of Wales. Descriptio Kambriae. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera. Ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner. Vol. 6. London: Rolls Series, 1861– 91. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. John of Salisbury. Policraticus. Ed. C. C. I. Webb. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1909. Jones, Julian Ward, and Elizabeth Jones, eds. The Commentary on the First Six Books of the “Aeneid” Commonly Attributed to Bernard Silvestris. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1977. Macrobius. Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Saturnalia. Ed. Jacob Willis. Leipzig: Teubner, 1970. The Saga of Tristram and Ísönd. Trans. Paul Schach. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1973. Servius. In Vergilii Aeneidos commentarii. Ed. Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen. 3 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1881–87. Thomas. Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, poème du XIIe siècle. Ed. J. Bédier. Vol 1. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1902. Virgil. P. Vergilii Maronis Opera. Ed. R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British. Ed. and trans. Judith Weiss. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1999. William of Newburgh. Historia rerum Anglicarum. Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I. Ed. Richard Howlett. Vol. 1. London: Rolls Series 82, 1884.

Secondary Sources Barron, W. R. J. ed. (1999). The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature. Cardiff: U of Wales P. Baswell, Christopher (1995). Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the ‘Aeneid’ from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Baumgartner, Emmanuèle (1987). Tristan et Iseut: De la légende aux récits en vers. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Blakeslee, Merritt (1989). Love’s Masks: Identity, Intertextuality and Meaning in the Old French Tristan Poems. Cambridge: Brewer. Brackert, Helmut (1968). Rudolf von Ems: Dichtung und Geschichte. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn (1993). Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.

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Chinca, Mark (1993). History, Fiction, Verisimilitude: Studies in the Poetics of Gottfried’s ‘Tristan.’ The Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London. Combridge, Rosemary (1964). Das Recht im ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Straßburg. 2nd ed. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Davies, Rees (1996). The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England. Oxford: Clarendon. Dean, Christopher (1987). Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Desmond, Marilynn (1994). Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality and the Medieval ‘Aeneid.’ Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Echard, Siân (1998). Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fichte, Joerg O. (1993). “‘Fakt’ und Fiktion in der Artusgeschichte des 12. Jahrhunderts.” Fiktionalität im Artusroman. Ed. Volker Mertens and Friedrich Wolfzettel. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 45–62. Fowler, Don (1997). “Virgilian Narrative: Story-Telling.” The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Ed. Charles Martindale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 259– 70. Green, D. H. (1994). Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hunt, Tony (1981). “The Significance of Thomas’s Tristan.” Reading Medieval Studies 7: 41–61. Ingledew, Francis (1994). “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae.” Speculum 69: 665–704. Irvine, Martin (1994). The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Jaeger, C. Stephen (1985). The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Kelly, Henry Ansgar (1993). Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Kermode, Frank (1983). The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Le Saux, Francoise (1999). “Wace’s Roman de Brut.” The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature. Ed. W. R. J. Barron. Cardiff: U of Wales P. 18–22. McDonald, W. C. (1991). Arthur and Tristan: On the Intersection of Legends in German Medieval Literature. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press.

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Mertens, Volker (1996). “Der arthurische Tristan.” Tristan — Tristrant: Mélanges en l’honneur de Danielle Buschinger à l’occasion de son 60ème anniversaire. Ed. André Crépin and Wolfgang Spiewok. Greifswald: Reineke. 365–79. Metzner, E. E. (1973). “Wandalen im angelsächsischen Bereich? Gormundus Rex Africanorum und die Gens Hestingorum. Zur Geschichte und Geschichtlichkeit des Gormund-Isembard-Stoffs in England, Frankreich, Deutschland.” Beiträge (Tübingen series) 95: 219–71. von Moos, Peter (1976). “Poeta und historicus im Mittelalter: Zum MimesisProblem am Beispiel einiger Urteile über Lucan.” Beiträge (Tübingen series) 98: 93–130. Pelan, Margaret (1931). L’influence du ‘Brut’ de Wace sur les romançiers français de son temps. Paris: Droz. Putter, Ad (1994). “Finding Time for Romance: Medieval Arthurian Literary History.” Medium Aevum 63: 1–16. Sargent-Baur, Barbara N. (1996). “Veraces historiae aut fallaces fabulae?” Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literatur. Ed. Norris J. Lacy. New York: Garland. 25–39. Short, Ian (1994). “Gaimar’s Epilogue and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Liber vetustissimus.” Speculum 69: 323–43. Southern, R. W. (1971). “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 2. Hugh of St Victor and the Idea of Historical Development.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21: 159–79. Stevens, Adrian (2000). “Killing Giants and Translating Empires: The History of Britain and the Tristan Romances of Thomas and Gottfried.” Blütezeit: Festschrift für L. Peter Johnson. Ed. Mark Chinca, Joachim Heinzle, and Christopher Young. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 409–26. Wisbey, Roy (1990). “Living in the Presence of the Past: Exemplary Perspectives in Gottfried’s Tristan.” Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend. Ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey. Cambridge: Brewer. 257–76. Wolf, Alois (1974). “diu wâre wirtinne — der wâre Elicôn. Zur Frage des typologischen Denkens in volkssprachlicher Dichtung des Hochmittelalters.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik 6: 93–131. ——— (1989). Gottfried von Straßburg und die Mythe von Tristan und Isolde. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Wulf, Charlotte A. T. (1995). “A Comparative Study of Wace’s Guenevere in the Twelfth Century.” Arthurian Romance and Gender. Ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 66–78.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

The Welsh master gives Tristan a harp. A scene from the Tristan story as depicted on the Chertsey Tiles.

IV. The Medieval and Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan

The Medieval Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan Marion E. Gibbs

O

to commence a study of the medieval reception of Gottfried’s Tristan with a clear view of the response to it of Gottfried’s closest and most significant contemporary, but the evidence of a sustained exchange, still less a “feud” between Gottfried and Wolfram von Eschenbach is simply not available, or at best based on supposition, despite the assumption by generations of scholars that it existed. There is too little firm information about the relative chronology of the passages in question, and one is left with little more than the belief that Gottfried must have disliked the convoluted style of Wolfram’s narrative and that Wolfram cannot possibly have approved of the adulterous love affair, which went counter to his firmly held views on the value of marriage and the need to live within a social framework. Wolfram may be the hasen geselle (friend of the hare; 4638) of Gottfried’s literary excursus (but see Ganz 1966, 73–76 for some powerful arguments against this view) and when Gottfried condemns “the tellers of wild tales” who need to attach commentaries to their work (4683–90), he may have Wolfram not least in his mind. It is tempting to view Wolfram’s contemptuous words in Parzival (1, 15–17) about those who cannot understand his words as his rebuttal. His refusal to use the name Blanscheflur for the wife of his Parzival may be a sign of his disapproval of Gottfried’s heroine of that name, the beloved of Riwalin, but it could equally be his way of divorcing himself from her predecessor in Chrétien’s work, or — no less likely — his seizing the opportunity to create a new and meaningful name, Condwiramurs, for his newly conceived character. Such matters do not constitute a feud, such as was assumed by generations of Germanists and argued in detail by, among others, Karl K. Klein (1953, 1961) and W. J. Schröder (1958), though one may not go so far as Ganz in ruling out the possibility of antagonism between the two great poets. His assertion that, if Gottfried is indeed referring to Wolfram in his literary excursus, one would expect him actually to name him, or NE WOULD LIKE TO BE ABLE

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at least to make an explicit reference to one of his characters (61), is questionable, and one is left with the unlikely possibility that Gottfried could have failed to mention one of the most prominent literary figures of his day, even if his only mention was to be a negative one. For the whole issue of the contemporary reception of medieval literature, it is relevant to note the comment by Ganz that medieval poets were probably less aware of the sharp differences between them than we choose to imagine, and that the “clashes” between Wolfram and Gottfried are the product of our modern reading of their works. This is a salutary caution, and modern scholars would do well to heed the implied advice of Ganz that they should free themselves from what he calls “this posthumous knowledge” (83). If Gottfried were indeed criticizing Wolfram, it would appear that Wolfram did little in the way of responding, though his comment in Willehalm (4,20–24) that his Parzival has been negatively received in some quarters may be a fairly bland reference to Gottfried among others. The 1973 study by Geil contains some convincing arguments against the idea of a feud, and though some scholars persist in accepting that one did exist, one may perhaps most readily concur with what seems to have been Frederick Norman’s somewhat laconic last word on the subject “so könnte es gewesen sein” (it might have been like that; 1969, 69), a substantial change from his statement of just eight years previously: “The most famous literary quarrel in medieval German literature is that between Wolfram and Gottfried” (1961, 59). There is no lack of evidence that others among Gottfried’s nearcontemporaries and successors did respond to his poem in a tangible way, and they did so in a variety of ways. Some simply praised him, some demonstrated their admiration by copying his language and style in their own works, some reacted to him by adopting something of his attitude to love or even by telling a totally different tale of love of a different kind and with a different outcome. In some cases there is a combination of these responses; sometimes, the influence of Gottfried is discernible but less explicit. Two people in particular, Ulrich von Türheim (in about 1240) and Heinrich von Freiberg (towards the end of the thirteenth century) took it upon themselves to complete the story Gottfried had left unfinished and, in the process, produced works of very different character, different that is both from one another and from the great fragment which was their inspiration. The anonymous poem Tristan als Mönch is not a continuation of Gottfried’s work and does not borrow from it, save in occasional word-play, which contrasts sharply with the somewhat crude narrative style (Tristan als Mönch, Bushey vii), but the very fact that it came into existence in the mid-thirteenth century speaks for a

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relationship with Gottfried’s poem, albeit a tenuous one. Two fifteenthcentury manuscripts place this poem of 2706 lines, which tells of the final phase of Tristan’s life, between Gottfried’s poem and the continuation by Ulrich von Türheim, suggesting, like so much of the reception of Tristan in the Middle Ages, that a good story told with some vigor was what most appealed and that the underlying message may have eluded the audience. Like the frescoes in Schloss Runkelstein in Bolzano, dated around 1400, it provides evidence of the lively interest of the Middle Ages in the story of elevated love and the activities of its protagonists in pursuit of it, but, like them, it does not reflect a true awareness of Gottfried’s special achievement. In the case of the frescoes, vivid and beautiful though they are, and with so much to support the view that they were inspired by Gottfried’s poem (Loomis 48–51), it is significant that there is no depiction of the Love Grotto. The relative abundance of manuscripts of Tristan (eleven complete and fifteen fragments) suggests the popularity of the poem, though this assumption may be modified in the light of the fact that ten of the eleven manuscripts include the continuation of either Ulrich von Türheim or Heinrich von Freiberg, a fact that probably speaks more for the craving of the Middle Ages for “completion” than for its sound literary judgment. It was clearly a work that, for all the problems of interpretation we find in it today, found favor as a narrative, but then the story of two lovers bound together by the accidental drinking of a magic potion was popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Indeed Muriel Whitaker tells us that Tristan “is the single most important source of imagery in the decorative arts, providing subjects for manuscript illuminations, stained glass, murals, ivory boxes, mirror backs, embroideries, drawings, paintings, cups and clothing” (9). This predilection for the story of Tristan and Isolde as decoration for sometimes quite mundane domestic objects found one of its most important expressions in the series of Chertsey Tiles, dated about 1265 and believed to be based on the Thomas version of the story. Their origin on the floor of a Cistercian abbey suggests that the morality or immorality of the famous love story was not a great concern in the Middle Ages. It is often the scenes of Tristan’s knightly adventures which are depicted, though the sojourn in the orchard is also frequently used to illustrate this quintessential story of love. Indeed, the question arises, as it probably always does in some form or another with a medieval work, about whether readers in the Middle Ages reacted to Gottfried’s Tristan in anything like the same way that modern readers react, seeing it as a problematic work that raises issues and leaves them unresolved. Alan Deighton (1979, 128) suggests that

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the very existence, in manuscript M, of a considerably abridged and simplified narrative speaks for the demand for a less challenging version. Manuscript M is altogether an interesting and somewhat puzzling early aspect of the “reception” of Gottfried, containing as it does so many and such fine illustrations yet presenting the narrative itself in a reduced form that violates Gottfried’s art and introduces largely arbitrary changes. Probably most telling of all, in terms of the understanding or lack thereof of Gottfried’s near contemporaries of the complexity of his poem, is the deletion of the allegorical interpretation of the Love Grotto. The attribution of this manuscript to the hand of the Meister Hesse lauded by Rudolf von Ems (Willehalm von Orlens, 2279–89) stemmed from no less an authority than Friedrich Ranke (1917, 417) and was generally accepted until Gesa Bonath’s categorical refutation in her examination of the Parzival manuscripts (Kerth viii, note 5). It would indeed be a paradox if someone so highly regarded as an arbiter of literary taste had countenanced or even instigated a version that so blatantly damaged the essence of Gottfried’s achievement, even if the complicated picture of its reception in the Middle Ages suggests that there were many who professed to admire the poem yet failed to get to the heart of it. In his Alexander, Rudolf von Ems devotes a great many more lines to effusive praise of Gottfried than he does to Hartmann von Aue or Wolfram von Eschenbach. Although he introduces him as “the third perfect branch” (3141) — a phrase that in itself echoes Gottfried’s description of Heinrich von Veldeke as having grafted the first branch in the German language (4738–39) — and thus implies a likeness among the three, it is evident that his greatest admiration is directed at Gottfried, and he suggests that he lacks the skill to praise him adequately. The passage deliberately imitates Gottfried’s own art, with the many repetitions and the manipulation of language: wie suoze ez [= daz rîs] seit von minnen! wie süezet ez den herzen der süezen minne smerzen. wie güetet ez der guoten guot, der hôchgemuoten hôhen muot. (3148–52) (How sweetly does he speak of love! How he sweetens the hearts with the anguish of sweet love. What good does he bestow on the goodness of the good, what high-spirits on the high-spirited! [All translations are my own])

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These lines might have come from Tristan, yet of course they have not, for Rudolf von Ems is himself a considerable poet who is capable of taking his narrative in a totally new direction, while using his revered predecessor as a model for many of his formulations: indeed, the very inclusion of a passage of literary critique echoes Gottfried’s own excursus: wie ist sô ebensleht gesat sîn vunt, sô rîch, sô sinneclich! wie ist sô gar meisterlich sîn Tristan! swer den ie gelas, der mac wol hœren daz er was ein schrôter süezer worte und wîser sinne ein porte. (3156–63) (How straight and smooth is his creation, how rich, how sensuous! How brilliant is his Tristan! Anyone who ever read it can tell that he was a tailor of sweet words and a gateway to wise thoughts.)

Here he seems to be praising Tristan both for its content and its language, and his use of the word ebensleht (straight and smooth) borrows directly from Gottfried’s praise of Hartmann von Aue (4661). In contrast, Rudolf’s praise in his literary commentary at the beginning of the second book of Willehalm von Orlens is more restrained, though here too he speaks of his admiration for the wise words with which Gottfried told of the love and loyalty and the grief of Tristan and Isolde (2185–92). He is, after all, himself on the brink of telling a love story that has been described as the first great German love story after Gottfried’s Tristan. To do so he borrows liberally from the master, yet the work that emerges is very different. It is inconceivable that Willehalm von Orlens would have come into existence without Tristan as its forerunner, but Rudolf von Ems is no mere imitator, but a powerful poet in his own right, capable, in this poem, of producing something that is simultaneously a Fürstenlehre (instruction in the art of being a princely leader) and an anti-Tristan, to echo the description of Brackert (221). However, it is salutary to consider the more cautious comments by Deighton, who concludes that Rudolf, for his only love story, turned naturally towards Tristan for some of his inspiration, but that he has “merely written a work which differs from Tristan but is no more an Anti-Tristan than it is an Anti-Parzival or an Anti-Gregorius” (1979, 322). It is all too easy to take Gottfried as the yardstick and in doing so to underestimate the achievement of those who, chronologically, followed him. (For a full comparison of Tristan and Willehalm von Orlens, see Haug.)

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The popularity of the story and the devotion of the young lovers through the trials of separation and despite the intrigues of society gained a place for Wilhelm and Amelie alongside Tristan and Isolde in the frescoes in Runkelstein devoted to exemplary lovers, yet their story is very different from that of their more famous companions there. Above all, in spite of the problems that the pair encounter along the way, when political considerations threaten to come between them and society appears to be against them, the prevailing mood is one of optimism, and the work ends with marriage, the reconciliation with the forces that have opposed them, and the clear vision of a happy and successful future, both for the two individuals and for the kingdom over which Wilhelm and his sons after him will rule. At the heart of the story is a familiar motif, not a potion that induces undying love, but the notion of a life doomed to be lived in silence until release comes in the form of the beloved. Like Tristan — and Riwalin — Wilhelm is a knight, and his chivalrous exploits match his actions as a devoted lover thwarted by political decisions beyond his control, until the abbess, sister to the king of England, who is determined to marry his daughter to the king of Spain, recognizes the depth of their love and contrives a reunion. About these young lovers there is an innocence devoid of duplicity, and even the characters who might be seen as negative — Jofrit of Brabant who slew Wilhelm’s father but tries to make up for that as best he can by educating the young orphan, and the king of England himself — are shown in a positive light. An obvious similarity is that Wilhelm is left an orphan when his mother dies of grief on hearing of her husband’s death, but the circumstances do not echo the situation of Tristan in detail. Rudolf is focusing on the idea of exemplary love, and he sometimes uses phrases that recall Gottfried, but he is too much a master of his own purpose — one different from Gottfried’s — to produce a work that is anything like an imitation. The opening acrostic and the insertion of comment on his literary predecessors are taken up, one senses, as “good ideas” and underline his avowed admiration for Gottfried. When Rudolf speaks, in the very first couplet, of the counsel of a noble heart, he must know that his audience is hearing the distinct echo of Gottfried, but he is referring to something quite different and much more bound to this world (Wachinger 67). Indeed, Rudolf’s whole work is firmly rooted in the values of this world, even to the extent that he concerns himself with the education of a young man, a future king, and sees the fulfillment of the love, not in union beyond the grave, but very much in the here and now. Like Gottfried, Rudolf sees joy and suffering as inseparable in love, but he does not proceed from that recognition to the assumption of a tragic outcome.

