Tristan’s World

This view of Tristan was written after I recently read the great romance in A. F. Hatto’s Penguin translation. Many years ago in graduate school I had slogged through the text in MHG. I cannot bring myself even now either to discard or to reread the voluminous notes I made at that time, but these comments make no scholarly pretense. I do not claim familiarity with the critical literature either, but this approach is, so far as I know, new. Parenthetical numbers refer to the Hatto paperback.

The study of literature I think would be enriched if more common readers were to record their reactions. Scholars might suggest ideas outside their areas of expertise. I suspect that even professors could learn a few things from non-specialists. Alas, I am afraid that no one today could make a living writing about literature as Edmund Wilson did without a university appointment.


     Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan is in part a hero in the old style: peerless physically, able to win every competition or single combat, a potent fighter in war. Yet he is far more an Odysseus than an Achilles, and his expertise at artifice is evinced by his cunning, trickery, and disguise, but also by his chivalry, elegance, and good taste. Tristan appears as a mysterious trickster, a shape-shifter, almost but not quite able to transform the tragic reality into which he is born. Tristan assumes disguises as a merchant’s son and as Tantris the minstrel, just as his mother Blancheflor had disguised herself to gain access to his father Rivalin. While the somewhat similar figure of Melville’s Confidence-Man plays hide-and-seek with the reader and remains wholly elusive in spite of the solid reality of the river boat, Tristan is wholly engaged in human suffering. Rather like Jesus, but lacking the promise of restorative justice after death, Tristan, a courtly elitist, a refined connoisseur among heroes, achieves his end through a love-death after enduring to the utmost the most ordinary of passions: love-longing, frustration, and mortality.
     The hero’s end, misled into thinking that his beloved is not arriving, affirms the sadness his name suggests while underlining the central motif of signs improperly interpreted, of counterfeit and genuine, deceptive and truthful, generating a scintillating play of appearance and reality. Different readings of Tristan are then unsurprising. One might read the epic as a post-modern spectacle with participants identifying themselves with conventions or ironic tropes on conventions to pass the time like Estragon and Vladimir though in Gottfried the setting may be a palace or a field of war and in Tristan a great deal happens, though the events generally seem governed by chance and guess-work and error. For all the sententiae dealt out here and there, Gottfried seems a profoundly skeptical man.
     The story itself is decentered. Unlike many authors of fiction until well into the nineteenth century, Gottfried does not claim that the story is true, only that it is of the sort that can uplift and entertain “noble hearts.” He notes the multiplicity of versions and promises to provide the very best using Thomas as his principal source, and, indeed, he does not wander far from his predecessor in the narrative. At various points in the telling, he emphasizes his own deviations from others who had told Tristan’s story. Beginning with an invented story current in many variations, he gives then his own reworking of what he considers to be the best of its past storytellers. It is a free play of fiction, governed by taste.
     Again and again along the way Gottfried stresses ambiguity and ambivalence. Tristan is above all else a lover. Yet a glance at the beginning and end of the narrative suggests that this status is dubious. His affair with Isolde begins only with the external chance of their accidental consumption of the love philtre. Then, at the end, Isolde’s double, Isolde of the White Hands, causes him to reflect. “Tristan was in two minds about whether he wanted Isolde or not . . .’Do I desire her or don’t I,’ he was constantly asking himself. ‘I think I do not, and then I think I do.’” (294) He marries the new Isolde, but does not make love to her and finally Tristan dies after she misinforms about the sail indicating the arrival of the Irish Isolde. His amatory career is thus muddied by chance, uncertainty, and lies, none of which affected his martial prowess.
     He realizes the inadequacy of language and declares “I do not know how to begin.” (108) He proceeds only after imagining a prayer to Apollo and the Muses and throughout the poem frequently pauses in self-reflection, commenting on his authorial decisions, asking himself such questions as “What fresh matters will I now set in train?” (121)
     In his prologue Gottfried sets forth his dialectical program, saying that, though his goal is distraction and entertainment to soothe the burden of life, his story is not for the many who value pleasure alone but for a more sophisticated audience that appreciates the “bittersweet.” (42) The hypnotic couplet of the prologue is a meditation on duality as much as an announcement of the author’s topic.


A man, a woman; a woman, a man;
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.


