Gottfried von Strasburg.

Gottfried von Strasburg. a famous medieval German poet, who flourished about the close of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century, contemporary with Hartmann von Aue, whom he celebrates as the first of German narrators, Wolfram von Eschenbach, to the prologue of whose Parzival he alludes, and Walter von der Vogelweide. Gottfried's poem, Tristan und Isolde, extends to 19,552 short rhymed lines, but was left unfinished, and ends abruptly. It was completed about 1210, and he himself died between that year and 1220. The story itself is of course of Celtic origin; and there is hardly another theme that has laid such a potent spell upon the imagination of poets in every age. Gottfried's immediate source was a poem of the French trouvère Thomas, of which only fragments now exist; but in his hands the theme has been treated with a new poetic vigour and mastery at once of pathos and of passion. Gottfried's works, with later continuations of Tristan by Ulrich von Türheim and Heinrich von Freiberg, were published by Fr. Heinrich von der Hagen (1823). The best edition is that of Bechstein (2d ed. 1873). Modern German translations have been given by Kurtz (1844), Simrock (1885), and Wilh. Hertz (1877). Wagner has made use of Tristan for his opera Tristan und Isolde. See works by Franck (1865) and Golther (1887).