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The work by Rudolf von Ems usually believed to have been composed first, Der guote Gêrhart, is thematically unrelated to Tristan, yet it opens with lines that one can justifiably say would have been inconceivable without the model of Gottfried: Swaz ein man durch guoten muot ze guote in guotem muote tuot, des sol man im ze guote jehen, wan ez in guote muoz geschehen. (Whatever a man for the sake of a good spirit does by way of goodness and in a good spirit one should attribute to his goodness, for it must come about out of goodness.)

The anonymous narrative poem, or Schwank, Aristoteles und Phyllis, which belongs to the second half of the thirteenth century, contains four substantial passages of undisguised borrowing from Gottfried’s Tristan, as well as other smaller instances where one hears the echo of Gottfried’s work. Some of these latter could be viewed as conventional, largely descriptive phrases from a poet who, even very early on in this little work, seems to be taking a lead from Hartmann von Aue, when he describes the Queen of Greece as ein bluome reiner wipheit und ganzer tugende ein adamas und luter als ein spiegelglas vor wandel und vor missetat. (20–23) (A flower of pure womanliness and a diamond of perfect virtue, unblemished as a mirror in the presence of error and misdeeds.)

This bears comparison with Hartmann’s Der arme Heinrich, lines 60–62: er was ein bluome der jugent, / der werltvreude ein spiegelglas, / stæter triuwe ein adamas (He was a flower of youth, a mirror of worldly joy, a diamond of steadfast loyalty). Such an echo may be explained as the use of conventional language by one who, as the rest of the work shows, was thoroughly versed in the language of his predecessors. The same may be true of his apparent borrowings from Gottfried: diu wolgetane Phillis (the lovely Phyllis; 185), diu junge, diu clare und diu schœne (the young, the lovely, the beautiful one; 204–5), and his description of Phyllis as diu liehte sunne (the radiant sun; 228) are somewhat borderline cases, where one cannot say with any certainty that he is deliberately copying Gottfried. When it comes, however, to his reference to huote in line 190, and to vertane huote (cursed surveillance) at that, or to diu gewaltige minne,

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/ der sinne ein roubaerinne (powerful love, robber of the senses; 467–68), one is on surer ground, for Gottfried’s concern with huote, the surveillance that a man can misguidedly place upon his wife to the destruction of love, constitutes a central issue in his analysis of Marke’s behavior to Isolde, while his frequent personifications of Love run through the work, particularly in the passages immediately following the drinking of the love potion, where it is described as diu süenaerinne (the reconciler; 11721), diu verwaerinne (the dyer; 11908), diu arzatinne (the physician; 12164), or, more aggressively, aller herzen lâgaerîn (the ambusher of hearts; 11711). It could, of course, be argued that the personification of Love is commonplace in Minnesang, too, and that the description of Love as a robber of the senses is reminiscent of Heinrich von Morungen’s accusation of it as a vil süeziu senftiu tôterinne (very sweet and gentle murderess; MF 147,4). Walther von der Vogelweide asks Wer gap dir, Minne, den gewalt, / daz dû doch sô gewaltic bist? (56,5: Love, who gave you the power to be so powerful?). However, the phrase in Aristoteles und Phyllis bears a close resemblance also to Gottfried’s description of the impact of love on the young Blanscheflur: diu gewaltaerinne Minne diu was ouch in ir sinne ein teil ze sturmecliche komen und haete ir mit gewalte genomen den besten teil ir maze. (961–65) (Love, that forceful one, had come into her senses rather too violently and with her force had taken away the better part of her composure.)

We are dealing, it would appear, with an author well acquainted with the language and formulations of the earlier generation, and able to employ them himself when the occasion arises. The same degree of randomness cannot, however, be attributed to the large-scale borrowing of four significant passages from Gottfried’s poem. These are: lines 207–20, which are almost identical with Tristan 959–72; lines 238–52, corresponding to Tristan 10962–76; lines 270–84, Tristan 10988–11002; lines 310–19, Tristan 844–53. This relationship cannot be explained as “plagiarism,” which might suggest a weaker poet’s attempt to get away with blatant copying of a superior predecessor. It is inconceivable that any audience would fail to recognize the quotations, and that is precisely what they are. The author of Aristoteles und Phyllis is no poet of high quality, but he is a narrator of some skill, telling a story with a purpose. That as much as one-tenth of its modest length should be recognizably

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the work of a well-known predecessor raises some interesting questions of interpretation and intention (see Wachinger and Deighton 1978 and 1979). The story of a young girl who humiliates a wise old man by forcing him to wear a saddle and to allow her to ride on his back in public is popular both in narratives and pictorial representations in the later Middle Ages. Ulrich von Etzenbach tells a similar tale in his Alexander (ca.1280). The German version known as Aristoteles und Phyllis, in which the man is explicitly the philosopher Aristotle, may derive from a French source, and its date is hard to establish with any certainty, though it can be placed somewhere towards the end of the thirteenth century. The copying of some crucial sections of Tristan — two of them describing the beauty of a young woman and two the impact of love — may be seen as a tribute to an admired predecessor, but their position in the work and the distinct purpose behind the telling of this superficially comic tale would seem to support the view that this is a carefully used device of cross-reference to a superior poet who had left posterity with some serious issues to contemplate, if not perhaps to resolve. For all its obvious humor — and Wachinger (82) actually sees the effect of the borrowings as parodistic, great passages from a serious work applied to an essentially trivial situation — the little poem is attempting to tackle the profound issues raised by Gottfried, of the place of love in a hostile society and the hazards in the relationships between men and women. The mocking of Aristotle is not the final view of him: he goes off to write his book about the nature of women and their wiles as one who, though temporarily made to appear ridiculous in full view of the court, resumes his status as philosopher in the end, but only after the girl has exacted her revenge by humiliating him for his foolish and ill-judged desires. Although the young lovers emerge happy and victorious on one level, the wise old man stands for the society that was hostile to their love and remains so. The poet’s view of women in general as constituting a trap that man can avoid only by avoiding their company altogether is expressed with great force and at considerable length (300–332; 422–49; 535–54), but this cautionary message is almost certainly not his only purpose. Despite the tendency of the author to show the young pair in a positive light, he does not deny that society, represented by the revered Aristotle, has a valid standpoint. The opposing forces are as irreconcilable as they are in Tristan, though this later poet does not linger on the tragic conflict, but permits a more or less satisfactory outcome. That along the way he quotes at some length and unashamedly from Tristan reminds the audience of the possibility that it could be otherwise.

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Konrad von Würzburg’s Herzmære belongs also to the second half of the thirteenth century — it is dated about 1260 — and, for all the difference between these two short narratives, it represents an interesting comparison with Aristoteles und Phyllis in a number of important respects. It too shows the power of love, in a triangular relationship of a very different kind, and the outsider in this case is not ridiculed, as Aristotle is, but pushed to an act of horrendous barbarity by his jealousy and determination to gain his revenge on his wife and her (dead) lover. That the outcome is tragedy is inevitable, given the material and the tone of the narrative: this is no cautionary tale that ends in some kind of tenuous resolution, as one might say Aristoteles und Phyllis does, but a literary vignette of tragic love, and the work of a considerable poet. Das Herzmære, too, is firmly harnessed to Gottfried’s Tristan, but in a different way from Aristoteles und Phyllis. The opening lines present the work as an example of pure love (lûterlîche mine) such as has become alien (wilde) to the world but of which von Strâzburc meister Gotfrid has spoken, assuring his listeners that those who hear tales of love are properly equipped to understand its nature and to pursue it for themselves. Thus Konrad, like Gottfried, has set himself the task of relating this tale of pure love as an example to his audience. These opening lines, which link the poem firmly with Gottfried’s Tristan, are matched in his closing injunction to those who hear his story and learn to cherish love, while the final line — kein edel herze sol verzagn (no noble heart shall falter) — echoes Gottfried’s dedication of his work to the noble hearts. Between the beginning and the end of Konrad’s poem, the narrative is, of course, very different in substance. The woman sends her lover to the Holy Land in order to divert the suspicions of her husband. The lover dies a martyr to love, but not before he has given instructions that his heart be returned to his beloved. The husband intercepts the messenger with the casket and has the heart roasted and served to his wife as a great delicacy. When she realizes what she has done, she refuses to eat again and wastes away. The lines that relate her death speak of her great loyalty and of the sacrifice of the loving pair as an example to those who hear their tale today. The attack on the modern way of love, which is so demeaned and so materialistic (552–63) recalls Gottfried’s criticism of love that cheapens itself on the marketplace (12290–306): both poets use the word veil (available for purchase) to characterize this inferior love, which has been reduced to a commodity. The proportions of the two works are very different, yet at the core of both of them is the wish to show a love that flies in the face of convention and can survive only through death.

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To an audience undoubtedly familiar with Tristan, Konrad needed to say no more. The impact of Gottfried’s Tristan on Konrad von Würzburg is probably most evident in terms of style in the 2000 lines entitled Die goldene Schmiede (The Golden Smithy). This is an elaborate poem in the tradition of the eulogy to the Virgin Mary, focusing on a single image that Konrad introduces at the beginning of the poem and then expands with an accumulation of sometimes quite tenuously linked images, resulting in what Max Wehrli has described as “ein kostbarer Wortschleier, eine Wortkaskade” (a precious veil of words, a verbal cascade; 555). In the smithy of his heart he intends to create a poem of gold and precious stones to honor the Empress of Heaven. He makes a direct reference to Gottfried, the houbetsmit (master smith), as he calls him, declaring, with conventional humility, that Gottfried could have praised the Virgin better, and he takes up Gottfried’s own picture, from his literary excursus, of the green clover on which he would like to tread with his fine words (4921). This is not, says Konrad, the place where he is entitled to sit: ich sitze ouch niht uf grüenem cle von süezer rede touwes naz, da wirdeclichen ufe saz von Strazburc meister Gotfrit, der als ein wæher houbetsmit guldin getihte worhte. der hæte, an alle vorhte, dich gerüemet, frouwe, baz, dann ich, vil reinez tugentvaz, iemer kunne dich getuon. (94–103) (I am not sitting on that green clover, wet with the dew of sweet words, on which Master Gottfried sat with such dignity, he who wrought golden poems, supreme master smith that he was. Without any doubt he would have praised you better, my Lady, than I can ever praise you, pure vessel of all virtue.)

Yet, in his fulsome expression of adoration and the consciously ornate style, he actually goes way beyond Gottfried, whose symbolism and use of rhetorical devices is, in comparison, much more controlled. The work, though dismissed by some as tasteless and little more than an extended exercise in intellectual playfulness, shows another facet of a poet of remarkable versatility who claimed Gottfried as his model but added originality to imitation to a much greater extent than anyone else of his generation.

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Another work of Konrad’s suggests the influence of Gottfried, combined with considerable originality, and this time it is the content rather than the manner that supplies the connection. In Engelhard he treats, as Gottfried does, the theme of triuwe, but this is not the love between a man and a woman, but the devotion, unto death if necessary, of two men. Engelhard and Dietrich are identical to look at, and it is only the similarity in names that sways the king’s daughter, Engeltrût, who had fallen in love with both of them, to give her heart to Engelhard. The first events of the story depend on the extraordinary physical likeness of the two men, which means that the one can substitute for the other, whether in combat or in the marriage bed. Yet the loyalty of the one to the other is unassailed: on two occasions a sword is placed between the one man and the other man’s wife. The woman in each case may be deceived because she fails to detect the substitution, but the integrity of the friendship between the men is deemed to remain intact. The final and even more extreme test comes when Dietrich is stricken with leprosy and learns, through an angel, that the only cure is the blood of Engelhard’s children. Their friendship means that Engelhard will even make this sacrifice, and he beheads the children. Dietrich recovers immediately and the children are discovered alive and well. This miracle is attributed to God who has recognized the devotion of the two men. Although one may detect, in this outcome and along the way, an echo of Der arme Heinrich, this does not seem to be a major influence: indeed, Konrad resists the temptation to pursue the emotion or psychological insights that suggest themselves. What he does do is provide a framework of morality that confronts all norms and seems to defy contradiction. The behavior of the two men, like that of Tristan and Isolde, is acceptable, it seems, because, like them, they are true to one another and to their friendship. Other considerations, and even the accepted criteria of human behavior, are made subservient to their triuwe, which is emphasized throughout, from the opening lines (up to 216), which contain a statement of intention no less powerful than Gottfried’s prologue, to the conclusion, which praises the pure loyalty, the elevated devotion that eschews all disloyalty and of which the two men are a shining example to the listener. No more than Gottfried does Konrad concede the possibility of a negative view or ponder on what may be seen as the ambivalent morality of the poem, but this time the influence of Gottfried is implicit rather than explicit: his name is not mentioned. It is hardly to be doubted that readers in the Middle Ages “received” Gottfried’s work as an enormous fragment and possibly accepted without question the explanation that his death prevented its completion. Cer-

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tainly both his continuators lament his death (Ulrich von Türheim in line 4, Heinrich von Freiberg in lines 30–33). Modern scholars, in their tussle with the thematic complexities of the poem, are more inclined to point to the difficulties Gottfried found as he pursued his declared source to its conclusion, and, while not excluding the possibility that he died before he could complete the work, even to suggest his possible despair at the task he had assumed. Gottfried Weber goes so far as to speak of a death that was not by chance but inwardly founded, stemming from something deep inside him: “So ist es mehr als wahrscheinlich, daß sein Tod kein zufälliger, sondern ein innerlich gegründeter war” (388). Unlike de Boor, who speaks of “ein Zufall, der wie ein Sinn aussieht” (a chance which looks like a deliberate intention; 1940, 295), Weber believes that the work breaks off at no arbitrary point but at the central turning point: following Thomas, Gottfried was about to relate the marriage of Tristan with Isolde of the White Hands and thus, as Weber puts it, the destruction of the mystery of triuwe, which is the foremost ingredient of his conception of love. The modern reader of English may not be entirely comfortable with the juxtaposition of Gottfried’s great fragment and the surviving fragments of Thomas, but the exquisite translation of A. T. Hatto (1960) presents us with a seamless story that more or less satisfies on that level. The contortions of Tristan’s thinking up to the point where the work breaks off may already have meant disappointment in human terms, but a conclusion that brings the deaths of both lovers is no contradiction of what Gottfried has said all along. In that sense one could argue that the end was known from the beginning and that the fragmentary state of the poem represents no great loss. Aesthetically, of course, we miss a completion of the acrostic and an epilogue, if not perhaps to match the great prologue, then at least to provide a balance to it, but McDonald may well be right when he says that the story itself “can perhaps have no satisfactory conclusion” (103). It is ironic that the two people who saw the need to complete Gottfried’s work and set about the task of doing so declared their admiration for Gottfried’s art, yet showed little ability to emulate it, or — more significantly — to demonstrate an awareness of his true purpose. Thus the continuations of Ulrich von Türheim in about 1240 and of Heinrich von Freiberg towards the end of the thirteenth century contribute significantly to the picture of the reception of Gottfried’s work in the Middle Ages but hardly satisfy in the terms they set themselves of completing the great fragment. Indeed, one may be more inclined to concur with Peter Strohschneider’s view that they saw their task not in concluding Gottfried’s narrative but in continuing it, and that their aim was not to

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reach the end but to delay the ending by means of a completely new process of narration (77). Most modern critics are generally negative in their appraisal of them, though McDonald sounds a salutary warning note when he says “Comparisons with Gottfried’s ‘magisterial’ Tristan are unfair” (103). Their respective achievements speak for the climate of their own generations and should not be too firmly rejected because they are so blatantly not Gottfried von Strassburg. As an important part of her examination of the place of the Tristan story in the German Middle Ages, Monika Schausten (1999) devotes substantial time to the consideration of the “continuators” and makes a powerful case for viewing them more in their own respective rights than as more or less chance inheritors of an unfinished narrative. In raising the issues she does about the very use of the term “fragment” to describe Gottfried’s poem (214), she challenges some preconceptions about that work, but, more importantly for the present topic, she expresses reservations about the intentions of Ulrich von Türheim and Heinrich von Freiberg as they embarked on their tasks. Without necessarily agreeing with her sometimes quite startling theories — that, for example, Ulrich was more concerned with completing a manuscript than with taking an unfinished story to a conclusion, hence his emphasis on the buoch that his patron had entrusted to him (213) — one cannot fail to be impressed by the independent stature she has given to two authors often disparaged as “Epigonen.” In similar vein, Peter Strohschneider makes a powerful case for viewing the “continuations” as significant aspects of the reception of Gottfried’s poem, and he demonstrates convincingly that the three “new” narratives — since he includes Tristan als Mönch in his analysis — each contribute to the direction of the medieval reception (Rezeptionslenkung, 95), or, as he puts it, even the “manipulation” of the existing story. The point he is making is that a narrative, whether traditionally regarded as a fragment or not, can be extended backwards or forwards, or receive parallel additions, and that the ability of a “great” poem to be treated in this way is testimony to its stature. Strohschneider’s measured approach thus raises some important issues of evaluation and reception, and his article, which at no point argues for an enhanced aesthetic reputation for the later works, prompts some new thoughts both on these works themselves and on Gottfried’s Tristan. Such, in Strohschneider’s terms, is the ultimate “reward” for those who ventured to supply these substantial commentaries to Gottfried’s poem (95). That Ulrich’s continuation was valued by the Middle Ages, and indeed by a generation very alive to Gottfried’s achievement, is suggested by its juxtaposition in the oldest manuscripts, M and H, with Gottfried’s

