49 pages • 1 hour read
Gottfried von StrassburgTristan
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1209A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Duality of Love
Tristan presents love as an overwhelming force that radically alters a person’s personality and values. It effectively makes somebody a different person in that it reorients their loyalties and their commitments and changes the range of their emotions. Under the spell of love, lovers previously characterized by their honor and virtuosity become willing to risk death and disgrace to be with their lover. Nevertheless, the story also exalts love, depicting it as a transcendent experience that justifies practically any suffering. This duality is a staple of the courtly love tradition.
Although the story depicts love similarly regardless of its origins—Rivalin and Blancheflor, King Mark, and Isolde of the White Hands all find their lives upended by the emotion—the love potion and its effects crystallize the story’s portrayal. Under the potion’s influence, Isolde immediately transforms from somebody who hates Tristan for having killed her uncle to somebody who is passionately devoted to Tristan. Similarly, Tristan transforms from somebody characterized by his deep devotion and loyalty to Mark to somebody who betrays Mark by sleeping with his fiancée. Love is such a powerful force that it destroys the longest and most strongly held loyalties and ideas of honor and replaces them with new needs and loyalties. Because Isolde’s husband is king, the affair that Tristan and Isolde engage in, often recklessly, is punishable by death. Before they drink the potion, they are described as extraordinarily honorable, but love makes them willing to risk public disgrace and death.
However, if the text presents love as subversive (as it would have been in a society where marriage was principally economic and political), it does not suggest that this makes love a force for evil. Rather, it elevates love to mystical status, describing it as having the power to unite two people in one: “Love, […] so joined them in affection that each was to the other as limpid as a mirror. They shared a single heart” (195). Love even sustains Tristan and Isolde when they are living in the mountain cave, the description of which as a “wasteland” recalls the biblical story of God miraculously sustaining the Israelites with manna in the wilderness.
The duality of love spills over into the experience of it: Love is characterized by ecstasy and anguish alike. Those in love are either fulfilled when they are with the object of their affection and secure in the knowledge that their love is reciprocated, or else they are tortured by separation or by thoughts that the other person no longer loves them. When Tristan and Isolde are not together they are miserable: anxious that the other may no longer love them and melancholy at their absence. However, love’s ultimate paradox lies in its ability to both give and take life, as Tristan and Isolde’s existences become so intertwined that the death of one entails the death of the other.
Tragic Fate Versus Free Will
Tied to the theme of love is the theme of fate and free will. Tristan is presented early on as somebody who is destined for sorrow, and the accidental circumstances in which Tristan becomes intoxicated with love magnify the work’s tragedy: No matter how Tristan struggles with his feelings, his efforts seem doomed to fail.
Even before the drinking of the love potion, Gottfried telegraphs that Tristan’s fate is predetermined. The tragic affair of Tristan’s parents foreshadows his own future, with his mother’s death of grief for her dead lover mirroring Isolde’s death at the end of the story. Tristan’s very name suggests not only the tragic circumstances of his birth but also his own tragic fate. In discussing his name, the narrator talks about the “sorrowful life he was given to live” and the “sorrowful death that brought his anguish to a close” (68). The poet uses dramatic irony to signal that Tristan is bound for sadness even as Tristan apparently retains freedom of action.
With the introduction of the love potion, the exact shape of Tristan’s helplessness becomes clear. Notably, neither Tristan nor Isolde choose to drink the potion; they do so unwittingly, mistaking it for wine, yet the apparently minor blunder of mistakenly taking a drink consigns them to their doom, as it creates a sense of desire too strong to resist. Following the error, both Tristan and Isolde attempt to quash or ignore their feelings, but their conscious “wills” ultimately give way: “The lovely woman fought back with might and main, but stuck fast at every step. She was succumbing against her will” (196). By the time of one of the most pivotal junctures of the relationship—its physical consummation—Gottfried depicts the pair as utterly passive in the face of their feelings. Tristan does not go to Isolde’s bed; rather, “Love the physician led Tristan, her sick one, by the hand: and there, too, she found her other patient, Isolde” (201).
In this context, all of Tristan’s positive attributes and achievements only magnify the ultimate tragedy of his fate. There are numerous ironic instances of fate apparently favoring Tristan. For example, when Tristan is at Mark’s court as a boy early in the story, people talk about how inappropriate his name is for him, and a group of retainers says, “God has heaped his bounty on this child for a life of sheer delight” (91). This apparent bounty, however, proves irrelevant in determining the course of Tristan’s life, which the force of his own feelings shapes.
Mixed Fortunes
Until the tragic denouement, fortune is always mixed in Tristan, particularly for the title character. Wherever good luck appears, bad is soon to follow, and bad itself is often followed by good. More broadly, fortune never appears assured but is rather always changing.
The fortunes of Tristan are never steady; as soon as he appears to be secure in his good fortune, he encounters some new obstacle. He thus vacillates between two extremes, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. The narrator at one point says, “Thus these two opposites, constant success and abiding misfortune, were paired together in one man” (111). For example, Tristan’s defeat of Morold wins security for Mark’s kingdom and glory for Tristan herself. In the duel, however, Tristan sustains a poisoned wound and must seek a cure from Morold’s sister or else die.
The text’s exploration of mixed fortunes dovetails in many ways with its exploration of fate and free will. To a large extent, Tristan’s moments of triumph stem from his own talents and actions, whereas his defeats are the result of circumstances (or internal impulses) beyond his control: “[I]n everything that he set his hand to he succeeded for the most part; yet his success was dogged by misfortune” (111). Yet good and bad fortune are not always as distinct as they might seem. Bad fortune necessitates action in order to be repaired, so Tristan displays his talents, travels to different places, adopts new disguises, and fights different enemies. This offers the opportunity for reinvention and allows Tristan to exhibit his talents in front of new people, thus earning even more fame. On the other hand, good fortune has its drawbacks: It is Tristan’s celebrity as a lover, for example, that involves him in the fight where he is fatally poisoned.
The idea that good and bad fortune are inextricably connected owes something to the image of the “Wheel of Fortune,” which figures fate as constantly in motion, raising people to the height of success and then stripping them of everything. The symbol was popular in the Middle Ages because it spoke to the transience of earthly things—a core teaching of the Church.