     He goes to say “Their life, their death is our bread” (44) Surely this means not only that his contemporaries could relish the story but also that such polarities define our everyday reality. The realization that such oppositions as joy and pain, male and female, truth and lie form the fabric of the human experience is transformative. Thus Tristan’s father Rivalin in his passion for Blancheflor not only learns that love is sadness; this insight so affects him that it “changed his whole cast of mind.” He “became quite a different man, since all that he did was chequered with strangeness and blindness.” (53)
     Even Christianity provides no reliable truth in Gottfried’s world. In one of the most-discussed figures of the story, Gottfried declares, upon Isolde’s success in the ordeal of hot iron that Christ is “pliant as a wind-blown sleeve.” (248) There could hardly be a more powerful statement of the uncertainty in which people live than to claim that Christ, in Christian ideology the central focus and bedrock of reality, is no more stable than a passing breeze. Indeed through the story Christ is consistently assumed to take the part of love with little regard for the church’s traditional moral doctrine.
     The oscillation between possibilities is evident in the hero’s identity and disguise, in the multiple versions of the story, in the limitations of language itself, in emotions, even in the divine. In this story in which the heroic knight is a trickster and an artist, valor is assumed and refined taste is the criterion of value. Yet Tristan must function in a world of disguises, misinterpreted signs, and contradictions. Whereas some have regarded Gottfried as the founder of a religion of love, it seems more accurate to say that he portrays a world of chance, ungovernable compulsion, and impenetrable obscurity in which one must, like Tristan, blindly grope forward until the end without the benefit of revelation. Along the way is magnificent pageantry, beauty, pleasure, and constant hazard into which our hero has no nobler choice then to throw himself fully into the game, rather like an existential “man of action,” and we, the readers, pass our time by following along as the hero makes his way in the “darkling plain.”

The Transvestite Knight: Ulrich’s Frauendienst in Performance

Ulrich’s Frauendienst is odd and obscure enough that perhaps some general readers could learn something from a simple description. This fresh impression, recorded after a first reading, adds yet one more voice to the conversation among the work’s readers, a conversation which reveals, I think, as much about each critic’s sensibility as about Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s.


