Passion as a Form of Communication in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan

Abstract

The love between Tristan and Isolde in Gottfried von Strassburg's version of Tristan is seen to be unique. Gottfried has striven to transcend the tradition established by his contemporaries and presents his audience with a new form of love that is endlessly complex, full of paradox, and seemingly without boundaries. For this reason, contextualizing the work within the tradition of medieval narrative has proven difficult, and scholars admit that many aspects of Tristan and Isolde's love still remain inscrutable. C. Stephen Jaeger has recently argued that the kind of love found in Gottfried's Tristan evolved from "ennobling love," an ethic of love and friendship that was prevalent in medieval monasteries and universities as well as at court. According to Jaeger, "Ennobling love had always been primarily a way of acting and behaving, and only secondarily a feeling." It is "love subjected to reason and discipline, love as a source of virtue, love as a learnable discipline that one can put into practice like any other ethic of behavior." 1 Self-discipline and virtue came from overcoming the sexual impulse and abstaining from the physical expression of sexuality. In Jaeger's view, the twelfth century "completely revalued and redefined" ennobling love by attempting a "reconciliation of ennobling love with physical love" (196). Jaeger calls this phenomenon "passionate love." He finds evidence of its social manifestation in the letters of Abelard and Heloise and considers Gottfried's Tristan to be a literary expression of passionate love. Jaeger asks how passionate love can confer "aura, prestige, [and] rank": "How can it claim virtue, while admitting virtue's old enemy, the sexual act, as the natural end of love and full partner in the exalting process?" (159).

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