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own work, or rather, in the case of M, with a version of Gottfried’s work. The thirteenth century, with its regard for a good story told to its conclusion, appears to have welcomed Ulrich’s achievement, although Ranke, undisguisedly contemptuous of what he describes as “ein Notdach, dessen poesielose Nüchternheit nur schlecht zu den zierlichen Formen und dem funkelnden Glanz des Meisterbaues passen will” (a makeshift conclusion whose unpoetic sterility fits ill with the delicate forms and the sparkling radiance of the master building; 1925, 250), speaks of its having deservedly received little acclaim when it first appeared in Strasbourg in about 1230 (“fand aber verdientermaßen wenig beifall”; 1917, 416). It is actually not so easy to judge the reception from the evidence of the manuscripts. The situation is not unlike that with Rennewart, Ulrich’s lengthy sequel to Wolfram’s Willehalm, which was presented in the manuscripts in the trilogy that opened with Ulrich von dem Türlin’s Willehalm (sometimes called Arabel). Common to both Ulrichs, and to both the continuations of Ulrich von Türheim, is the declared admiration for the work of the predecessor, hence the sense of vocation in supplying a completion. In his attempt to redress the almost exclusively negative view of Ulrich’s Tristan, Wachinger suggests that one of the difficulties is that Ulrich had no overall concept of his own (60). Wachinger himself uses this perceived weakness in the structure of the narrative to argue for the existence of an unknown source other than Eilhart, but, in the absence of firm evidence of what this might be, he arrives only at the conclusion that Ulrich is poles apart from Gottfried in his concept of love but also in his whole way of thinking (64). One can hardly argue with that view, and one must concur with Thomas Kerth that Ulrich was faced with a dilemma he struggled manfully to resolve, producing an “independent contribution to the body of German Tristan literature, compatible with both its models, yet curiously inferior to each” (91). Bearing in mind McDonald’s warning about unfair comparisons, one might venture to suggest that the interest in Ulrich’s work is expressed in the word “curiously”: this is an attempt that warrants consideration, because it has intrinsic interest. The task of completing Gottfried’s poem was placed upon Ulrich, according to what he says early in his work, by Konrad von Winterstetten, a significant figure in the Hohenstaufen household and noted for his fostering of literature. Not only Ulrich von Türheim received his patronage, but, no less crucially for the reception of Gottfried von Strassburg, so did Rudolf von Ems. It is evident that both Ulrich and his patron admired Gottfried, but this admiration is strangely at odds with the decision — which may have been imposed on him by the fact that no

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version by Thomas of Britain was available — to base his continuation on a source emphatically rejected by Gottfried himself. Although arguments have been put forward for a lost French source (Wachinger 61), the majority of scholars even now point to Eilhart’s Tristrant (c.1180) as Ulrich’s model, though he treats this with considerable flexibility (see, however, Deighton 1997 for a contrary argument). The resultant work is thus a strange mixture, in which it may be held that Ulrich’s own views and interpretation dominate. Yet ultimately his view of love as the product of true faithfulness, his conviction of its power to exist beyond the grave, and his evident sympathy for the lovers are all in tune with Gottfried’s essential thesis. The true lovers, of whom he says in his powerful epilogue that they love this tale — rehte minnære / diu minnen diz mære (3629–30) — seem to be identical with the noble hearts to whom Gottfried addressed his poem. Yet the story has passed through darker phases, when the constancy of Tristan’s love is brought into question by his marriage with Isolde of the White Hands. The duality of love is present in Ulrich as in Gottfried, and the pressure of society threatens: for some modern critics, the marriage to the second Isolde represents Ulrich’s attempt to ensure the victory of honor over love. Yet Isolde of the White Hands may be seen as a negative force, deserving the rejection of Tristan and ultimately of the narrator, who tries for much of the work to present her in a positive light, but can only blame her for lying about the color of the sail and attribute to her the great sin of causing the death of Tristan. After that she is banished from the scene of a death which she has been instrumental in causing but in which she has no further role to play (3418–22). The view held by Gerhard Meissburger that Ulrich aims at an elevation of marriage as the only means for love to flourish (55) is not entirely sustainable. The marriage of Tristan and Isolde of the White Hands is a sham, a charade played out before society, but ultimately untenable, since Tristan and Isolde are the victims of a more powerful fate, symbolized by the love potion. What Thomas Kerth sees as “Ulrich’s dilemma” exists on several levels. Although Ulrich’s completion is probably externally not too far from Gottfried’s envisaged conclusion, and he tries to emulate something of Gottfried’s language, his emphasis is on a morality unrecognized by Gottfried, with his concept of a love that dictates its own terms. Ulrich does not really venture to copy the art he extols in the opening of his work, where he sets out his purpose as that of completing Gottfried’s work as best he can. In the end, the commendation of the lovers to the Trinity and the final “Amen” distances Ulrich’s poem totally from Gottfried’s and makes us realize, with hindsight, how little he has really allied himself to Gottfried’s position

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throughout, although Klaus Grabmüller finds a way to reconcile the apparent contradiction between Ulrich’s allegiance to Gottfried and his production of a work with a sternly moral tone in the didactic tendency of the literature of the later generation. If modern critics ponder upon the judgment of an audience apparently capable of accepting Ulrich’s sequel, they may also ask why, some fifty years later, another author took up the challenge. In three of the four fifteenth-century manuscripts, the work of Heinrich von Freiberg replaces that of Ulrich, raising the question whether later generations sometimes saw Heinrich’s version as superior, though some of the later manuscripts contrive to include Ulrich’s version. The fact that Heinrich makes no mention of Ulrich von Türheim is impossible to evaluate: if he knew it, which seems likely, he clearly saw no need to pass comment on a work that he was about to replace. What emerges from the study of Heinrich von Freiberg’s work is that it is considerably more than a continuation. Although prompted by the wish to complete a poem left as a fragment by a greatly admired predecessor and to do this in honor of a revered patron (53–83), the length, scope, and in a sense the direction the work assumes give it a certain independent status, as both Peter Strohschneider and Monika Schausten have also demonstrated in some detail. Its provenance at the court of Prague in the last decades of the thirteenth century takes it a long way from the Strasbourg of about 1210 and the chivalric ethos of the Blütezeit. Heinrich’s Tristan belongs very much to its age, with its regard for social morality and its blatant religiosity, features that distinguish it as sharply as can be imagined from Gottfried’s poem. His admiration for Gottfried’s art leads him to emulate it and at times to outdo the “master” in his use of elevated language and his predilection for playing with words. It is possibly this external resemblance, as Monika Schausten seems to be suggesting (276), that leads, or rather misleads, one into assuming a closer relationship between the two poems than a proper assessment of the narratives reveals. In the opening lines of his work Heinrich adopts Gottfried’s own metaphor of clothing and tailoring to honor the meister, introducing this tribute with a traditional expression of his awareness of his own inadequacy to the task before him:

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getichtes des gar spehen des rîchen und des wehen bin ich ein erbeloser man und hab mich doch genomen an zu volbringen diz mere, daz so blunde hat untz her mit schoner red betichtet und meisterlich berichtet min herre meister Gotfrit von Strazburc, der so mangen snit spehen unde richen schone unde meisterlichen nach durnechtiges meisters siten uz blundem sinnen hat gesniten und hat so richer rede cleit disem sinne an geleit. dise materien er hat gesprentzet an so lichte wat, daz ich zwivele dar an, ob ich indert vinden kan in mines sinnes gehuege red, di si wol stende tuege bi disen spruchen guldin! (7–29) (I have in no way inherited the art of excellent, rich, fine poetry, and yet I have taken it upon myself to complete this story, which thus far and with such elegance and fine language and in such masterly manner Gottfried von Strassburg has told us. He has fashioned it so beautifully, tailoring so many excellent and perfect pieces with great finesse and such supreme skill, according to the manner of the true master, and has clothed this thinking in such rich language. He has dressed these matters in such brilliant garments that I doubt whether in the chamber of my mind I can find such words as would be fitting to these golden sayings.)

Interesting here is Heinrich’s reference to the spruche of his predecessor: what those who spoke of his death so lamented was the loss of one who seems to have been a veritable font of such sayings. Ulrich von Türheim had referred similarly to a style that was “radiant with sayings” (12). It is evident that the medieval audience in general often found a strong didactic element in Gottfried’s work and looked to him for guidance in the form of epigrams relating particularly to love (see Deighton 1979,

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1). Like so many who praised Gottfried, Heinrich is aware of the special nature of his thought and his art, and of the perfect fusion of the two, yet one senses already that behind the conventional admiration is a poet of independent skills who is about to embark on a narrative that will take him well away from his predecessor, in content and above all in the concept of his material. After this opening tribute to Gottfried, his introduction of himself, and the acknowledgment of his patron, Raimund von Lichtenberg, Heinrich takes up the narrative where Gottfried had left it and focuses on an unhappy Tristan, deep in thought and pondering his attraction to Isolde of the White Hands and his inescapable love for Isolde the Fair. Contrary to what Peter Strohschneider says (88), it does not look as though a swift conclusion to Gottfried’s fragment were pending, and, in any case, Heinrich von Freiberg has much else in mind than to supply a banal practical solution to a dilemma of the magnitude offered by Gottfried. There follows the marriage, it is true, but then Tristan’s duplicitous explanation to his bride that he fails to consummate it out of deference to a solemn promise given in a pact with the Virgin Mary, that he would leave any future wife a virgin for a whole year. This somewhat displeasing insertion by Heinrich allows him to show Isolde of the White Hands willing to accept her husband’s abstinence and even to permit him to leave her for that year while he journeys to King Arthur’s court, to consolidate and enhance his reputation as a knight. From there he travels on to Marke’s court, and what follows is a replay of the events earlier in Tristan’s life and related by Gottfried: renewed association with Isolde, explained as a resurgence of the power of the love potion (3005–7), discovery by Marke, banishment, and a period spent in the forest. There they are nourished, as in Gottfried’s grotto, by love (3377), enjoying an idyllic life for — and Heinrich is explicit about this — half a year (3383), until Marke, again out hunting, discovers them and takes Isolde back to court. Tristan returns to his wife, though as he lies beside her he can think only of his beloved Isolde, and again fails to consummate the marriage. His wife, for her part, is bewildered that the man who has proved himself such an exemplary knight is lacking when it comes to the demonstration of his manhood that she had expected upon his return. Much of the remainder of this long poem (6890 lines) shows Tristan as the intrepid hero in a lengthy series of adventures that all contribute to his honor as a knight and conform to the traditional narrative of the post-courtly German poets. He meets again with Isolde the Fair, parts from her again, and only then consummates his marriage. There is considerable tension between Tristan’s honor as a knight and his behavior

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as a lover. He overcomes physical danger again and again, yet ultimately he dies of love, and Heinrich seems to be aware of this contradiction: Der hochgemute Tristant, der zu Gales in daz lant vur zu dem vursten Gylan und den risen Urgan sluoc und daz cleine hundelin mit dem menlichen ellen sin Pytticreu menlich erwarb, von herzenliebe in leide starb. (6455–72) (The noble Tristan, who travelled to Wales to Prince Gylan and slew the giant Urgan and boldly won the little dog Petitcru with his manly courage, died grief-stricken, of love.)

In Gottfried’s work, honor had existed on two levels: the honor of society and their position in that society are what troubles Tristan and Isolde in the Love Grotto, and this means that they offer no resistance when Marke summons them back to the court, even though, in the thinking of Gottfried’s prologue, they are most perfectly paying due honor to love during the period they spend there. In Heinrich’s version, the conflict is differently presented: Tristan cannot ultimately maintain his honor in terms of his reputation in society because he is constantly disturbed by the thought of Isolde and by his inescapable love for her. It is Curvenal who, after the death of the lovers, tells Marke about the love potion and its consequences and provokes the self-accusation from Marke that leads to his withdrawal into a monastery. Marke is elevated to der künec ûz erkorn (the excellent king; 6823), who declares that, had he known of the circumstances, he would have sacrificed his own happiness to the higher love he only now begins to comprehend. Like Ulrich von Türheim, who also has Marke declare that he would have behaved differently if he had been in possession of the true facts, Heinrich seems to be implying that a non-tragic outcome to the love of Tristan and Isolde was possible, a stance that runs counter to Gottfried’s own position. When Marke plants a rose on the grave of Tristan and a vine on that of Isolde, Heinrich uses these traditional motifs, not to praise the lovers or to elevate their love, but to conclude his poem with a warning to those whom he censures as the lovers of the world (der werlde minnære). In a final stroke of independence, he interprets the rose as Christ Himself, and the vine as mankind, and he appeals to God the Father to allow the one to entwine the other. Thus he steps back from

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a story of tragic love and suddenly converts his poem into a cautionary tale that demonstrates the ultimately destructive power of a love that is too much of this world, directing his audience to the transcendent power of the love of Christ. One might well come to the conclusion that, in attempting to complete Gottfried’s work, Heinrich has in fact composed a whole new work very different in nature and ultimately, if perhaps not consistently throughout, offering a negative view of his model. As Margarete Sedlmeyer puts it, in one of the very few studies devoted to Heinrich von Freiberg, “Nachahmung verboten ist im Hinblick auf den christlichen Hintergrund Heinrichs Aussage” (“Imitation prohibited” is Heinrich’s message with regard to the Christian background; 291): the final message is that this love is not to be seen as an example, a far cry from Gottfried’s assertion that his tale of ideal love and ideal lovers is intended to nourish lovers who hear of it. Yet Heinrich’s position is expounded only in the epilogue, only in retrospect clarifying his manipulation of the material throughout. The focus of his continuation is no Love Grotto, but a hut in the forest, a feature that Strohschneider even goes so far as to describe as part of that “wretched reality” (94) that Heinrich von Freiberg sets against Gottfried’s utopian — and ultimately unsustainable — ideal. The love of Heinrich’s pair is in the world and of the world, and the circumstances that oppose it are not an insuperable fate but a chain of irritants that could eventually be overcome and allow them to emerge into a happy existence. The series of adventures recalls the Arthurian romances, and particularly the sometimes straggling chains of not-always-connected events of the immediately post-classical generation of Der Stricker or Heinrich von dem Türlin. With hindsight, one realizes that Heinrich von Freiberg’s insistence (3321–27) that Tristan and Isolde cannot find the Love Grotto of which Gottfried had spoken and in which they had previously been so content is a significant clue to his changed perspective and his very different message. This is not, however, to say that Heinrich von Freiberg, any more than Ulrich von Türheim, failed to understand Gottfried. Chinca, in his thought-provoking analysis of their ultimately very different presentation of the lovers, speaks of their “complete reversal of Gottfried” and of their standing Gottfried “on his head” (110). Their focus, he maintains, is on an afterlife, a Christian heaven, while Gottfried and the noble hearts are “reunited in a literary afterlife, sustained by the repeated celebration of the Eucharist-story.” It is not relevant here to consider the precise validity of this assessment, but it is important that such a sharp distinction can be discerned, underlining the fact that both continuators did considerably more than continue. Indeed, the picture that emerges of the recep-

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tion of Gottfried’s poem throughout the thirteenth century is that it was admired and valued, and that Gottfried’s successors used it as a springboard for some remarkably diverse and, in many respects, highly independent creations of their own. That they could not match him artistically is, for the most part, undoubtedly true, and their blatant attempts to copy his language and style are often clumsy imitations. To see these poets’ works as mere reactions to Tristan, refutations of it or attempts to set the record straight, is probably a mistake of the postmedieval reader, and one that the authors’ contemporaries may well not have made. The fact remains that, without Gottfried’s towering model, many of these works would not have come into being, and, more than that, that their very existence contributes to the still evolving view of Gottfried’s work.

Works Cited Primary Sources Aristoteles und Phyllis: Neues Gesamtabenteuer. Ed. H. Niewöhner. Dublin/Zurich: Weidmann, 1967. Des Minnesangs Frühling. Ed. Karl Lachmann and Moriz Haupt. 1857. With many subsequent revisions and reprints, and editions by Friedrich Vogt and Carl von Kraus. Most recently revised and edited by Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren. Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1988. (= MF) Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide. Ed. Hugo Kuhn. Berlin: de Gruyter. 1965. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. According to the text of Friedrich Ranke. Ed. and trans. (German) Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Heinrich von Freiberg. Tristan und Isolde. Ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok. Greifswald: Reineke Verlag, 1993. Konrad von Würzburg. Engelhard. Ed. Paul Gereke. Halle: Niemeyer, 1912. Konrad von Würzburg. Die goldene Schmiede. Ed. E. Schröder. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1926. Konrad von Würzburg. Herzmære. Ed. E. Schröder. Berlin: Weidmann, 1924. Rudolf von Ems. Alexander. Ed. Victor Junk. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970. Rudolf von Ems. Willehalm von Orlens. Ed. Victor Junk. Berlin: Weidmann, 1905. Tristan als Mönch, Untersuchungen und kritische Edition. By Betty C. Bushey. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1974. Ulrich von Türheim. Tristan. Ed. Thomas Kerth. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979.