     The greatest medieval European epic-length narrative poems were composed in German around the turn of the twelfth century. The Nibelungenlied, Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde, and Wolfram’s Parzifal are encyclopedic, culture-defining works, illuminated by the ancient motifs of Celtic and Germanic paganism. Sophisticated narratives woven of masterful poetry, each has a broad array of thematic implications embracing politics, love, death, and the divine.
     Only a few years later Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst (Service of Women or the Woman) was rooted in the shallower soil of courtly love. That term has, of course, been questioned and indeed such ambiguity is Ulrich’s chief theme and mine. Before relating something of the reception history of the concept of courtly love and of Ulrich’s own version of it, though, a summary of his narrative, though it will have no value for those who have read it, may intrigue some who have never previously heard of it. The plot is nothing short of outlandish.
     Frauendienst is a first-person narrative in stanzas containing a number of interpolated poems in other forms. In his youth Ulrich, the persona, serves a noble lady and develops such a devotion to her that he drinks the water with which she washes. Later as a knight he dedicates his service to her despite her rejection of his love-messages. When she criticizes the appearance of his lip, he immediately seeks out a plastic surgeon. To honor his beloved and all women he disguises himself as Venus and, dressed as a woman, tours from Venice to Vienna, challenging all he meets to “break lances” in jousts. A lady in church sees through his costume (which could hardly be convincing to anyone) when she is to give him a “kiss of peace” only to kiss him anyway in the best of humor. An unknown admirer covers him with flower petals when he is in his bath (while pretending to be a woman). His lady convinces him to join the lepers who wait for alms outside her castle with the promise that she will eventually admit him. As he waits there the watchman urinates on him. He later undertakes another pilgrimage in the person of King Arthur serving a different, more obscure damsel who barely enters the story, but the latter part of the work abandons the more or less continuous narrative of these adventures and substitutes more poems and apothegms with a scattering of fragmentary narrative passages.
     This sketch is sufficient to make the absurdity of the story abundantly clear. Strange as it may seem to contemporary readers, the earlier scholars commenting on Ulrich’s work concurred in considering the work as essentially an authentic autobiography. For Tieck in 1812 the book was simply the “Geschichte und Liebe des Ritters und Sängers Ulrich von Liechtenstein von ihm selbst beschrieben.” For years readers assumed the story was factual. Reinhold Bechstein in his 1888 edition unreservedly calls it a “Selbstbiographie” [1] and goes yet further, declaring that “Ulrich’s narration makes such an impression of candor that we can have no doubt of his love of truth, indeed, all the less, since he reports many things that are in no way flattering to him.” [2] Based on the assumption of the text’s literal truth, it was studied for many years more as a historical than as a literary document.
     While modern readers smile at what seems the credulity of earlier generations, more recent readings of the text have ranged from the reasonable and productive to anachronistic and fanciful. The suggestion of Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler who consider the work “a sincere autobiographical romance,” an Ich-Roman that relays “the author’s psychological states, his unconscious or only semi-conscious fears, anxieties, and even obsessions,” is highly suggestive. [3] Albrecht Classen, denying significant autobiographical content, finds the poem an analysis of “the theatrical nature of courtliness,” revealing “the precariousness and thus the extreme value of courtly culture” and allowing performer and audience “self-confirmation” though he gives scant attention to its comic elements. [4]
     Ulrich’s translator and editor J. W. Thomas to whom the Frauendienst is a humorous “fiction” focuses on the poems relation to other poems, finding in it a catalogue of Minnesang conventions in the lyrics accompanied by a humorous parody of the same conventions in the narrative passages. [5] While this seems eminently reasonable it leaves open the questions of theme and reception.
     More suspicious are such conclusions as those of Ingrid Bennewitz to whom Ulrich’s cross-dressing represents his “insecurity with his male body” [6] or Lisa Perfetti for whom the poem “subverts the lyric genre’s conventional silencing of women” and exposes the “pretense of the male voice” which claims to be “dedicated to serving women as a sham.” [7] Andrea Moshövel’s characterization of cross-dressing as "a “misogynistic and homophobic expression of anxieties over the dissolving of gender boundaries.” [8] sounds like an exportation of contemporary attitudes backwards in time.
     The disputed terrain between those who take Ulrich’s quests in behalf of love as straightforward amatory heroism and those to whom his adventures are primarily comic, ironic, or subversive mirrors critical attitudes toward courtly love as a whole. Brought into common usage with Gaston Paris [9], the term had become generally accepted, particularly after C. S. Lewis’s popular The Allegory of Love. Courtly love seemed to have settled into the realm of received ideas until the sixties when D. W. Robertson declared it “an impediment to the understanding of medieval literature” [10] and a couple of years later E. Talbot Donaldson wrote of “The Myth of Courtly Love.” [11] J. J. Wilhelm argued for dropping the term entirely. Without surveying the vast bibliography on this topic, it is sufficient here to observe that the issue as a whole has been deeply contested.
     Even more broadly, on strictly formal grounds, every convention has the potential to bring to birth a panoply of variations in a process I name “transformation of convention.” [12] The establishment of a steady rhythm, for example, allows the listener to perceive the absence of a beat or a change on tempo. In this way the semantic density of the aesthetic work is greatly heightened. Conventions provide a dynamic technique for poetry’s exploration of ambiguities and contradictions.
     The performative aspects of medieval literature are often neglected as moderns read in library or study. Yet Frauendienst was in fact recited and its lyrics sung in a social situation, and the context of Ulrich’s poem shapes its substance. The poem offers ample opportunity for performative elements apart from the text. Many passages in which Ulrich comments with satisfaction on his feminine garments would almost inevitably be presented with mincing gestures. The repetitive description of jousting matches with specific opponents, often characterized in the most general terms, may bore modern readers, but in the original context, they likely represented “shout-outs” to individuals whose friends and relatives, if not they themselves, were in the audience. The comic aspect of the story, unnoticed for years, would have been explicit. Surely the singer’s sly glance around the room would accompany Ulrich’s sudden brief mention of interrupting his love-service for a few days to look in on his wife or his “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. [13]
     The reception of the narrative must be of a piece with that of the interspersed lyrics, despite apparent contradictions. Imagining this dramatic situation it is natural to take courtly love poems in general as sophisticated flirtatious courtly entertainments, celebrating the men of the nobility as warrior-lovers and the women as paragons of beauty, the more alluring for their discreet reserve. The courtly love paradigm regularly casts the he-man and the glamour girl in leading roles, but they are not always presented straightforwardly. The hefty measure of idealization does not foreclose possibilities such as irony, comedy, or obscenity, possibilities necessary to reflect the range of human responses to love.
     Ulrich is telling a tall tale, but his extravagances are far from arbitrary. For courtly love as a whole, the essential datum is the power of sexuality. The primary signification of the love-service is the lover’s feeling of helplessness in the experience of erotic desire at least from the male point of view. [14] He may experience such vulnerability even in a patriarchal society. To address the lady as “my lord” (Midons)as the Old Occitanian poets did, expresses an authentic emotional truth while not altering the balance of social, economic, or political rule in the least. All courtly poetic practice occurs within the complex ironies of this realization.
     Through poetry which enacts the dynamic contradictions of desire, the court became a theater of erotic play. Ulrich is telling a tall tale based in his own sexuality. His status as a supreme athlete for love is confirmed by his endurance of harsh treatment at the lady’s hands, his lying with lepers, his determination taken to the point of absurdity, all this accumulates to suggest that he is, in fact, the greatest lover the world has ever known. It is immaterial that in a realistic situation a man would surely either divert his attentions to a more welcoming quarter or, in some circumstances, force his will upon the woman.
     Thus Ulrich’s Frauendienst is realistic in depicting the coercive imperium of sexuality at the same time as it is recognizes the irony of this female power in a patriarchy through fantastic parody. An outright boast of sexual prowess might have found fewer listeners than Ulrich’s whimsical and self-mocking tale. Apart from increasing entertainment value, the two-sided meaning of the love epic is in fact more true to human nature than either half of its vision would be. Ulrich does not seek to dismantle the social order of feudal society; rather he performs the role of an artist by pointing toward its contradictions and tensions, the delights and the shackles of the world in which he lived, the most important of which are little changed in the three-quarters of a millennium since.



