LLT 180 Lecture 22 1 Today we're gonna pick up with Gottfried von Strassburg. As most of you already know, and it's been alleged and I readily admit, that I'm an occasional attention slut. Obviously, otherwise, I wouldn't permit it to be recorded for TV. And, you know, if you pick up your Standard today, it always surprises me -- actually, if you live in Springfield, you might have met me before without realizing it. I like to cook and a colleague in the department -- his wife's an editor for the Springfield paper and she also writes a weekly column for the "Home" section. And so he and I were talking about pans one day and I was, you know, saying, "Well," you know, "so many people fail to cook because they don't have the perfect pan." And she was wanting to write an article about pans. She'd been trying to convince him to buy better pans. And so she said, "Hey, would you pose for a picture with pans? I'm writing this article." And so I said, "Oh, what the heck." And so she came over and took this photo. And a couple of weeks later, I opened Sunday morning's paper -- 'cause I knew it was gonna be in that week -- and went over to the "Home" section. And there was this color photo, about this big, and I went, "Oh, crap," you know. So whatever. Gottfried. Again, as they tell you here, we don't know much about these people, and this is really about love. And, as several of you mentioned, the focus obviously in the Chrétien material was about love, and he did write something about Tristan and Isolde before. We don't know a lot about Gottfried. If you didn't read this whole long introduction -- LLT 180 Lecture 22 2 and there's a lot of good stuff in there. Actually, it's probably better for me if you didn't read the big long introduction. Because then when I say some of the clever things from the Introduction, you'll think I thought 'em up. Whereas actually, I just read the introduction. A couple of places you can look for material -- and I've mentioned this book before - - and I'm gonna use it mainly. They're longer sources we can use. But this does a really good job in English, in the Encyclopedia of Literature, just giving you a quick overview of an author without reading a 15-page introduction. And what they tell you about Gottfried, the date in here -- I think marked 12-10 or mark 12-10 sometime -- is supposed to be when this work appeared. And this says, referring to Gottfried. And just to give credence to what I said, I said these really important people and we talk about Chrétien -- we talk about Wolfram, Walther from the Vogelweide, the great medieval poet. These people are usually referred to by their first names. And you see in this article -- I don't know if it's big enough you can see it, but it says Gottfried von Strassburg and Gottfried is blown up. Like, you know, you look him up under Gottfried, you look him up under von Strassburg. This is one of the greatest medieval poets whose quarterly epic Tristan, probably written about 1210, is the classic version of this famous love story. The only information about Gottfried consists of references to him in the work of other poets, and inferences from his own work. However, the breadth of his learning displayed in Tristan reveals that he must've been well educated and accustomed to polite society. He acknowledges, and he says this readily in the beginning of the book, that he LLT 180 Lecture 22 3 views the right telling of the story to be by the one of Thomas -- by Thomas of Brittany, which appeared somewhere 1160, 1170, allegedly at the same time that Chrétien was supposed to be working on this story. And so we have this kind of Anglo-Norman-French version of the story. Gottfried's moral purpose -- and so here we have something very moral -- as he states in the Prologue, is to present to courtiers, people at court, an ideal of love. And so some of this might get really aaagggghhh. And everybody dies, so good. The core of this ideal is that love, minne -- and this very term minne has been much discussed, courtly love. There end up being two words in medieval German. One, which definitely is just kind of lust without anything else, and then minne which is more -- kind of an incorporated idea of lust with everything else, or everything else with lust, or however you want to do that. The core of this ideal is that love ennobles through the suffering -- what a bummer -- with which it is inseparably linked. And so we have a good, romantic ideal here: that good and bad are, you know, tied together; that love and suffering are tied together. And so extreme joy and suffering are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. The ideal Gottfried enshrines in the story in which actions are motivated and justified not by a standard ethic, but by the conventions of courtly love. Thus, the love potion -- and there's a love potion in here. And there's been a lot of discussion about whether this love potion really existed or whether the love potion -- when we get to that point, we can decide whether it's just a device that symbolizes Tristan and Isolde becoming aware of their strong LLT 180 Lecture 22 4 feelings for each other since they're trapped on a boat. Thus, the love potion, instead of being the direct cause of the tragedy, as in primitive versions of the Tristan story. So in the primitive version it was viewed there really was the magicpotion that you had to watch out for. It is treated with sophistication as a mere outward symbol of the nature of lovers' passion. Tragic, because -- and it's justified by the courts of love because of its spontaneity. Although unfinished, Gottfried's is the finest -- finest. So this is not German literature itself. It's somebody writing about all world literature. 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 contents and by the elaborate skills demonstrated in the poetic technique. And so he's a great stylist, if we read it in the medieval German -- which, obviously, we're not going to do. You know, he's noted for being a great stylist and also for his high content. So as we pick this up, then -- a story you should be familiar with, you know -- the Isolde swoon and all this. And if we don't pick this up until well into this edition, pretty classic edition by Penguin Classics, obviously a classic edition, with the Prologue. And as we start into the Prologue, we see immediately some of these -- [Inaudible student response.] I'm gonna have to ponder that. I don't see that it particularly spells anything. Especially with that story with the G. You know, you wouldn't have -- LLT 180 Lecture 22 5 [Inaudible student response.] Good question. No answer. I don't see that it's some trick. Sometimes it is, but I'll ponder it and give you an answer. Other questions? Never thought about it. We get this word play. If we go down toward -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 -- what would be the 8th stanza in the Prologue, "There are so many today who are given to judging the good bad and the bad good." And so this combination, this little thing he does of good/bad, bad/good, tying things together, which is first or do we have two things here that are equal. So later they'll talk about Tristan/Isolde, Isolde/Tristan. They'll talk about love/sorrow, sorrow/love. You know, it's impossible to take one without the other, that these belong together. And it's just something he consistently does and so it's an important part of his stylistics. For whom is this written? For whom is this written? It's not written for any of us. It's written for people with noble hearts. So people in the polite world. As we go on, on the top of the next page, as we go on after he stops translating the stuff more in an attempt to go stanza by stanza, but only to his prose translation, he says, "Thus I have undertaken a labour to please the polite world and to solace noble hearts." And so we're dealing with not common world, but the polite world and we're dealing with noble hearts. Hearts who not only love but are interested in love, interested in the ideal of love, and would like to read and talk about it being educated. And so he even says, "Hey, this is not for the many." This is a few lines further. "I do not mean the world of the many." And then we once again immediately get back to this idea of word pairs. He says, LLT 180 Lecture 22 6 . their way and mine diverge sharply. [that is, from the common people] I have another world in mind which together in one heart beats 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.