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Secondary Sources Brackert, Hermann (1968). Rudolf von Ems: Dichtung und Geschichte. Heidelberg: Winter. de Boor, Helmut (1940). “Die Grundauffassung von Gottfrieds Tristan.” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift 18: 262–306. Reprinted in Gottfried von Straßburg, ed. Alois Wolf, Darmstadt, 1973. Chinca, Mark (1997). Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Deighton, Alan (1978). “diu wîp sint alliu niht alsô. Aristoteles und Phyllis and the Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan.” New German Studies 6: 137–50. Deighton, Alan (1979). Studies in the Reception of the Work of Gottfried von Strassburg in Germany During the Middle Ages. D. phil., Oxford. Deighton, Alan (1997). “Die Quellen der Tristan-fortsetzungen Ulrichs von Türheim und Heinrichs von Freiberg.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 126, 2: 140–65. Frühmorgen-Voss, Hella (1975). Text und Illustration im Mittelalter. Munich: Beck. Ganz, Peter F. (1966). “Polemisiert Gottfried gegen Wolfram? Zu Tristan 4638f.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (= Pauls und Braunes Beiträge, abbrev. PBB) (Tübingen) 88: 68–85. Geil, Gerhild (1973). Gottfried und Wolfram als literarische Antipoden. Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau. Grabmüller, Klaus (1985). “Probleme einer Fortsetzung. Anmerkungen zu Ulrichs von Türheim Tristan-Schluß.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 114: 338–48. Haug, Walter (1975). “Rudolfs Willehalm und Gottfrieds Tristan: Kontrafaktur als Kritik.” Deutsche Literatur des späten Mittelalters. Ed. Wolfgang Harms and L. Peter Johnson. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. 83–98. Kerth, Thomas (1981). “The Dénouement of the Tristan-Minne: Türheim’s Dilemma.” Neophilologus 65: 79–93. Klein, Karl Kurt (1953). “Das Freundschaftsgleichnis im Parzivalprolog. Ein Beitrag zur Klärung der Beziehungen zwischen Wolfram von Eschenbach und Gottfried von Straßburg.” Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 1. Band: Amman-Festgabe 1. Teil: 75–94. Reprinted in Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Heinz Rupp, Darmstadt, 1966. Klein, Karl Kurt (1961). “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Parzival.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (= Pauls und Braunes Beiträge, abbrev. PBB) (Halle) 82: 13–38. Loomis, R. S. (1938). Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art. London, New York: Modern Language Association of America, Monograph Series.

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McDonald, William C. (1990). The Tristan Story in German Literature of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Meissburger, G. (1954). Tristan und Isold mit den weißen Händen: Die Auffassung der Minne, der Liebe und der Ehe bei Gottfried von Straßburg und Ulrich von Türheim. Basel: Reinhardt. Norman, Frederick (1961/62). “The Enmity of Wolfram and Gottfried.” German Life and Letters 15: 53–67. Norman, Frederick (1969). “Meinung und Gegenmeinung: Die literarische Fehde zwischen Gottfried von Straßburg und Wolfram von Eschenbach.” Miscellanea di studi in onore di Bonaventura Tecchi. Vol 1. 67–86. Picozzi, Rosemary (1971). A History of ‘Tristan’ Scholarship. Bern: H. Lang. Ranke, Friedrich (1917). “Die Überlieferung von Gottfrieds Tristan.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 55: 157–278, 381–438. Schröder, Walter Johannes (1958). “Vindære wilder mære. Zum Literaturstreit zwischen Gottfried und Wolfram.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (= Pauls und Braunes Beiträge, abbrev. PBB) (Tübingen) 80: 269–87. Reprinted in Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Heinz Rupp, Darmstadt, 1966. Schausten, Monika (1999). Erzählwelten der Tristangeschichte im hohen Mittelalter. Munich: Fink. Strohschneider, Peter (1990). “Gotfrit-fortsetzungen. Tristans Ende im 13. Jahrhundert und die Möglichkeiten nachklassischer Epik.” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift 65: 70–98. Sedlmeyer, Margarete (1976). Heinrichs von Freiberg Tristanfortsetzung im Vergleich zu anderen Tristandichtungen. Bern/Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Stiebelung, Karl (1905). Gottfried von Strassburg und seine beiden Fortsetzer Ulrich von Türheim und Heinrich von Freiberg. Halle a.d. Saal: Ehrhardt Karras. Wachinger, Burghart (1975). “Zur Rezeption Gottfrieds von Straßburg im 13. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Literatur des späten Mittelalters. Ed. Wolfgang Harms and L. Peter Johnson. Berlin: E. Schmidt. 56–82. Weber, Gottfried (1948–50). “Gottfrieds Tristan in der Krise des hochmittelaterlichen Weltbildes um 1200.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 82: 335–88. Wehrli, Max (1980). Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Reclam. Whitaker, Muriel (1990). Legends of King Arthur in Art. Cambridge: Brewer.

The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde Ulrich Müller Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben. August von Platen

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HE ORIGINS OF THE TRISTAN LEGEND

are still obscure today, but we know for sure that its transition from orality to literacy occurred in medieval France. Unfortunately, the first French Tristan romances by Béroul and Thomas have been transmitted only in fragments. Since Gottfried’s romance was not completed by its author, it is the poem of a medieval German writer of relatively modest literary ability, Eilhart von Oberge, that ironically represents the first complete medieval version of the legend. Nevertheless, the number of surviving manuscripts tells us that Gottfried’s romance, together with its continuations, was well known in German-speaking countries. More widespread in western Europe were large-scale prose versions, which in the late Middle Ages made the legend of Tristan and Isolde the most popular story in secular literature. From the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the revival of interest in the Middle Ages at the end of the late eighteenth century, the legend was never completely forgotten, even if it is unlikely that many were reading Gottfried’s work during these centuries. If educated people knew anything about Tristan and Isolde, this would have been from one of the above-mentioned prose versions, many of which were printed in France, England, Spain, and the Italian- and Germanspeaking countries: the French Tristan en prose (eight printings from 1489 till 1586), Malory’s book about Sir Tristrem (Morte Darthur, Book V; printings from 1485 till 1634), the Italian and Spanish prose versions produced from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century (Rusticciano da Pisa; Tristano Riccardiano, Tristano Veneto, Tavola Rotonda, I due Tristani; Tristán de Leonis, etc.), and the German prose version and Volksbuch (printings from 1484 till 1664).

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The modern revival of the medieval legend is also based on versions such as that of Comte de la Vergue de Tressans (Extraits de romans de chevalerie, in Bibliothèque universelle des romans, 1775–89) and on new printings of the late medieval prose versions (the German prose version edited by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen in 1809, and an edition of Malory edited by Robert Southey in 1817). Christoph Heinrich Myller published the first modern transcription of Gottfried’s romance and of the continuation by Heinrich von Freiberg in 1785 in the second volume of Samlung [sic] deutscher Gedichte aus dem XII. XIII und XIV. Iahrhundert [sic], and new editions of Gottfried’s Tristan and the continuations were produced by Eberhard von Groote (Berlin 1821), Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (Breslau 1823), and Hans Ferdinand Massmann (Leipzig 1843). The first modern German translation was published in 1844 by Hermann Kurtz (revised by Wolfgang Mohr [Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1979]), and the first modern edition of the French fragments in verse was printed in 1835–39 by Francisque Michel (Paris: Techener). Any knowledge the layman might have today about the medieval story of Tristan and Isolde is probably based on the opera of Richard Wagner (whose primary source was Gottfried’s romance), or perhaps on the modern retelling of the story by the French philologist Joseph Bédier (1900) — or from a movie or television. Since Wagner’s time, most authors have been using a combination of sources: the fragmentary French romances, Gottfried, Wagner (and hence his understanding of Gottfried), Malory, and Bédier (who also used Gottfried as one of his sources). Hence, it is nearly impossible to separate the reception of Gottfried’s version of the Tristan/Isolde legend from the modern use and treatment of the complete myth. In the following I will present an outline of the modern Tristan tradition in toto, but will stress the role of Gottfried’s romance and its reception in German-speaking areas. There are a great many sources about the modern reception of the Tristan legend, on which this chapter is based and to which readers are referred for more information. On the Tristan versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the minor ones, information can be found in earlier monographs (Golther, Dufhus, and Heimann), as well as in recent books and articles about the German reception (Geerdts, Batts, Schwarz, Poletti, Grill, and W. Hoffmann). Modern English and American Tristan versions in the context of the Arthurian legend are presented and discussed by Beverly Taylor and Elizabeth Brewer and by Raymond H. Thompson (see also Halperin, Wolff, and Wangelin); the French reception is outlined by Linden. Grimbert’s introduction to the Casebook of Tristan and Isolde, in which she tries to cover all languages (with

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bibliography), is also very useful. Furthermore, the relevant entries in Lacy’s New Arthurian Encyclopedia offer specific information about most modern authors dealing with the legend. All relevant modern authors, especially in German, are listed in the exhaustive bibliography of Grosse and Rautenberg.

Before Wagner Many scholars and educated readers in German-speaking regions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found the story of Tristan and Isolde to be immoral and indecent. The founding fathers of the new academic discipline Germanistik, the Grimm brothers and Karl Lachmann, did not like Gottfried von Strassburg’s medieval story, calling it “soft and immoral,” and full of “voluptuousness” and “blasphemy” (Lachmann). This scathing review sets the tone for many later critical appraisals. More than a century later, Gottfried Weber wrote of “Gottfrieds ästhetische Opiumhöhle” (Gottfried’s aesthetic opium den; 1928, 206). However, romantic and post-romantic artists, and above all musicians, did not agree with the scholars, but rather became ever more fascinated with the medieval legend and with Gottfried’s romance. There were early plans to produce works based on the Tristan legend by the German authors and artists August Wilhelm Schlegel (“Rittergedicht,” 1801), Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (1804), August von Platen (1825–1827), and Friedrich Rückert (“Jung Tristan,” 1839), but only unrealized drafts and fragments have remained. A poem by von Platen, “Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen / ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben,” is still well known today. The poem emphasizes the union of love and death, but only its title, “Tristan,” alludes to the medieval story. A large fragment of a lyrical cycle titled Tristan und Isolde: Ein Gedicht in Romanzen (Düsseldorf: J. Schaub, 1841), written by Karl Immermann, the author of the play Merlin (1832), was published posthumously. Immermann presents a versified retelling in stanzas of the first part of the medieval myth, sometimes with subtle irony (see Szymanzig). Some years later, Matthew Arnold published a verse modernization, Tristram and Iseult (London 1852). Using Malory as a source, this first modern re-telling in English combined the legends of Tristan and Merlin. Theater plays dealing with the Tristan legend written by Friedrich Roeber (Tristan und Isolde: Eine Tragödie in Arabesken [Elberfeld/Leipzig: J. Bädeker, 1838, revised 1898]); and Josef von Weilen (Tristan: Romantische Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen [Vienna: C. Überreiter, 1858]) had little success, and were soon completely forgotten.

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The first modern composer of whose interest in the Tristan legend we are aware was Robert Schumann (1810–56). Schumann planned for several “medieval operas” about the Wartburgkrieg, the Nibelungs, King Arthur and Lohengrin, and Tristan and Isolde. Unlike Richard Wagner, who occupied himself with the same medieval sources at nearly the same time, Schumann’s operatic plans did not result in a single note, despite the fact that the painter and writer Robert Reinick conceived a prose draft for Schumann in 1846 of an opera in five acts telling the story of Tristan and the ‘First Isolde’ (see Schnapp).

Richard Wagner We do not know which were the exact sources for the above-mentioned writers and artists, but we know for sure that Richard Wagner (1813–83) was inspired by Gottfried for his “Musikdrama” Tristan und Isolde (as he was by Wolfram von Eschenbach for Parsifal). Wagner possessed the Gottfried editions of von der Hagen and Massmann and the translation of Kurtz in his library in Dresden, which he had to leave behind in 1849 as a fugitive after the unsuccessful revolution (see von Westernhagen) and which has been in the Wagner Archives in Bayreuth since 1971. Elsewhere I have drawn attention to how Wagner used and transformed his medieval sources in the composition of his operas (see Hasty ed., 248–54). By radically reducing the scale of the medieval works in operas such as Parsifal and Tristan, and by concentrating the action in a few crucial events, Wagner was convinced that he alone was presenting the real and genuine meaning of the medieval stories, which he considered had been misunderstood and corrupted by Wolfram and Gottfried. Of course, Wagner’s interpretation of his material was in many ways unique, and in other ways it was shaped by the political and social currents of his time. Like every author who retells a traditional story, Wagner accomplished this in his own distinctive way. In Tristan und Isolde Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried’s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love are censored, repressed, and finally defeated by the structure and rules of the society in which they are living, which is to say feudal society. Wagner’s version on the other hand strives to demonstrate that love per se cannot be fulfilled perfectly within the limits of the world, but only by escaping to the other world, to the mystical night, to nirvana. Among the vast number of books and articles of varying quality written about Wagner and his operas, the essay by Thomas Mann (“Lei-

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den und Größe Richard Wagners,” 1933) is still a treasure of insights. Mann outlines the biographical and especially psychological context of Wagner’s operas, and avoids any nationalistic interpretation. More recent monographs worthy of mention are those of Peter Wapnewski, Dieter Borchmeyer, and Doris Rosenband, as well as the relevant articles and chapters of the Wagner Handbook (ed. Müller and Wapnewski) and the Wagner Compendium (ed. Millington). Wagner’s drama and music are difficult material, demanding for musicians and singers (see Brown), for opera fans, and for scholars. Unlike the situation with other Wagner operas, there was no political discussion about Tristan und Isolde. The well-documented and often-discussed antisemitism of Wagner seemed here to be irrelevant, at least until the 1992 assessment of Paul Lawrence Rose, whom Anthony Suter recently called “perverse enough to see Tristan und Isolde as Anti-Semitic” (Suter 4). Wagner used only the first part of the medieval Tristan legend, omitting the story of the second Isolde. It is well known that his main source was Gottfried von Strassburg, but he was also influenced by contemporary scholarly interpretations of Gottfried’s romance. As already suggested, Wagner radically reduced the scale of the medieval romance, as he transformed the story into a drama with three acts — Wagner himself called it a “Handlung in drei Akten” (action in three acts). The duration is approximately four hours — without intermissions — and little action occurs on the stage. Nearly the entire drama consists of lengthy narrations of past events and dialogues, and in large parts of the drama, as the popular saying goes, “nothing happens.” Important parts of the story are not actually played out on the stage, and audiences used to “normal” operatic action and easily digestible melodies and arias might be tempted to find Tristan und Isolde tedious if not dull. Each of the three acts has a dominating theme: the first, love potion (Liebestrank); the second, love night (Liebesnacht); and the third, lovedeath (Liebestod). The first act takes place aboard the ship on which Tristan escorts Isolde, the future wife of his uncle and king, Marke, from Ireland to Cornwall. In loose variations of Gottfried’s version, Isolde’s mother has given her daughter several magic potions, and the younger Isolde is infuriated by Tristan’s behavior because she loves him but is unsure whether he loves her in return. She chooses the death potion for both of them to solve this apparently unsolvable problem, but her servant Brangäne decides to switch the potions, so Isolde and Tristan drink a love potion instead. Awaiting the death they believe is coming, they confess their mutual love. Later, Tristan is forced to turn over his beloved to his uncle Marke to marry.

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Thus, in Wagner’s version, the meaning of the love potion has been changed fundamentally. It is not something magic, but rather a psychological device that forces the disclosure of mutual love. The new Wagnerian conception of the love potion was insightfully articulated by Thomas Mann: Die Umdeutung des naiv-epischen Zaubermotivs des ‘Liebestrankes’ in ein bloßes Mittel, eine schon bestehende Leidenschaft freizumachen — in Wirklichkeit könnte es reines Wasser sein, was die Liebenden trinken, und nur ihr Glauben, den Tod getrunken zu haben, löst sie seelisch aus dem Sittengesetz des Tages — ist die dichterische Idee eines großen Psychologen. (369) (The transformation of the naive, epic, magical motif of the love potion into merely a device that liberates an already existing passion — in reality it could be pure water that the lovers drink, and only their belief that they have drunk of death frees them from moral laws — is the poetic idea of a great psychologist.)

The second act can be described as an extended alba or tageliet (see Wapnewski 1978). Isolde and Tristan meet secretly at night in an orchard, protected by Brangäne acting as a guard. Their love duet, a nearly never-ending declaration of the metaphysics of love, becomes more and more ecstatic. The climax of the passionate love scene is also its finale: Melot, Tristan’s malicious comrade, has betrayed him and informed King Marke about everything. Marke catches the lovers, but he is unable to comprehend how their love and disloyalty could have come about, and the lovers do not explain themselves or their feelings to him. In the end, Tristan provokes a fight with Melot and causes himself to be severely wounded by throwing himself on Melot’s sword. The third and final act takes place at Tristan’s castle in France. Fatally wounded, Tristan is fervently longing for Isolde. Only she can save him, and his companion Kurwenal had sent a message to Cornwall urgently asking her to come. When Isolde finally arrives by ship and Tristan hears her voice, he is so ecstatically moved that he dies in Isolde’s arms. At this point his beloved Isolde also begins to withdraw from the world and from life. She notices nothing around her anymore besides her dead lover, and she dies next to him, somewhat like a holy martyr departing from this world. In the meantime Marke arrives with a second ship. Brangäne has informed him about the love potion, and he believes he understands everything now, but it is too late for the two lovers, who have made their decision to pass beyond into the “eternal night,” into a blissful nirvana.