1. Page VIII.

2. Page IX. The translation is mine.

3. Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein,” in German Literature of the High Middle Ages edited by Will Hasty and James N. Hardin. Müller goes too far when he claims in another article that “Ulrich seine Rolle als Mann und Ritter nicht akzeptiert.” (“Ulrich von Liechtenstein und sein Männerphantasien; Mittelalterliche Literatur und modern Psychologie,” in Ich -- Ulrich von Liechtenstein, ed. Franz Viktor Spechtler).

4. Albrecht Classen, “Moriz, Tristan, and Ulrich as Master Disguise Artists: Deconstruction and Reenactment of Courtliness in ‘Moriz von Craû’, ‘Tristan als Mönch’, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 475-504.

5. See J. W. Thomas, “The Minnesong Structure of Ulrich von Liechtenstein's 'Frauendienst,'” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 102. Bd., H. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1973), pp. 195-203 and his introductory material in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Service of Ladies.

6. Ingrid Bennewitz, “Der Körper der Dame. Zur Konstruktion von ‘Weiblichkeit’in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in ‘Aufführung’ und’ Schrift’ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, 222-238.

7. “‘With them she had her playful game’ The Performance of Gender and Genre in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst,” in Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature, ed. Lisa Perfetti.

8. My translation. Andrea Moshövel, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein” Wîplich man. Formen und Funktionen von ‘Effemination’ in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten des 13. Jahrhunderts, Aventiuren Bd. 5.

9. In his "Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette" in Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde. The term not only described a set of conventions recognizable to any reader of medieval literature; it occurred only perhaps twice in Old Occitanian (“cortez amors” in Peire d'Alvernhe and “amor cortes” in Flamenca). Some prefer the term fin’amor because it and variations occur far more commonly, but poets often refer to love as essentially courtly. For Marcabrun “cortesia es d’amar” in “Cortesamen vuoill comenssar . . .” The opening phrase also identifies the court with artfulness.

10. In “Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love ,” in The Meaning of Courtly Love.

11. In Speaking of Chaucer. John A. Yunck, reviewing Donaldson’s book for Criticism : a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (Vol. 13, No. 4 [Fall 1971]) called courtly love a “scholarly figment” as though the issue was settled.

12. A number of articles on this site employ this term and offer fuller explanation of it. See, for instance, “Transformation of Convention ,” “William IX: A Study in Transformation of Convention,” “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Mule in Blues Imagery,” and others.

13. See, for instance, st. 989 in which the local noble jokes about Ulrich’s change from female to male or st. 134 in which bystanders laugh at the lady’s insulting him. His visit to his wife is st. 707. He also spend a “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. (994)

14. A particularly rich body of work survives by trobairitz, female Troubadours. Accessible anthologies include those by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner (Songs of the Women Troubadours) and Magda Bogin (The Women Troubadours). See also Peter Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages.

Der von Kürenberg

Little is known of the first of the Minnesingers, called the Kürenberger (der von Kurenberc) apart from an approximate date (fl. mid-twelfth century) and a general region along the Danube somewhere near Melk and Linz. His work survives only in the fourteenth century Codex Manesse (the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift). Unlike later lyricists, he uses the same strophic form as the Nibelungenlied. He and Dietmar von Aist are often said to be independent of influence from the Occitanian Troubadours, though this judgement rests on a rigid notion of courtly love. To me Kürenberg seems to play with the courtly conventions that some later poets simply reproduced.

