Prelude to Valentine Day: A Look at a Lesser-Known Classic of Romantic Literature

Having taught college students for four decades, I can tell you that getting them to read the so-called literary classics is not an easy task. They continually come up with what they often regard as the entirely original idea that we should ditch that crap and let them just study career related subjects. The task is particularly difficult when you are asking them to read a 13th century German work that runs over three hundred pages in the Penguin edition.

Here’s my sales pitch: if you take the ideas in this work seriously, it could determine the course of the rest of your life. Let me explain.

The work is Gottfried Von Strassburg’s Tristan. We don’t know much about Gottfried the man except that he is a sophisticated writer with an aristocratic point view. He is writing in the cultural tradition of courtly love, a literary movement from which we derive many of our clichés of romantic thought and behavior. The movement swept through Europe, spread by troubadours and other artists, and is well-developed when Gottfried makes his contribution in 1210 AD. His work, in fact, may be a send-up of the tradition. But that is not how one major critic reads the work. For the late literary scholar Joseph Campbell, Gottfried’s Tristan is a revolutionary work that ushers in a new age in Western thought.

In an act of titanic oversimplification, let me summarize Campbell’s four volume The Masks of God: primitive people have their gods (volume one), oriental civilization has its gods (volume two), the west has its gods (volume three), modern times leave the old gods behind and find meaning in creative lives focused on relationships with others (volume four). Gottfried’s Tristan marks our departure from lives centered around the old gods to lives centered around fulfillment and meaning found in intense human relationships.

If you sit down to read Gottfried’s book, you need to adjust your expectations. His work is fictional but not a novel in the modern sense. There is no concern for consistent characterization or economy in plotting. The stories can seem repetitive. But if you persist, you will discover a writer keenly aware of our psychological experience of love, an irreverent, sly humorist, and a skillful teller of tales, filled with frank descriptions of the physical nature of attraction along with graphic descriptions of violence. Plus, there’s a dragon, a love portion (illustrated above), trial by ordeal, and magical place called The Cave of Lovers.

The intellectual scaffolding of the work is in its prologue where the author sets himself up as a champion of a certain type of love. It is love that involves great bliss but also great pain, a love almost mystical in the way it combines contradictory sensations. The writer scorns the many who cannot stand the pain of this type of love. He rejects their world, writing, in A.T. Hatto’s translation, “I have another world in mind which together in one heart bears 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. To this life let my life be given, of this world let me be part, to be damned or saved with it.” Given that Gottfried is writing in the Age of Faith, in the age of inquisitions, it is that last line that is particularly daring and significant.

Among the educated classes at the time, Tristan is the familiar figure of the great lover. Action-wise, Gottfried is following the storyline of an older writer known as Thomas. But Gottfried gives the story a new dimension and teases out its implications. Tristan’s name means sadness, and Gottfried argues that this fact shows us the nature of true love. Love is intense joy, but also intense sorrow. For noble hearts, its pull is beyond our will’s power to deny, leading to risk and defiance of moral conventions. It invokes the idea of our soulmate, the one and only person that we are meant to be with, an experience of love that brings a fusing of identities: “They who were two and divided now became one and united…. They shared a single heart. Her anguish was his pain: his pain her anguish. The two were one both in joy and sorrow….” This sense of a soulmate echoes today in our popular culture. Few couples standing at the altar feel that their partner is merely the person who has submitted the best romantic resume. For Tristan, there is only his adulterous love interest Isolde, and for Isolde, there is only Tristan. In their story, we recognize the cultural contraption of romantic love celebrated on Valentine Day.

I leave my students with these questions: Is Gottfried right about the nature and significance of romantic love? Should you be searching for your soulmate and is there only one? If you settle for less than the Tristan-Isolde experience of love, are you abandoning your only possibility for true happiness and meaning in life? If you don’t settle for anything less than the Tristan-Isolde experience, are you perhaps pursuing an impossible or harmful ideal and forsaking other opportunities for meaning and happiness? Thankfully, teachers can provide questions without having to provide answers.