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Wagner’s musical conception was nothing less than revolutionary, going to the extreme musical frontiers of his time. The opera, written and composed between 1857 and 1859 in Zurich, Venice, and Lucerne, is musically integrated, or durchkomponiert, with only some parts that are reminiscent of traditional operatic structures like arias and duets. The musical composition is characterized by chromaticism, tonal interlacing, and sophisticated instrumentation that is able to express subtle psychological conditions and erotic passion with an unprecedented intensity. In his composition Wagner comes very close to the atonality used by the Neue Wiener Schule, especially Arnold Schönberg. Not only tonality, but also traditional musical measures are dissolved in Tristan’s death scene. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is one of the great achievements in the history of music and theater. The libretto is sometimes ridiculed for its grandiose style, but, of course, it is not meant to be read by itself, but rather heard as carried by the music. The only authentic form of existence of an opera, above all of a Wagner opera, is as a congruent combination of words and music, and these correspond brilliantly in Tristan und Isolde. While composing this opera Wagner was influenced by Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (1799), which blended love, night, and death, and by the pessimistic and world-denying philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (particularly Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1809), which stressed that life unavoidably means suffering. Also very important was Wagner’s private entanglement and affair with Matilde Wesendonk, wife of his sponsor, the Zurich banker Otto Wesendonk. The result of these various intellectual, poetic, and personal experiences was an opera that represents an unprecedented exploration of the mystical and metaphysical dimensions of love. For many years Wagner’s opera was declared too difficult to be staged and performed. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was like a guardian angel for Wagner in times of financial difficulty, finally made performances possible. On June 10, 1865, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had its premiere at the Royal Court and National Opera in Munich, and on this day a new era of musical history began. The musical and dramatic effects of this work were profound, and, since then, they have often compared to the effect of a narcotic. Late Romanticism and Decadence throughout Europe were influenced by it, above all in France and Italy (Gabriele d’Annunzio; Ettore Moschino’s “Tristano e Isolde” [1910]; see Koppen). Until today, a production of Wagner’s Tristan involves a demanding effort even for a leading opera house.

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The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Besides Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, there were only rare efforts to produce new works of literature or music dealing with the Tristan story. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Tristan dramas included Ludwig Schneegans’ Tristan: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen mit einem Vorspiel (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1865), Carl Robert’s Tristan und Isolde: Drama in fünf Akten (Berlin: W. Müller, 1866), Albert Gehrke’s Isolde, Tragödie in drei Akten (Berlin: L. Heimann, 1869), Adolf Bessel’s Tristan und Isolde: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Kiel: Lipsius & Tischer, 1895), and Ernst Eberhard’s Tristan und Isolde: Drama in fünf Akten nach Gottfrieds von Straßburg gleichnamigem Gedicht (Berlin: F. Schneider, 1898), none of which experienced much success (see the studies of Poletti and Grill, with reprinted excerpts of these dramas). Only in England, with its own Arthurian tradition stemming from Malory, did some innovative poetic achievements occur, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Last Tournament (1872), and Algernon Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) and Queen Iseult (six cantos, unfinished — see Harrison). In England, the medieval story of Tristan and Isolde was important for Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite artists and painters who placed it in the Arthurian framework (see the article of Poulsen in Grimbert ed., and Mancoff). At Neuschwanstein, one of the models for Disney’s “magic castles,” the bed chamber of the Bavarian King Ludwig II is decorated with paintings depicting the Tristan legend created by August Spieß in 1880, the sources of which were the romances of Gottfried and Eilhart von Oberge. In these paintings a young woman is depicted reading Gottfried’s romance, of which verses 218–21 are explicitly shown (see Mück). The modern reception of the medieval Tristan story took a significant step at the turn of the century with the publication of Le roman de Tristan et Iseult (Paris: H. Piazza, 1900), a reconstruction of the complete legend by the leading French philologist Joseph Bédier, which was explicitly conceived to challenge Wagner’s influential version. Among other sources, Bédier used the Middle High German romance of Gottfried and particularly that of Eilhart. But Bédier’s version of Isolde and Tristan’s journey from Ireland to Cornwall clearly shows that even he could not avoid Wagner’s influence. As in Wagner’s opera, Bedier’s Isolde, already in love with Tristan, feels neglected by him. Bédier’s book, which was translated into many languages (into English by Hilaire Belloc in 1903; into German by Rudolf G. Binding in 1911, among

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others), has remained very popular. More than half a million copies of the original French version have been sold since its appearance in 1900. In view of this, it may not be surprising that Bédier’s reconstructed story has been so influential and that it has often been treated as if it were the definitive version of the Tristan story. A few years later, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) wrote his novella Tristan (1903), a parody of Wagner’s conception of Tristan-love, which is situated not in the Middle Ages, but in Mann’s own era. The fervent passion of Wagner’s couple here becomes a bourgeois exaltation that is ironically depicted by the author. Only a few specialists know that Mann also planned a Tristan film in 1923, using Gottfried as the main source. Only a short draft of his plan for the film remains. Other authors tried new interpretations of the old legend, independent from Wagner, using the “Second Isolde” or King Marke as their point of view. Some German dramatists, using mostly Gottfried and his continuators as sources, experienced some success. Ernst Hardt’s Tantris der Narr: Drama in 5 Akten (Leipzig: Insel, 1907) was translated by John Heard Jr. (Tristram the Jester 1913/1936). Later Heard composed the poem “The Marriage of Tristram” in 1942. Georg Kaiser’s König Hahnrei (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1908) was first produced in 1918, and Eduard Stucken wrote Tristram und Ysolt: Ein Drama in fünf Akten (Berlin: Reiss, 1916), as part of a dramatic Grail cycle produced between 1901 and 1924. The titles of the plays of other dramatists who had less success often indicate their special points of view: Emil Ludwig’s Tristan und Isolde: Dramatische Rhapsodie (Berlin: Österheld, 1909), Friedrich Huch’s Tristan und Isolde (1911), Carl Albrecht Bernoulli’s Die beiden Isolden (Bern: Schweighauser, 1915) and Tristans Ehe: Ein amerikanisches Drama in fünf Akten (Leipzig: Reclam, 1927), Marie Itzerott’s Die Weißhand: Ein dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Akten (Oldenburg/Leipzig: Schulze, 1916), Hermann Heubner’s König Marke: Schauspiel in fünf Akten (Berlin: Juncker, 1918), Maja Loehr’s Tristans Tod: Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen (Vienna: Heller, 1919), and Albert Erk’s Isolt Weißhand (Birkenfeld a.d. Nahe: Fillmann, 1921). For details about these dramas see Schwarz, Poletti, and Lacy. A version of the Tristan story in German prose that was quite successful was Will Vesper’s Tristan und Isolde (Ebenhausen bei München: Langewiesche-Brandt, 1911). Other noteworthy non-dramatic versions were Max Geissler’s stanzaic Das Tristanlied (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1911), Hans Waldemar Fischer’s Tristan und Isolde: Der große Roman von Liebe und Tod: Neuerzählt (Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1932), and Friedrich Schreyvogel’s Tristan und Isolde: Roman (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1930). It was even thought that a version of the

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Tristan story would be good for young soldiers fighting for the Reich, hence Edith Jansen-Runge’s Isolde und Tristan, Geschichte einer jungen Liebe — Feldpost-Ausgabe (Berlin/Bodenhausen-Bennhausen: Fackelträger, 1943). Some of the noteworthy versions in English-speaking lands were Thomas Hardy’s The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonesse (1923) — see Clark/Wasserman), and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Tristram” (1927). There were several English dramas about Tristan and Isolde that were influential in modern Arthurian literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as J. Comyns Carr’s Tristram and Iseult (1906), Thomas Herbert Lee’s The Marriage of Iseult (1909), Martha Kinross’s Tristram and Isoult (1913), Arthur Symons’ Tristan and Iseult (1917) — which was inspired by Wagner, and John Masefield’s Tristan and Isolt (1927). Three Tristan plays were also written in the United States: Louis K. Anspacher’s Tristan and Isolde (1904), Don Marquis’s Out of the Sea (1927), and Amory Hare’s Tristram and Iseult (1930) (see Lupack 1992, and Lupack and Lupack 1999: 107–9). Most of these dramatists used Bédier’s version as their main source.

1940 to the Present He died as Tristan, not as Don Juan Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Two important interpretations of the medieval legend were published around 1940, both of them by Swiss authors: Denis de Rougemont’s monograph L’amour et l’occident (1939), and Frank Martin’s “chamber oratorio” Le vin herbé. Rougemont’s book, an academic interpretation in the form of a lengthy essay, remains influential today, above all for writers. Few believe that Rougemont was right when he connected medieval courtly love with the religious ideas of the Cathars in the south of present-day France, but another idea of his work has remained important for many readers: the medieval story of Tristan reveals a distinctly European fixation, namely an obsessive desire for love and passion that lead, ultimately, to self-destruction. Frank Martin (1890–1974) was the only composer who succeeded in writing a piece of musical theater that could stand up to Wagner’s opera, at least to some degree: Le vin herbé (“The Poisoned Wine,” i.e. the “love potion”; see Müller 1982), which was commissioned by Robert Blum, a Zurich composer and conductor. Martin was asked to write it

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for Blum’s Madrigal Choir in Zurich, and he received specific instructions regarding the singers and the instruments. The complete title of Martin’s chamber oratorio reads: Le vin herbé, 3 chapitres du roman de tristan et iseult de joseph bédier pour 12 voix mixtes, 7 instruments à cordes et piano (“The Poisoned Wine, according to Three Chapters of the Novel Tristan and Iseult by Joseph Bédier for Twelve Voices, Seven String Instruments, and Piano”). A first version premiered in 1940, and an extended one in 1942, both produced by Blum’s choir in Zurich and conducted by Blum. A scenic version, an opera-like production, was staged for the first time in 1948 at the Salzburg Festival. The longer version of Martin’s oratorio consists of three parts: “Le vin herbé” (The Poisoned Wine), “Le forêt du Morois” (The Wood of Morois), and “La mort” (Death), a structure that is strikingly similar to Wagner’s opera. The twelve voices sing the whole text taken from Bédier’s roman, using the style of a madrigal, singing the narration as well as the monologues and dialogues in the same way. The musical structure, conceived for a small chamber orchestra, is delicate and subtle, but nevertheless contains dramatic and expressive accentuations that again remind listeners of Wagner. The oratorio, of which recordings are available, has been produced from time to time, but not nearly as universally or as often as Wagner’s opera. Since 1938 there has been a great number of new interpretations, modernizations, and re-tellings of the medieval Tristan story, some of them (especially the German ones) explicitly using Gottfried’s romance as a source. An exhaustive list covering the period 1945–95, at least for the English-, French-, and German-speaking areas, can be found in Müller/Springeth. In Italy, Spain, and Portugal, no important new versions of the legend seemed to have been conceived (the Portuguese version of the legend, by the way, is the historical story of Ines de Castro — see Müller/Pöckl/Springeth). Besides new translations of older works into modern English, French, German, Italian and even Japanese (see Müller 1988, Grosse and Rautenberg 22 and 31–37), many writers conceived modern novels and retellings of the medieval story: Rosemary Sutcliff’s Tristan and Iseult (London: The Bodely Head, 1971) — without a love potion, Pierre Champion’s Roman de Tristan et Yseut (1947/1979), Pierre d’Espezel’s Tristan et Iseut, renouvelé d’après les manuscrits [. . .] (Paris: Union latine d’éditions, 1965), René Louis’s Tristan et Iseult: Renouvelé en français moderne (Paris: Livre de poche, 1972), Michel Cazenave’s Tristan et Iseut (1985), Walter Widmer’s Tristan und Isolde: Ein Roman von Liebe und Treue, Leid und Tod — Nach den alten Quellen neu erzählt (Zurich:

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Classen, 1946), Ruth Schirmer’s Der Roman von Tristan und Isolde: Den alten Quellen nacherzählt (Zurich: Manesse, 1969), and the East German author Günter de Bruyn’s Tristan und Isolde: Nach Gottfried von Straßburg neu erzählt (Berlin (East): Neues Leben, 1975 — see the study of Stein). Among Tristan novels are Hannah Closs’s Tristan: A Novel (London, 1940), Anna Taylor’s Drustan the Wanderer: A Historical Novel Based on the Legend of Tristan and Yseult (London, 1971), Diana L. Paxson’s The White Raven (New York: Morrow, 1988), and Wilhelm Kubie’s Mummenschanz auf Tintagel: Unpathetischer Roman über König Arthur und seine Tafelrunde, Tristan und Isolde, Lancelot und Winniwe [. . .] (Linz/Vienna: Österreichischer Verlag für Belletristik und Wissenschaft, 1946; abridged version 1937). Kubie’s Mummenschanz is the most astonishing fantasy novel in German and tells the whole Arthurian legend in a farcical manner through the eyes of Bedivir, who is a friend of King Marke (see the study of Schmidt, which includes a reprint of the novel). The legend of Tristan and Isolde is used in a humorous way by Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler in Merlin, oder Das wüste Land (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), in which Arthur’s wife, Ginevra, and Isolde exchange letters discussing their lovers. This long theater play is one of the outstanding dramatic events in German-speaking regions in recent decades (see Dorst/Ehler, 2001, 4 CDs: Munich, 1995). Beyond this, there are two funny, or rather sarcastic dramatizations in Germany: Ingomar (von) Kieseritzky and Karin Bellingkrodt’s Tristan und Isolde im Wald von Morois, oder Der zerstreute Diskurs (Graz: Drischl, 1987), primarily conceived for radio, but later also staged, demonstrates that life in splendid isolation (the woods of Morois) is unbearable, even for the most fervent lovers. Whereas Kieseritzky and Bellingkrodt modernize the medieval story (see Müller/Springeth, 2000), the feminist writer Esther Vilar’s Stundenplan einer Rache: Bühnenstück nach Richard Wagner (Munich: Lauke, 1990) ridicules Wagner’s opera. A rather enigmatic use of the medieval story is made by the Swiss Hanno Helbling in Tristans Liebe: Abendstücke (Munich/Zurich: Piper, 1991), and by G. M. Th. Stelly in Tristan in New York: Traumbuch einer Reise ins Herz (Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1993 — see W. Hoffmann 439, footnote 28). The Austrian Norbert Silberbauer’s ironical short story “Tristan & Veronika, Franz und Isolde,” published in a 1992 special issue of the literary magazine Erostepost, again transfers the plot to our times and begins with an explicit citation of some verses of Gottfried. The author Gottfried von Strassburg is at the center of Bruno Gloger’s Dietrich: Vermutungen um Gottfried von Straßburg (Berlin (East): Un-

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ion, 1976). The protagonists of Gloger’s novel, which was published in the former German Democratic Republic, try to reconstruct the life of Gottfried and the circumstances of his writing. Several writers have used the medieval story as a background, above all James Joyce in his puzzling and difficult novel Finnegan’s Wake (London/New York, 1939). The novel’s protagonist is H. C. Earwicker, the middle-aged owner of a pub in Dublin, whose own mental processes and sexual desire have been shaped by Tristan’s love for Isolde (Taylor/Brewer 268 and Hayman). Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Tristan (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1967; English translation New York: Braziller, 1974) tells the love story of a Polish partisan. The Czech writer Jiri Marek transfers the old story to Prague, quoting Gottfried’s verses 11983f. as a motto: Tristan aneb O lásce (“Tristan, or about Love” [Praha: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel 1985; German translation: Berlin (East): Volk und Welt, 1987]). Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier locate their novel Castle Dor (New York: Doubleday, 1961) at Castle Dor in modern Cornwall, perhaps the historical site of Mark’s fortress. John Updike’s novel, Brazil (New York/London: Knopf/Hamilton, 1994), ridiculed as “soft porn” by the German reviewer Elke Schmitter (Die Zeit, 7.2.1996, 51), situates it in contemporary Brazil. Transformed into a woman, Tristan even makes a surprise appearance in a science-fiction comic strip (Camelot 2000). Raja Rao, one of the leading Anglo-Indian writers, used the medieval legend in a striking way in the novel The Serpent and the Rope (London: Murray, 1960) by blending Indian and European myths, especially from the “Middle Ages” (the Grail, Tristan and Isolde), in the depiction of a Hindu scholar wandering between India and Europe, and between two women (see McDonald/Müller, 1986–87, and Müller, 1999). Sometimes modern novels about triangular love have been connected by readers and scholars more or less convincingly with the Tristan story. Batts’s suggestion in 1969 that Hans Erich Nossack’s novel Spätestens im November: Roman (Berlin, 1955) is based on the medieval story is questionable. However, readers who identified an explicit Tristan background in Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), or A. S. Byatt’s Possession (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), are probably right. We should be cautious in any event, for not all stories of passionate love involving a triangular relationship are necessarily modern versions of the story of Tristan and Isolde, or the “éternel retour” of one of most famous love stories of European literature. And even if it is clear that the medieval story is being used, we seldom know exactly which sources have been employed by the author: Gottfried, Eilhart, the French verse or

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prose “Tristans,” Malory, Wagner, Bédier, or, probably in many or most cases, a combination of all. The finale of this survey should be a musical one. After Wagner, and besides Frank Martin, there were only two more remarkable recreations of the medieval story by means of modern music: Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan. prelude für klavier, tonbänder und orchester (1973), a highly expressive orchestral montage using the medieval Lamento di Tristano, music by Brahms, Chopin, and Wagner, and the last verses of the fragments of Thomas de Bretagne (in an English translation). The second is an oratorio by the Swiss composer Armin Schibler, La Folie de Tristan: mystère musicale pour chanteurs et récitants, orchestre, choeur mixte, groupe Jazz-rock et bande électronique d’après Marie de France, ‘Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut,’ renouvelé par Joseph Bédier et ‘Das Unverlierbare’ d’Armin Schibler (text published in Arnim Schibler, Antoine und die Trompete: Texte 75–81, Adliswil/Lottstetten: Kunzelmann, 1982). A “folk-opera,” Trystan and Essylt, conceived and produced by Timothy Porter (Bristol, 1980), is of regional significance. The author specialized in Celtic studies, and his ensemble, “Green Branch” stresses the Celtic roots of the Tristan story (see Müller 1981).