I have not attempted to reproduce Kürenberg’s strophes exactly. The caesurae have all but vanished in my effort to make something readable in English, but I am no looser than my author in attention to form. Slant rhymes and errant syllables are not uncommon in the MHG, though of course they would have been less obtrusive, even imperceptible in musical performance. I have used iambic tetrameters and pentameters for the most part, rhyming abcb.


“Wîp vil schœne . . .”

O lovely lady, come with me,
and highs and lows I’ll share with you
my whole life long I’ll love just you
your loving a lesser I won’t allow.


“Aller wîbe wünne . . .”

Most marvelous of ladies, still a maid,
I send in loving notes the praise you’re due.
You know I’d be there, but I am discreet.
I doubt your mind, while mine is fixed on you.


Though the first of these quatrains is pared down to a largely timeless declaration of love with only a hint of rivalry, the second includes some aspects of the common conventions of the love poetry of the times, the extravagant praise of the beloved, the communication by messages, and the nosy figures hostile to love, while maintaining the lover’s total devotion.


“Ich stuont mir nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night alone I stood upon the tower.
I heard a knight whose voice rang out in song.
A song of Kurenberc’s rose from the crowd –
If he stays here he will be mine ere long!”

“So quick bring me my armor and my horse!
A lady forces me to ride away!
She wants me to submit to her and serve.
Without my love I swear she’ll have to stay.”


The critique of courtly manners is suggested first by the woman’s aggressive desire to dominate a man who has made no gesture in her direction. Seeking independence rather than love-service, he must depart, reversing the ordinary pattern of devotion to the female in conscious self-subordination .


“Jô stuont ich nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night I stood beside your bed,
but didn’t wish to break your rest.”
“For that may you be cursed!” she said.
“Am I a boar to gore your breast?”


Compare the opening words to those of the previous song. This lyric provides one of the clearest examples of the transformation of convention. In the very dawn-time of vernacular love poetry, the courtly tradition rises not alone but accompanied by a range of variations that may validate, extend, or emphasize the original convention, but also may twist or distort it, most commonly by denial, reversal, inversion, or parody. While the knight is decorous and respectful, as proper at any rate as one can be while slipping up on someone’s bedside, the woman is freer. Using colloquial language and a dramatic image, she expresses what can only be disappointed lust. The effect is surely comic.


“Swenne ich stân aleine . . .”

I stand in nightgown all alone
and think of you, my noble knight.
I blush the shade of rose mid thorns
and muse upon my lonely plight.


The lovely simplicity of this lyric resembles the fragment traditionally attributed to Sappho Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα. One thinks also of the Mughal miniatures showing lone women experiencing love-longing.


“Ich zôch mir einen valken . . .”

I trained my falcon longer than a year.
When I had tamed him well to suit just me
and gilded all his plumage tastefully,
he rose right up and flew to some far tree.

Since then I’ve seen that lovely bird in flight
with silken bonds still on his feet above.
His feathers shone so grand, so red and gold!
May God bring love to those who long to love!


The falcon is an appropriately aristocratic image, but again here, the lover/bird, though trained for a solid year, resists her control and flies away. His absence may be only temporary. Line four, in which I have jettisoned some information to seize a rhyme by translating “in anderiu lant” as “some far tree,” suggests service in war, perhaps a crusade, after which he may return to her. The gilded feathers have much the same implication of the expression “a bird in a gilded cage." The final line reminds me of the hauntingly lovely chorus of the Pervigilium Veneris “Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet” ("Let he who never has loved find love tomorrow, and let the lover love tomorrow").


“Wîp unde vederspil . . .”

All females and all falcons may be trained.
They come to one who knows how to entice.
A handsome knight did thus attract a dame.
My spirit soars with love to paradise.


In this quatrain the falcon has become the woman, a clear example of the early transformation of Minnesang convention.


“Der tunkele sterne . . .”

A faint star knows just how to hide.
Learn how my dear when I am near
to gaze upon another man.
No one must guess you are my dear.


Here the emphasis on “tougen minne” or hidden love allows Kürenberg to play with the widespread figure comparing the lady to a star. Reversing the usual implication that suggests her bright preeminence casting rivals into shadow, here she is advised to seek obscurity to conceal her relationship.