Tristan the Christian
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Tristan the Christian
Tristan eloquently displays many truths of love. This moving narrative explains the sorrow and the joy, the anguish and the ecstasy, of pure love. Gottfried von Strassburg describes the nature of a love comparatively different from that in the Homeric world. Much of this difference comes from the innate differences between the Homeric gods and Gottfried's Christian God. Whereas Greek society projected its erotic and physical human love to the characters of the gods, the Gottfriedian Tristan acts in response to and imitating divine love. Tristan acts according to the will of God, according to what is right by God. This story of the affairs of Tristan evokes the sacrificial love of Christ and the necessary sorrow that accompanies such a profound joy.
In the Prologue, Gottfried employs Eucharistic language to the story of Tristan and Isolde:
This is bread to all noble hearts. With this their death lives on. We read their life, we read their death, and to us it is sweet as bread...