Tristan and Isolde in Film French directors have been foremost in the making of films about Tristan and Isolde. The earliest Tristan films were made in France (all called Tristan et Yseult: 1909, 1911, 1920: see Harty 1999b). French directors also conceived the most extravagant Tristan films (see Grimbert ed., and Harty 1991 and 1999a), among which is Jean Delannoy’s L’Eternel Retour of 1943 (screenplay by Jean Cocteau), which transferred the story to a French provincial town in the 1940s. This outstanding movie, produced in black-and-white and starring Jean Marais and Madeleine Sologne, has achieved the status of a cult film. On the other hand, Yvan Lagrange’s Tristan et Iseult (1972) realizes a powerful visualization of the story that is nearly without dialogue. Lagrange’s film was produced in Morocco and Iceland, stars the director himself and his wife, and is distinguished by its colorful choreography (see Paquette’s article in Buschinger ed., 1982, 319–25). Less well known are films from Denmark and Iceland: Isolde (Denmark 1989, directed by Jytte Rex), and I Skugga Hrafsina (In the Shadow of the Raven, Iceland 1988, directed by Hrafn Gunnlugsson; see Harty 1999b). An 1979 Irish movie entitled Lovespell (1979, also sometimes entitled Tristan and Isolt) and directed

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by Tom Donovan was conceived with much sympathy for King Mark, a role that was played by Richard Burton. The first significant German fantasy movie, Feuer und Schwert, was created by Veith von Fürstenberg in 1981. Harty calls this film “the most faithful film version of the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde” (1999b, 181–82). Although an effective and at least partly accurate rendition, this romantic movie experienced little success (see Kerdelhue’s article in Buschinger ed., 1987). Tristan und Isolde, a two-part film for television made in 1998 (a co-production of Italy, France, and Germany directed by Fabrizio Costa) was more faithful to the medieval legend, but it was of inferior quality. Finally, two more films should be mentioned in which some scholars have detect the influence of the Tristan story: François Truffaut’s 1981 film La Femme d’à-côté (see Grimbert’s article in Harty 1999a, 183–201), and Luis Buñuel’s Tristana (1970), though no references to the medieval story can be found in Buñuel’s movie or in his source, a 1892 Spanish novel by Benito Pérez Galdós (the titles of the novel and the film designate simply “something triste,” without any allusion to the Tristan story).

A final question — “quasi una coda” Ich weiz wol, ir ist vil gewesen, die von Tristande hânt gelesen; und ist ir doch nicht vil gewesen, die von im rehte haben gelesen. (130–34) (I know that there have been many people who read about Tristan; but there are not many who read about him in the right way.)

Was Gottfried right or was he wrong?

Works Cited Batts, Michael S. (1969). “Tristan and Isolde in Modern Literature: L’éternel retour.” Seminar 5: 79–91. Reprinted in Grimbert ed., 1995. Borchmeyer, Dieter (1982). Das Theater Richard Wagners: Idee — Dichtung — Wirkung. Stuttgart: Reclam. Brown, Jonathan (2000). ‘Tristan and Isolde’ on Record: A Comprehensive Discography of Wagner’s Music Drama with a Critical Introduction to the Recordings. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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Maddux, Stephen. “Cocteau’s Tristan and Iseut: A Case of Overmuch Respect.” Grimbert, ed., 1995. Mancoff, Debra N. (1990). The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. New York: Garland. Mann, Thomas (1961). Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 9. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. McDonald, William C., and Ulrich Müller (1986–87). “Tristan in DeepStructure: Raja Rajo’s ‘The Serpent and the Rope’ (1960), a Paradigmatic Case of Intercultural Relations.” Tristania 12: 44–47. Mück, Hans-Dieter (1982). “Das historisierende Mittelalterbild Ludwigs II. Die Entwicklung Neuschwansteins von der Burg Lohengrins und Tannhäusers zum Gralstempel Parzivals.” Mittelalter-Rezeption II: Gesammelte Vorträge des 2. Salzburger Symposions. Ed. Hans-Dieter Mück et al. Göppingen: Kümmerle. 195–246. Müller, Ulrich (1981). “Mittelalterliche Dichtungen in der Musik des 20.Jahrhunderts IV: ‘Trystan and Essylt’ von Timothy Porter (1980).” Romanisches Mittelalter: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Rudolf Baehr. Ed. Dieter Messner and Wolfgang Pöckl, with Angela Birner. Göppingen: Kümmerle. 191–205. ———. (1982). “Mittelalterliche Dichtungen in der Musik des 20.Jahrhunderts III: Das Tristan-und-Isolde-Oratorium von Frank Martin (nach Joseph Bédier). Mit einem Ausblick auf die Tristan-Komposition von Hans-Werner Henze.” Tradition und Entwicklung: Festschrift für Eugen Thurnher. Ed. Werner Bauer et al. Innsbruck: Germanistisches Institut der Universität. 171– 86. ———. (1988). “The Myth Around Tristan and Ysolt: Translations and Adaptations.” Literature in Translation: From Cultural Transference to Metonymic Displacement. Eds. Pramod Talgeri / S. B. Verma. Bombay: Popular Prakashan: 194–204. Müller, Ulrich, Wolfgang Pöckl, and Margarete Springeth (1998). “D. Inês de Castro (+1355) und D. Pedro, König von Portugal (+1367). Dokumente und Erläuterungen zur einer historischen Liebesgeschichte des 14.Jahrhunderts und zu ihrer Mythisierung.” Chevaliers errants, demoiselles et l’Autre: höfische und nachhöfische Literatur im europäischen Mittelalter: Festschrift für Xenja von Ertzdorff zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Trude Ehlert. Göppingen: Kümmerle. 257–89. Müller, Ulrich (1999). “Ein indischer Tristan: Der europäische Mythos von Tristan und Isolde im modernen anglo-indischen Roman: Raja Rao’s ‘The Serpent and the Rope’” (1960). Tristan und Isolt im Spätmittelalter. Eds. Xenja von Ertzdorff and Rudolf Schulz. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Chloe. Beihefte zum Daphnis, 29): 517–38.

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Contributors MICHAEL S. BATTS is Professor Emeritus of German Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is author of numerous books and articles on medieval German literature and German literary history, including Gottfried von Strassburg (1971) and A History of Histories of German Literature (1987). DANIELLE BUSCHINGER is Professor of German Studies at the University of Picardie Jules Verne. She is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with Gottfried’s Tristan and medieval German literature, and editor/translator (with Wolfrang Spiewok) of Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant (1993). MARION GIBBS is Emeritus Reader in German Language and Literature at the University of London, after having taught for many years at Royal Holloway College. She is author of numerous books and articles on medieval German literature, including (with Sidney Johnson) Medieval German Literature: A Companion (1997; repr. 2001). Also with Sidney Johnson, she has translated Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm. NIGEL HARRIS is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is author of The Latin and German ‘Etymachia’: Textual History, Edition, Commentary and numerous essays on medieval German literature. WILL HASTY is Professor of German Studies at the University of Florida. He is author of a number of books and articles on medieval German literature, and editor of A Companion to Wolfram’s ‘Parzival’ (Camden House, 1998). SIDNEY M. JOHNSON is Professor Emeritus of German Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is author of numerous books and articles on medieval German literature, including (with Marion Gibbs) Medieval German Literature: A Companion (1997; repr. 2001). He has also translated Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm (also with Marion Gibbs). ULRICH MÜLLER is Professor at the University of Salzburg. He is author of numerous books, editions, and articles on medieval German literature and its modern reception; co-editor (with Peter Wapnewski) of the

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Richard-Wagner-Handbuch (1986; translated as the Wagner Handbook, 1992). ANN MARIE RASMUSSEN is Associate Professor of German Studies at Duke University. She is author of Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature (1997) and co-editor (with Anne L. Klinck) of Medieval Women’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches (2002). She is currently working on a study of fifteenth-century German literature. DANIEL ROCHER is Professor Emeritus of German Studies, University of Strasbourg. He is author of Thomasin von Zerklaere: Der Walsche Gast and numerous chapters and essays on Gottfried von Strassburg and medieval German literature. ADRIAN STEVENS is Senior Lecturer in German at University College London. He is author of numerous articles, and editor of numerous volumes of essays on medieval and modern German literature, including (with Roy Wisbey) Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend (1990). He is currently working on a book titled Thomas, Gottfried and the Writing of the Tristan Romance. NEIL THOMAS is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Durham, UK. He is author of numerous books and essays on medieval German literature, including The Defence of Camelot (1992), Reading the ‘Nibelungenlied’ (1995), and ‘Diu Crone’ and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle (2002). ALOIS WOLF is Professor Emeritus of German Studies at the University of Freiburg. He is author of numerous books, editions, and articles on medieval German literature, including Gottfried von Strassburg und die Mythe von Tristan und Isolde (1989).

Index Abelard, 24, 37, 40, 132 Achtnich, Karl, 67 acrostic, 2, 3, 266, 274 Adam, 48, 51, 97, 129, 153, 175 Aelred of Rievaulx, 230, 253 Aeneas, 35, 205, 232–36, 251 Alan of Lille, 63–64 Albigensians, 61 Albion, 235 Allgaier, Klaus, 115, 125, 133 Alsace, 56–57, 60, 65, 67–69 Andreas Capellanus, 108, 161 Anselm of Laon, 231–32, 253 Anspacher, Louis K. (Tristan and Isolde), 294 aphrodisiac, 88–89 Apollo, 219 Aristoteles and Phyllis, 267–70, 282–83 von Arnim, Achim, 287 Arnold, Matthew (Tristram and Iseult), 287 Arnolf of Orleans, 198 Arthur (King), 26, 34, 51–52, 103, 108, 155–56, 190, 198– 200, 205, 224–26, 228, 230– 31, 234, 244–48, 250, 254–56, 279, 281, 283–88, 292, 294, 296, 301–2, 304, 306 assonance, 17, 215 Augustine, Augustinian, 33, 116, 233, 253 Barron, W. R. J., 230, 254–55 Baswell, Christopher, 231–32, 254

Batts, Michael, 4–5, 15, 18, 55– 67, 127, 133, 175, 180, 288, 297, 299, 305 Baumgartner, Dolores, 115, 133 Baumgartner, Emmanuèl, 224, 227 Bayer, Hans, 115, 133 de Beaujeu, Renaut (Le Bel Inconnu), 184 Bechstein, Reinhold, 4 Bédier, Joseph, 210, 229, 243, 254, 286, 292–95, 298, 300, 302 Beguines, 15, 61–63, 66, 68 Bekker, Hugo, 116, 118, 133 Belinus, 244–45 Bender, Ernst, 67 Benskin, Michael, 91, 109 Bernard of Clairvaux, 115, 125, 133 Bernardus Silvestris, 232 Bernoulli, Carl Albrecht (Die beiden Isolden; Tristans Ehe: Ein amerikanisches Drama in fünf Aktene), 293 Béroul, 6–8, 74, 90–92, 94–95, 109–10, 133, 175, 190, 192, 197, 208–10, 216, 220, 286 Bessel, Adolf (Tristan und Isolde: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen), 292 Biblis, 36, 236, 251–53 Blakeslee, Merritt, 224, 254 Blamires, Alcuin, 139, 152, 155 Blankeflur (Eilhart), 14 Blanscheflur, v, 16, 28–29, 35– 36, 73–86, 104–5, 117, 122, 128, 137, 139–41, 143, 155,

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169, 179, 207, 213–14, 216– 17, 219, 261, 268 Bligger von Steinach, 65, 219 Blodgett, E. D., 220 bloodletting episode, 7 Blum, Robert, 294–95 Blütezeit, 2, 8, 110, 256, 277 Boccaccio, 89 Bock, Hildegard, 67 Boethius, Boethian, 29, 52, 116 bold water episode, 185 de Boor, Helmut, 53, 100, 109, 114, 133–34, 273, 283 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 289, 299 Brackert, Helmut, 251–54, 265, 283 Brahms, Johannes, 298 Brangaene, 16, 28, 30–31, 41–42, 77, 94–97, 104, 118, 122, 129, 131, 137, 140, 142, 146–50, 152, 155–56, 174–77, 196, 213–14 Brangäne (Wagner), 289–90 Brangene (Béroul, Eilhart), 92, 94 Brault, G. J., 184–85, 199, 200 Brennius, 244–45 Brentano, Clemens, 287 Brewer, Elizabeth, 286, 297, 304 Briard, Jacques, 200 Bringvet (Robert), 93–94, 225 Bromiley, Geoffrey, 183, 200 Bromwich, Rachel, 184, 200 Brown, Jonathan, 289, 299 Brown, Margaret, 167, 180 Bruckner, Matilda, 227, 254, 304 de Bruyn, Günter (Tristan und Isolde), 296 Buñuel, Luis (Tristana), 299, 301 Burckhardt, Jakob, 231 Burns, E. Jane, 194, 200 Buschinger, Danielle, 16, 73–86, 92, 109, 256, 282, 298–300, 303, 305 Buttner, Heinrich, 67 Byatt, A. S. (Possession), 297

Caerleon, 119 Cahn, Julius, 67 Canace, 36, 236, 251–53 Carlisle fragment, 4, 76, 91, 110, 185, 199, 209, 214 Carpenter, Frederic Yves, 300 Carr, J. Comyns (Tristram and Iseult), 294 de Castro, Ines, 295 Cathars, Catharism, 14, 62, 115, 294 Cazenave, Michel (Tristan et Iseut), 295 Champion, Pierre (Roman de Tristan et Yseut), 295 Chanson de Roland, 205 Chertsey tiles, 20, 70, 183, 202, 258, 263 chiasm, 17, 77, 208, 215–17 Chinca, Marc, 3–4, 8, 18, 191, 200, 223, 232, 255–56, 281, 283 Chopin, Frederic, 298 Chrétien de Troyes, 9, 40, 52, 89, 102, 205–6, 212, 261 Christ, 4, 16, 56, 78, 119, 121, 124, 152–53, 159, 280–81 Christian, Christianity, 12, 15, 23–24, 37–38, 41, 46, 63–64, 79, 99, 113–15, 117, 122, 129, 130–31, 153, 159, 226, 235, 251, 281 Cicero, 23, 33 Clanchy, Michael, 40, 52 Clark, M. A., 300 Clark, Susan L., 294, 300 Classen, Albrecht, 175, 180, 196, 200, 300 Clausen, Ilse, 132–33 Cligès, 50, 52 Closs, Hannah (Tristan: A Novel), 296 Cocheyras, Jacques, 300 Cocteau, Jean, 299, 302

INDEX

Cohen, Albert (Belle du Seigneur), 297 Cole, William, 115, 133 Combridge, Rosemary, 240, 255 Comte de la Vergue de Tressans (Extraits de romans de chevalerie), 286 Constantine, 244–46 Corineus, 229, 235, 239, 251 Cornwall, 5, 73, 79, 82–84, 96, 107, 117–19, 121, 126, 131, 139, 142, 147, 153, 165, 167, 170, 172–74, 179, 184–85, 189–90, 194, 199, 206, 211, 214, 218, 227–29, 234–36, 238–40, 242–48, 250, 253, 289–90, 292, 294, 297 Curschmann, Michael, 183, 200 Curtis, Renée, 183, 199–200 Curtius, E. R., 15, 18, 180 Curvenal, 82, 121, 175, 180 Dallapiazza, Michael, 154–55 Dante, 15, 29, 75 David and Goliath, 119 Davies, Rees, 223, 255 Dayan, Joan, 151, 155 Dean, Christopher, 230, 255 Debouille, Maurice, 300 Decker, Frances, 180 Deighton, Alan, 263, 265, 269, 276, 278, 283 Deist, Rosemary, 152, 155 Delannoy, Jean (L’Eternel Retour), 298 Desmond, Marilynn, 233, 255 Dichterschau, 4, 32, 45–46, 54, 160, 221 Dickerson, Harold, 115, 125, 133 Dido, 35–36, 205, 213, 232–33, 236, 251–53, 255 Dietz, Reiner, 87, 99, 109, 113, 133 Dimler, G. Richard, 115, 133 Diu Crône, 184, 201

