Tristan

Note

This version of 'Tristan' is not a direct translation. It has been embellished somewhat and some content is removed. However, most of the missing content is to do with Gottfried's own opinions, asides and excursus, and therefore, the basic story as Gottfried wrote it has been retained.

As feasible as this version of "Tristan" is, this editor believes Gottfried's romance of Tristan and Isolde to be the finest around, and urges you to buy this book (which is a direct translation) to truly appreciate his masterpiece.

For copyright reasons we are unable to show the content of that book for free, so we hope this rendering of Strassburg's work will suffice in the mean time.
Author: Gottfried von Strassburg
Date: c1210
Origin: Germany

  • Gottfried von Straßburg

    German poet and author who lived in the late 12th, early 13th century (ca. 1180 – ca. 1210). He is celebrated for his Middle High German courtly romance "Tristan" – widely considered one of the narrative masterpieces of the German Middle Ages.

    Tristan is 19,548 lines long, but is incomplete. No extant manuscript (11 complete manuscripts and 17 fragments) offers a conclusion, which means Gottfried either died before finishing his work (testified by later poets), or gave up finishing it.

    The text comprises of rhyming couplets, with the 44 line prologue written in quatrains and the main divisions of the story written in pairs of quatrains. The initial letters of the quatrains form an acrostic: Gotefrid-Tristan-Isolde, whilst the prologue acrostic gives the name Dieterich (assumed to be the patron of Gottfried).

    The piece is (by the authors admission) based on Thomas of Britain's version of the legend, but features many embellishments - including the literary excursis which is considered the earliest piece of literary critique in the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages. Gottfried's unfinished work was completed by two later poets (Ulrich von Türheim around 1235 and Heinrich von Freiberg around 1290) but they used Eilhart von Oberge as a source, not Thomas of Britain.

    Not much is known about Gottfried. He is taken to have written Tristan in the first decade of the 13th century and is taken to have died in 1210. His origin or close association with Strasbourg is affirmed by the fact that the earliest manuscripts of Tristan demonstrate signs of Alemannic, Alsation dialect. He is always referred to by the term 'Meister' (Master), which means he was not a Knight and came from a learned background. The text reveals that he obviously received a solid education in the trivium, the quadrivium, classical literature, rhetoric, and theology.