Gottfried von Strassburg
Portrait of Gottfried von Strassburg
from the Codex Manesse (Folio 364r).
died c. 1210
one of the greatest medieval German
poets, whose courtly epic Tristan und
Isolde is the classic version of this
famous love story.
The dates of his birth and death are
unknown, and the only information about
him consists of references to him in the
work of other poets and inferences from
his own work. The breadth of learning
displayed in Tristan und Isolde reveals
that he must have enjoyed the fullest
education offered by the cathedral and
monastery schools of the Middle Ages.
Together with the authoritative tone of
his writing, this background indicates
that, although not himself of noble
birth, he spent his life in the society
of the wellborn. Tristan was probably
written about 1210. Gottfried is thus a
literary contemporary of Hartmann von
Aue, Walther von der Vogelweide, and
Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The Celtic
legend of Tristan and Iseult (German:
Isolde) reached Germany through French
sources. The first German version is
that of Eilhart von Oberg (c. 1170), but
Gottfried, although he probably knew
Eilhart’s poem, based his own work on
the Anglo-Norman version of Thomas of
Brittany (1160–70).
Gottfried’s
moral purpose, as he states it in the
prologue, is to present to courtiers an
ideal of love. The core of this ideal,
which derives from the romantic cult of
woman in medieval courtly society, is
that love (minne) ennobles through the
suffering with which it is inseparably
linked. This ideal Gottfried enshrines
in a story in which actions are
motivated and justified not by a
standard ethic but by the conventions of
courtly love. Thus, the love potion,
instead of being the direct cause of the
tragedy as in primitive versions of the
Tristan story, is sophisticatedly
treated as a mere outward symbol of the
nature of the lovers’ passion—tragic
because adulterous but justified by the
“courts of love” because of its
spontaneity, its exclusiveness, and its
completeness.
Although
unfinished, Gottfried’s is the finest of
the medieval versions of the Tristan
legend and one of the most perfect
creations of the medieval courtly
spirit, distinguished alike by the
refinement and elevated tone of its
content and by the elaborate skill of
its poetic technique. It was the
inspiration for Richard Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde (1859).