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Docen, Bernard, 13 Dollinger, Philippe, 67 Donovan, Tom (Lovespell), 299 Dorst, Tankred and Ursula Ehler (Merlin, oder das wüste Land), 296, 300 Douce (mansucript fragment of Thomas’s Tristran), 81, 83, 210 Dreyfus, François, 67 du Maurier, Daphne (Castle Dor), 297 Dublin, 39, 215, 217, 250, 297 Dufhus, E., 286, 300 Eberhard, Ernst (Tristan und Isolde: Drama in fünf Akten), 292 Echard, Siân, 224, 230, 255 Eco, Umberto, 165, 180 edele herzen, 3, 33, 41, 43, 51, 128, 154, 159, 187, 191, 211, 215, 220 Ehrismann, Gustav, 100 Ehrismann, Otfried, 104, 106, 108–9 Eilhart von Oberge, 6–8, 10, 13, 55, 73–75, 90–92, 94–95, 98, 109–10, 141, 164, 175, 185, 190, 192, 197, 208–10, 225, 275–76, 285, 292, 297 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 8 Elisabeth von Schönau, 64 Elm, Kaspar, 67 Erasmus, 24 Erbstösser, Martin, 67 Erk, Albert (Isolt Weißhand), 293 Ermoldus Nigellus, 56, 66 Eros, 25, 36, 43, 47–48, 52, 103, 110, 133, 221 Ertzdorff, Xenia von, 52, 111, 302 Esclados, 206 d’Espezel, Pierre (Tristan et Iseut, renouvelé), 295 Estoire, 6, 74, 90–91

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Eucharist, 34, 78–79, 127–29, 159, 191, 281 Eve, 48, 50–51, 97, 129, 137, 153–54 Ferrante, Joan, 135, 164, 169, 180, 189, 200 Fichte, Joerg, 230, 255 Fischer, Hans Waldemar (Tristan und Isolde: Der große Roman von Liebe und Tod), 293 Floraete, 117, 162–64, 179, 217 Foltz, Max, 67 Fowler, Don, 236, 255 Frederick I (Hohenstaufen), 56, 66 Freed, John, 67 Friedrich von Hausen, 35, 65, 102 Fritsch-Rössler, Waltraud, 300 Fromm, Hans, 37, 53, 132–33 Fructus, 43 Frühmorgen-Voss, Hella, 283 von Fürstenberg, Veith (Feuer und Schwert), 299 Furstner, H., 100–101, 109 Gahmuret, 76 Galdós, Benito Pérez, 299 Gallagher, Edward J., 300 Ganz, Peter, 44, 53, 102, 106, 109, 261–62, 283 Geerdts, Hans-Jürgen, 286, 300 Gehrke, Albert (Isolde, Tragodie in drei Akten), 292 Geil, Gerhild, 262, 283 Geissler, Max (Das Tristanlied), 293 Geistesgeschichte, 13 Genelun, 26 Genesis, 50 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 223–24, 228–31, 234–39, 242, 244, 253, 255–56

Gerald of Wales (Descriptio Kambriae), 230, 254 Gewehr, Wolf, 31, 53 Gibbs, Marion, 4, 10, 17, 261– 84, 305 Gilan, 226 Gilson, Etienne, 23, 53 Giot, Pierre-Roland, 184, 200 Giraldus of Aurillac, 25 Gley, Werner, 67 Gloger, Bruno (Dietrich: Vermutungen um Gottfried von Strassburg), 296–97 Gnaedinger, Louise, 220 Goerke, Hans, 115, 134 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 24, 200 Gogmagog, 234, 251 Golther, Wolfgang, 4, 286, 300 Gothic, 114–15, 160 Gottfried von Strassburg, v–vi, 1–19, 23, 25–38, 40–48, 50– 57, 61–66, 68–69, 73–83, 85– 92, 94–117, 119, 122, 124–25, 127–29, 131–39, 141–45, 148, 150, 153–57, 159–64, 169–71, 174–81, 183–85, 187, 190–91, 196–97, 199–201, 205–21, 223–25, 227–31, 233–40, 242–43, 246–56, 261–89, 292–93, 295–97, 299–300, 303, 305–6 Grabmüller, Klaus, 277, 283 Grasser, Jean-Paul, 67 Greece, Greek, 23, 39–40, 150, 232, 267 Green, D. H., 230 Green, Monika, 144, 155 Gregory VII, 61 Greven, Joseph, 67 Grill, Dorothea, 286, 292, 300 Grimbert, Joan, 156, 183, 200, 286, 292, 298–300, 302–3 Grimm brothers, 287 Groos, Arthur, 183, 200

INDEX

von Groote, Eberhard, 286 Grosse, Siegfried, 287, 295, 301 Grübel, Isabel, 67 Grundmann, Herbert, 67 Gunnlugsson, Hrafn (I Skugga Hrafsina), 298 Gurmun, 172, 218, 237–44, 247–48, 250 Gurmunt (Wace), 237–38, 240 von der Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich, 4, 286, 288 Hagenau, 56, 64–65 hagiography, 114 Hahn, Ingrid, 130, 134 Hall of Statues, 184, 197, 209 Hall, Clifton, 116, 130, 134 Halperin, Maurice, 286, 301 Hardt, Ernst (Tantris der Narr: Drama in fünf Akten), 293 Hardy, Thomas (The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonesse), 294, 300 Hare, Amory (Tristram and Iseult), 294 Harris, Nigel, 16, 113–32, 305 Harris, Sylvia, 184, 200 Harrison, Anthony H., 292, 301 Hartmann von Aue, 2–5, 34, 51, 135, 160, 198, 205–7, 212, 219–20, 264–65, 267 Harty, Kevin J., 298–99, 301 Hasty, Will, 1–18, 52, 85, 159– 80, 220, 288, 305 Hatto, A. T., 5, 16, 30, 52, 76, 86–87, 94, 100–102, 109–10, 119, 133, 143, 150, 155, 160, 180, 185, 187, 199, 273 Haug, Walter, 15, 18, 43, 53, 87, 91, 103–4, 107–8, 110, 123–24, 132, 134, 159, 181, 265, 283 Hayman, David, 297, 301 Heard, John (Tristan the Jester), 293

E 311

Hecker, Norbert, 67 Heimann, Ernst, 286, 301 Heinrich von Freiberg, 7, 10, 18, 262–63, 273–74, 277–82, 284, 286 Heinrich von Morungen, 268 Heinrich von Veldeke, 34–35, 219, 264 Heinze, Hartmut, 114, 134 Helbling, Hanno (Tristans Liebe), 296 Helen of Troy, 38–39, 46 Heloise, 37, 40 Henry II of England, 8, 90 Henry VI (Hohenstaufen), 56 Henze, Hans Werner (Tristan: prelude fur klavier, tonbänder und orchester), 298, 302 Herbert of Bosham, 63 Herrad of Landsberg, 64 Herzeloyde, 76 Heubner, Hermann (Konig Marke: Schauspiel in fünf Akten), 301 Hildegard von Bingen, 62–64 Hoeppfner, Ernest, 67 Hoffmann, Donald L., 301 Hoffmann, Werner, 286, 296, 301 Hofmann, Albert von, 67 Horace, 24 Horn, Hermann, 67 Huber, Christoph, 3, 5, 14, 18, 90–91, 110, 135, 220 humanism, v, 23–54, 68 hunt, hunting, 3, 123, 165, 192, 166–68, 279 Hunt, Tony, 109, 192, 200, 227, 255 huote (surveillance), 48, 50–51, 129, 137, 152–54, 157, 191, 267–68 I due Tristani, 285 Immermann, Karl (Tristan und Isolde: Ein Gedicht in Romanzen), 287

312 E

INDEX

Ingledew, Francis, 244, 255 Innocent III, 61 Ireland, 5–6, 36, 39, 46, 82–83, 93–94, 100, 108, 117, 150, 164, 170–72, 206, 214, 237– 44, 246–50, 289, 292 Irish seneschal, 137–38, 144–46, 149, 154 Irvine, Martin, 231, 255 Isalde, Isolde (Eilhart), 6, 75, 92, 94, 208, 209, 225 Iseut, Isolde, Yseut (Béroul), 7, 91–92, 94, 208, 225 Isolde (Queen of Ireland), 16, 28, 36–37, 94, 96, 118, 137–46, 152, 154–56, 171, 213 Isolde, Isolt, Isot, Ysolt, v–vi, 1, 4, 6–7, 16–18, 27–32, 34–40, 42, 44–48, 50–51, 53–55, 64, 73–85, 87, 90, 92–93, 94–105, 107, 109–11, 113–15, 117–31, 134, 136–37, 139–57, 159–60, 162, 169, 171–79, 181, 185– 92, 194–95, 197, 199–201, 206–8, 210, 212–19, 225–27, 236, 250–53, 265–66, 268, 272, 276, 279–81, 285–304 Isolde (Thomas), 75, 80–81, 83, 197, 226 Isolde White Hands, Ysolt as Blanches Mains, vi, 17, 28, 44– 45, 154, 184–201, 210, 273, 276, 279 Ísönd (Robert), 9, 19, 86, 91, 93–94, 225, 229, 254 Itzerott, Marie (Die Weißhand), 293 Jackson, W. T. H., 102–3, 110, 115, 128, 134, 159, 179–80, 189, 200 Jacobson, Evelyn, 115, 134, 160, 181

Jaeger, C. Stephen, 63, 68, 153– 54, 156, 167, 180, 221, 235, 255 Jakob Twinger von Konigshoven, 56 Jansen-Runge, Edith (Isolde und Tristan — Feldpost-Ausgabe), 294 Jerome, 24, 233 John of Salisbury, 233, 254 Johnson, L. P., 98, 110, 256, 283–84 Johnson, Sidney, 16, 87–212, 305 Jones, Martin, 4, 18 Joyce, James (Finnegan’s Wake), 297 Julius Caesar, 26, 186, 244–46 Jupé, Wolfgang, 160, 169, 181 Jupiter, 236 Kaedin, 185–86, 188, 198–99 Kaherdin (Thomas), 93, 210, 226 Kaiser, Georg (König Hahnrei), 293 Kästner, Hannes, 159, 179, 181 Keck, Anna, 95, 107, 110 Kelly, Henry, 230, 255 Keredic, 237 Kermode, Frank, 235, 255 Kerth, Thomas, 18, 115, 117, 134, 199, 264, 276, 282–83 Kieckhefer, Richard, 88, 110 Kieseritzky, Ingomar and Karin Bellingkrodt (Tristan und Isolde im Wald von Morois), 296, 303 King Hakon (of Norway), 209 King Ludwig II of Bavaria, 291– 92 Kinross, Martha (Tristram and Isoult), 294 Klein, Karl Kurt, 261, 283 Klewitz, Hans, 58, 68 Koch, Gottfried, 68 Kolb, Herbert, 114–15, 118, 134 Konrad von Megenberg, 89, 109

INDEX

Konrad von Wurzburg, 10, 18, 270–72, 275, 282 Koppen, Erwin, 291, 301 Kruse, Ernst, 68 Kubie, Wilhelm (Mummenschanz auf Tintagel), 296, 303 Kucaba, Kelly, 153, 156 Kuncewiczowa, Maria (Tristan), 297 Kunisch, Hermann, 115, 134 Kurtz, Hermann, 13, 286, 288 Kyot, 9 la meir/l’meir/l’ameir, 76–77, 214 Lachmann, Karl, 12–13, 99, 113, 134, 220, 282, 287, 302 Lacy, Norris, 287, 293, 301 Lagrange, Yvan, 298, 303 Lancelot, 11, 296 Langmeier, Beatrice, 113, 134 Lanz-Hubmann, Irene, 110, 132, 134 Laube, Heinrich, 12 Le Saux, Francoise, 231, 255 Leclercq, Jacques, 23, 53 Lee, Thomas Herbert (The Marriage of Iseult), 294 Levy, Harry, 30, 53 Lévy, Paul, 68 Lewes, Ülle, 115, 135 Linden, Brigitte, 286, 301 Livet, Georges, 63, 68 Loehr, Maja (Tristans Tod: Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen), 293 Lohengrin, 288 Loomis, R. S., 283 Lorenz, Ottokar, 56, 68 Louis, René (Tristan et Iseult: Renouvelé), 295 Love Grotto (Minnegrotte), 7, 14, 16–17, 19, 29–30, 35–36, 38, 40–45, 47, 53, 74, 85, 99, 111, 114–15, 123, 128–29, 133–35,

E 313

150, 153, 160–62, 175, 177– 79, 184, 187, 190–92, 207–8, 211, 213–14, 218, 220, 263– 64, 279–81 love potion/philtre/Minnetrank, v, 4, 6, 16, 28, 30, 32, 42, 78, 82–83, 87–112, 119, 126, 128–31, 141–42, 144, 146–47, 150, 174–75, 187–89, 196–99, 208, 263, 266, 268, 277, 279– 80, 289–90, 294–95 Lucan, 40, 231–32, 256 Lucius (Wace), 244–46, 248, 250 Lupack, Alan, 294, 301 Lupack, Barbara Tepa, 294, 301 Machiavelli, 88 Macrobius, 233, 254 Maddux, Stephen, 302 Malory, Thomas, 11, 285–87, 292, 298 Mälzer, Marion, 156, 186, 201 Mancoff, Debra N., 292, 302 Mann, Thomas, 288–90, 293 Manuscript H, 275 Manuscript M, 264, 275 Marais, Jean, 298 Marcabru, 39, 52 Marek, Jiri (Tristan aneb O lásce), 297 Marian poetry, 29, 50, 271 Marie de France, 36, 183–84, 298 Marjodoc, 149, 176 Mark (Béroul, Eilhart), 6, 185, 225 Mark(e) (Gottfried; Thomas), 5– 7, 16–17, 27–28, 31, 35, 37– 38, 42–48, 51, 55, 70, 73–74, 77, 82–84, 94–96, 98, 100, 104–5, 107, 116–23, 129, 139–40, 147, 149, 152–54, 160–80, 184, 189, 191, 196, 200, 201, 207–8, 214–15, 217–19, 226–33, 238–40, 242–44, 247, 248–50, 268,

314 E

INDEX

279–80, 289–90, 293, 296–97, 299 Markis (Robert), 246, 249 Marold, Karl, 5 Marques (Thomas), 210 Marquis, Don (Out of the Sea), 294 Marthelot, Pierre, 69 Martin, Frank (Le vin herbé), 294– 95, 298, 302 Mary, Virgin, 29, 89, 154, 271, 279 Masefield, John (Tristan and Isolt), 294 Massmann, Hans Ferdinand, 286 matière de Bretagne/Matter of Britain, vi, 5, 17, 51, 223–56 Maximianus, 244–45 McCracken, Peggy, 144, 156 McDonald, William, 198, 200, 224–25, 255, 273–75, 284, 297, 302 McDonnell, Earnest, 62, 68 McNamara, Jo Ann, 138, 156 Meissburger, G., 276, 284 Melot, 17, 117, 149, 175–76 Mergell, Bodo, 114, 135 Mertens, Volker, 89, 96–98, 107– 8, 111, 115, 135, 224, 255–56 Metzner, E., 237, 256 Michel, Francisque, 286 Miklautsch, Lydia, 144, 156 ministerial class, 58, 60 Minne, 28–31, 35, 45, 48–49, 75–76, 79, 82, 96–97, 100– 101, 104–5, 110, 114, 130, 155, 160, 178, 185, 188, 193– 94, 196, 206, 209, 211, 220, 229, 251, 253, 264, 267–68, 276, 283–84 Minnegrotte (Love Grotto), 7, 14, 16–17, 19, 29–30, 35–36, 38, 40–45, 47, 53, 74, 85, 99, 111, 114–15, 123, 128–29, 133–35, 150, 153, 160–62, 175, 177–

79, 184, 187, 190–92, 207–8, 211, 213–14, 218, 220, 263– 64, 279–81 Minnesang, 27, 50–51, 157, 180, 221, 268 Minnesangs Frühling, 27, 65, 219 Minnetrank/potion/philter, v, 4, 6, 16, 28, 30, 32, 42, 78, 82– 83, 87–112, 119, 126, 128–31, 141–42, 144, 146–47, 150, 174–75, 187–89, 196–99, 208, 263, 266, 268, 277, 279–80, 289–90, 294–95 misogyny, 139, 145, 149, 153 Mitsch, Ruthemarie, 186, 201 Modred, 226 Mohr, Wolfgang, 27, 53, 159, 181, 189, 201, 286 Moi, Toril, 138, 154, 156 Mone, Franz, 13 Montpellier, 88 von Moos, Peter, 256 moraliteit, 37, 174 Morgan, 73, 84, 123, 125, 162– 64 Morold, 6, 36, 82, 118–19, 121– 22, 124–25, 142–44, 146, 170, 215, 217, 226, 237, 240, 244, 247–50 Mórold (Robert), 246, 249 Mück, Hans-Dieter, 292 Müller, Irmgard, 88, 111 Müller, Ulrich, 11, 18, 285–306 Muses, 45–46, 219 Myller, Christoph Heinrich, 4, 286 mysticism, 14, 30, 43–44, 63–65, 77–78, 107–8, 114–15, 125– 28, 288, 291 Nagel, Hermann, 60, 68 nationalism, 12, 13, 99, 289 Nauen, Hans-Günther, 114, 135 Naumann, Hanns, 100, 111 Neuschwanstein castle, 292

INDEX

Newstead, Helaine, 186, 201 Nibelung, 303 Nibelungenlied, 11, 41, 51, 205 Nickel, Emil, 100, 111 Norman, Frederick, 262, 284 Norwegian merchants, 35, 81, 118, 121–23, 165, 189, 213, 218 Nossack, Hans Erich (Spätestens im November), 297 Novalis, 183 Nowé, Johan, 73, 85 Odo of Cluny, 25 Ogrin (Béroul), 92, 208 Ohly, Friedrich, 29–30, 33, 42, 52–53 Okken, Lambertus, 73, 86 ordeal of the glowing iron, 4, 16, 113, 115, 117–21, 124–25, 130, 152–53, 177 Otfried von Weissenburg, 32, 64 Ovid, 35, 42, 44–45, 48, 52–53, 78, 107, 128, 159, 180, 193, 198, 236–37, 251, 253 oxymora, 17, 28, 41–42, 215–17 Padel, Oliver, 184, 201 Pape, Louis, 200 Paquette, Jean-Marcel, 298, 303 Parmenie, 73, 84, 118, 122, 162, 164, 170, 189 Parzival, 24, 126, 261, 303 patriarchy, 138–39, 155–56 patron(age), 2–3, 274–75, 277, 279 Paxson, Diana (The White Raven), 296 Pelan, Margaret, 224–25, 237, 256 Perillon, Marie-Christine, 68 Peters, Edward, 196, 201 Petitcru, 82, 214, 217, 225, 280 Petrarch, 24, 32 Pfleger, Luzian, 68

E 315

Philipps, Dayton, 68 philter/love potion/Minnetrank, v, 4, 6, 16, 28, 30, 32, 42, 78, 82–83, 87–112, 119, 126, 128–31, 141–42, 144, 146–47, 150, 174–75, 187–89, 196–99, 208, 263, 266, 268, 277, 279– 80, 289–90, 294–95 “Phyllis and Flora,” 44 Phyllis of Thrace, 36, 213, 236, 252–53, 267 Picozzi, Rosemary, 5, 11–13, 18, 87, 99, 111, 113, 135, 284 Piramus and Thisbe, 35 Pius II, 24 von Platen, August, 285, 287 Pliny, 88 Poag, James, 73, 86 Polak, Lucy, 184, 198, 201 Poletti, Elena, 286, 292–93, 303 Porter, Timothy (Trystan and Essylt), 298, 302 Poulson, Christine, 303 prologue, 2, 6, 15, 28–29, 31–35, 40–41, 43–44, 46, 50–51, 77, 79, 108, 127, 148, 159, 161– 62, 167, 179, 191, 211–13, 215, 217, 223–24, 273, 280 Putter, Ad, 256 Quiller-Couch, Arthur (Castle Dor), 297 Quinn, Esther, 116, 135 Rabine, Leslie, 139, 156 Rahner, Hugo, 38, 53 Raimund von Lichtenberg, 279 Ranke, Friedrich, 5, 14, 16, 18– 19, 29, 52–53, 86, 99, 106, 109, 111, 114, 133, 135, 155, 180, 199, 220–21, 254, 264, 275, 282, 284 Rao, Raja (The Serpent and the Rope), 297, 302 Rapp, Alfred, 63, 68

316 E

INDEX

Rasmussen, Ann Marie, 16, 137– 56, 306 Rautenberg, Ursula, 287, 295, 301 Reinick, Robert, 288 Reinmar, 50, 54, 65, 219 “Remiremont Council of Love,” 44, 52 Renaissance, 23, 53–54, 68, 255, 284 Reuss, Rodolphe, 57, 68 Rex, Jytte (Isolde), 298 Richard of St. Viktor, 125 Rivalin (Eilhart), 6 Riwalin, v, 16, 27–29, 35, 46, 73–86, 104–5, 117–18, 122– 23, 128, 139–41, 163–64, 169, 179, 207, 213–14, 216–17, 219, 227, 261, 266 Robert (Friar) (Tristrams saga), 9, 19, 45, 73–75, 78, 80, 82, 86, 91, 93–95, 109, 164, 167, 170, 177, 209–10, 225, 226, 227– 29, 238, 242–43, 246–50, 254 Robert, Carl (Tristan und Isolde: Drama in fünf Akten), 292 Robinson, Edwin Arlington (“Tristram”), 294, 300 Rocher, Daniel, 171, 205–21, 306 Roeber, Friedrich (Tristan und Isolde: Eine Tragödie in Arabesken), 287 Rolandslied, 26 Romanesque, 115 Romanticism, 291 Rome/Romans, 15, 23, 26, 30, 35, 40, 44, 48, 55–56, 60, 62, 226, 234–37, 239–53 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 289, 303 de Rougemont, Denis, 1, 14, 19, 294, 300, 303 Round Table, 190, 225, 230, 255

Rual, 27, 83, 117–18, 121, 130– 31, 162–64, 167, 169, 189–91, 217 Rückert, Friedrich (Jung Tristan), 287 Rudolf von Ems, 10, 18, 254, 264–67, 275, 282–83 Ruh, Kurt, 73, 78–79, 86, 154, 156 Ruodlieb, 25 Rusticciani da Pisa, 285 Sachs, Hans (Tragedia mit 23 Personen von der strengen Lieb Herr Tristrant mit der schönen Konigin Isalden), 10 Salerno, 88, 172 Sargent-Baur, Barbara, 230, 256 Savage, Edward B., 303 Sawicki, Stanislaw, 32, 53, 221 Scaglione, Aldo, 68 Schach, Paul, 8–10, 19, 86, 93, 109, 198–99, 225–27, 229, 243, 246, 249, 254 Schaefer, Jacqueline, 197, 201 Scharschuch, Heinz, 221 Schausten, Monika, 7, 19, 274, 277, 284 Schedl, Susanne, 64, 68 Scherer, Wilhelm, 12–13, 19, 56, 68 Schibler, Armin (La folie de Tristan), 298 Schiller, Friedrich, 24 Schirmer, Ruth (Der Roman von Tristan und Isolde), 296 Schirok, Bernd, 221 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 12, 287 Schmidt, Siegrid, 296, 303 Schnapp, Friedrich, 288, 303 Schneegans, Ludwig (Tristan: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen), 292

INDEX

Schneider, Hermann, 100, 111 Schnell, Rüdiger, 104–5, 111, 116, 125, 132, 135 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 291 Schreyvogel, Friedrich (Tristan und Isolde: Roman), 293 Schröder, Walter Johannes, 101– 2, 111, 261, 284 Schröder, Werner, 104, 111, 114–15, 135 Schultz, James A., 140, 156 Schulze, Ursula, 32, 53 Schumann, Robert, 288, 303 Schwarz, Alexander, 286, 293, 303 Schwietering, Julius, 53, 100, 111, 114–15, 135 Scully, Terrence, 186, 201 Sedlmeyer, Margarete, 281, 284 Seiffert, Leslie, 178, 181 septem artes liberales, 3 setmunt, 30, 53 Short, Ian, 109, 199, 224, 256 Silberbauer, Norbert (“Tristan und Veronika, Franz und Isolde”), 296 Sir Tristram, 9 Sirens, 37–38, 150, 187 Sittler, Lucien, 68 Sneyd (manuscript fragments of Thomas’s Tristan), 80, 193, 197–98, 209–10 Sologne, Madeleine, 298 Song of Songs, 14, 42, 128 Southern, R. W., 23, 54, 251, 256 Spach, Louis, 69 Spieß, August, 292 Spiewok, Wolfgang, 83, 86, 201, 256, 282, 305 Spruchdichtung, 219 St. Trudperter Hohelied, 29, 52 Stein, Peter K., 296, 303 Steinhoff, Hans-Hugo, 87, 111

E 317

Stelly, G. M. Th. (Tristan in New York: Traumbuch einer Reise ins Herz), 296 Stevens, Adrian, 17–18, 157, 180–81, 200–201, 223–56, 306 Stiebelung, Karl, 284 Stockum, 114, 135 Stoeckicht, Otto, 69 Stökle, Ulrich, 114, 135 Stolte, Heinz, 100, 111 Strasbourg, v, 3, 15, 55–69, 275, 277, 306 Strobl, Adam, 69 Strohschneider, Peter, 273–74, 277, 279, 281, 284 Stucken, Eduard (Tristram and Ysolt: Ein Drama in fünf Akten), 293 studia humanitatis, 23 surveillance (huote), 48, 50–51, 129, 137, 152–54, 157, 191, 267–68 Sutcliff, Rosemary (Tristan and Iseult), 295 Suter, Anthony, 289, 304 Swinburne, Algernon (Tristan of Lyonesse and Queen Iseult), 292, 301 Sychaeus, 205 Symons, Arthur (Tristan and Iseult), 294 Szymanzig, Max, 287, 304 Tantris, 83, 100, 142, 144, 150– 51, 169, 172–73, 191, 293 Tavola Rotonda, 285 Tax, Petrus, 114, 134–35, 143, 157 Taylor, Anna (Drustan the Wanderer), 296 Taylor, Beverly, 286, 297, 304 Tennyson, Alfred Lord (“The Last Tournament”), 292 Tertullian, 24, 233

318 E

INDEX

the Fall, 44, 51, 114, 129 Theisen, Joachim, 116, 135 Thomas, vi, 8–11, 16–17, 27, 33, 52, 73–76, 79–83, 85–86, 90– 95, 99, 109, 133, 135, 155–56, 164, 180, 184–85, 190, 193, 196–201, 207–10, 212, 216, 220, 223–54, 273, 276, 285, 298, 306 Thomas, Neil, 17, 115, 135, 183– 201, 306 Thomas Beckett, 63 Thompson, Raymond H. 286, 304 Thurlow, Peter, 153, 157, 221 Tilly, Jean-Jacques, 184 Todtenhaupt, Martin, 112 Tomasek, Tomas, 174, 181, 221 topos/topoi, 31, 33–34, 41–42, 45, 53 translatio imperii, 40, 235 Trindade, W. Ann, 186, 201 Tristan, v–vi, 1, 5–7, 11, 16–17, 26–32, 34–40, 42, 44–48, 50– 51, 53, 55, 64, 69, 73–74, 76– 85, 87, 95–105, 107, 113–15, 117–19, 121–31, 137, 139–55, 159–60, 162–79, 185–86, 188–202, 206–10, 212–19, 227, 230, 236–37, 242, 244, 246–53, 257, 262–63, 265–66, 272–73, 276, 279–81, 285, 288–92, 297, 299 Tristan als Mönch, 262, 275, 282 Tristán de Leonis, 285 Tristan story, 2, 4–8, 10–11, 13– 14, 16–18, 33, 44, 46, 70, 73, 89–90, 135, 161, 175, 184, 198, 202, 207–8, 210, 223– 227, 231, 233, 235, 238, 246, 253, 258, 274, 284, 292–95, 297–99 Tristan-love, Tristan-Minne, 12– 14, 45, 96, 101, 103, 106–8, 115, 127–31, 283, 293

Tristano Riccardiano, 285 Tristano Veneto, 285 Tristram (Robert), 93–94, 225, 229, 246–49 Tristran, Tristan (Béroul), 7, 91– 92, 94, 208, 225 Tristran, Tristan (Thomas), 80, 83, 92–93, 185, 192, 197–99, 209–10, 224–27, 247 Tristrant (Eilhart), 6, 92–94, 185, 209, 225 Tristrant und Isalde (chapbook), 10 troubadours, 27, 41, 43, 64 Troy/Trojan, 232–36, 238, 244, 251–52, 255 Truffaut, François (La Femme d’àcôté), 299 Turin fragment, 196 typology, 16, 36, 39, 115, 134, 164, 214, 217, 252 Ulrich von Etzenbach, 269 Ulrich von Turheim, 7, 10–11, 18, 197, 199, 262–63, 273–78, 280–81, 283–84 Updike, John (Brazil), 297 Urgan, 225–26, 280 Venus, 36, 41, 54, 105, 252–53 version commune, 6–8, 10, 89–91, 95, 208–9 version courtoise, 6, 8, 90–92, 95, 208–9 Vesper, Will (Tristan und Isolde), 293 Vilar, Esther (Stundenplan einer Rache), 296 Vilmar, August, 12 Vinaver, Eugène, 300 Virgil, 46, 205, 231–34, 236–37, 251, 253–55 virginity, 77, 147, 175, 177 Vogeleis, Martin, 65, 69 Vogler, Bernard, 59–60, 69

INDEX

Volfing, Annette, 154, 157 Vulgate Cycle, 10–11 Vulcan, 46 Wace (Roman de Brut), 17, 25– 26, 52, 223–31, 234–40, 242, 244, 246–48, 253–56 Wachinger, Burghart, 269, 275, 284 Wagner, Richard, 11, 18, 183–84, 200, 210, 286–96, 298–99, 301, 303–4 Wagner, Wilfried, 141, 157 Waldensians, 62–63 Walter (archdeacon of Oxford), 224 Walther von der Vogelweide, 50, 54, 57, 65, 189, 219, 268, 282 Wangelin, A. M., 286, 304 Wapnewski, Peter, 289–90, 304– 5 Wartburgkrieg, 288 Wasserman, Julian N., 294, 300 Weber, Gottfried, 69, 100, 112– 13, 115, 136, 273, 284, 287, 304 Wehrli, Max, 1, 3, 8–9, 19, 271, 284 von Weilen, Josef (Tristan: Romantische Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen), 287 Wenzel, Horst, 3, 19 Werner, Ernst, 67 Wesendonk, Mathilde, 291 Wesendonk, Otto, 291 von Westernhagen, Curt, 288, 304 Wetzel, René, 87, 107–8, 112 Whitaker, Muriel, 263, 284 Widmer, Walter (Tristan und Isolde: Ein Roman von Liebe und Treue), 295 William of Newburgh (Historia rerum Anglicarum), 230 Willson, H. B., 114, 136, 201

E 319

Winter, Georg, 55, 69 Wisbey, Roy, 18, 157, 180–81, 200–201, 252, 256, 306 Wolf, Alois, 1, 15, 19, 23–54, 109, 111–12, 135, 159, 181, 201, 221, 252, 256, 283, 306 Wolff, Lucien, 286, 304 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 2–5, 9– 11, 65, 76, 99, 135, 212, 214, 261–62, 264, 275, 283–84, 288, 304 Wulf, Charlotte, 226, 256 Zach, Christine, 184, 201 Ziegler, Vickie, 115, 136 Zuckerman, Elliot, 304

significant figures and episodes in the work

THE ESSAYS

(“Gottfried’s Adaptation of the Story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur,” by Danielle Buschinger;

Introduction: The Challenge of

Performances of Love:

Gottfried’s Tristan

“Duplicity and Duplexity: The Isolde of the White

Tristan and Isolde at Court

Will Hasty

Will Hasty

Hands Sequence,” by Neil Thomas; “Interpreting

Duplicity and Duplexity: The Isolde

the Love Potion in Gottfried’s Tristan,” by Sidney Johnson; “Performances of Love: Tristan and

Cultural and Social Contexts

Isolde at Court,” by Will Hasty; “The Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde,” by Ann

Humanism in the High Middle Ages:

Marie Rasmussen). All the essays contribute to a

Alois Wolf

comprehensive view of Gottfried’s revolutionary

Gottfried’s Strasbourg:

romance, which provocatively elevates a sexual,

Between Epic and Lyric Poetry:

The City and Its People

human love to a summum bonum.

The Originality of Gottfried’s Tristan

Michael S. Batts

Daniel Rocher

Will Hasty is Professor of German at the University of Florida. He is the editor of A Companion to Wolfram’s “Parzival,” (1999), and author of Adventures in Interpretation: The Works of Hartmann von Aue and Their Critical Reception (1996), both published by Camden House.

of the White Hands Sequence Neil Thomas

The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan

Gottfried’s Narrative Art

History, Fable and Love:

Figures, Themes, Episodes Gottfried’s Adaptation of the Story

Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain

of Riwalin and Blanscheflur Danielle Buschinger

Adrian Stevens

This Drink Will Be the Death of You: Interpreting the Love Potion in

The Medieval and Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan

Gottfried’s Tristan

The Medieval Reception of

Sidney M. Johnson

Gottfried’s Tristan Marion E. Gibbs

God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan Nigel Harris The Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde Ann Marie Rasmussen

The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde Ulrich Müller

The legend of Tristan and Isolde – the archetypal

A COMPANION TO GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG’S “TRISTAN”

The volume also contains new interpretations of

narrative about the turbulent effects of allconsuming, passionate love – achieved its most complete and profound rendering in the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg’s verse romance Tristan (ca. 1200-1210). Along with his great literary rival Wolfram von Eschenbach and his versatile predecessor Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried is considered one of three greatest poets produced by medieval Germany, and over the centuries his Tristan has lost none of its ability to attract with the beauty of its poetry and to challenge – if not provoke – on the basis of its sympathetic depiction of adulterous love. The articles in A Companion to Gottfried’s “Tristan,” written by a dozen Gottfried specialists in Europe and North America, provide definitive treatments of significant aspects of this most important and challenging high medieval version of the Tristan legend. They examine aspects of Gottfried’s unparalleled narrative artistry (“History, Fable, and Love: Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain,” by Adrian Stevens; “Between Epic and Lyric Poetry: The Originality of Gottfrieds Tristan,” by Daniel Rocher) and the important connections

A COMPANION TO

P.O. Box 41026 Rochester, NY 14604-4126, USA and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydell.co.uk or: www.camden-house.com

Edited by Will Hasty

ISBN 1-57113-203-1

Camden House

GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG’S “TRISTAN” EDITED BY WILL HASTY

between his Tristan and the socio-cultural situation in which it was composed (“Gottfried’s Strasbourg: The City and Its People,” by Michael Batts; “God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan,” by Nigel Harris; “Humanism in the High Middle Ages: The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan,” by Alois Wolf). Other essays examine the reception of Gottfried’s challenging romance by later poets in the Middle Ages (“The Medieval Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan,” by Marion Gibbs) and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, composers, and artists – particularly Richard Wagner (“The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde,” by Ulrich Müller). (continued on back flap) Jacket image: Tristan playing for the Welsh master, from manuscript R (99v). Reproduced from Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan: Ausgewählte Abbildungen zur Überlieferung (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1974) with the kind permission of the editors. Cover design by Anne Reekie