Text
The text of Tristan is 19,548 lines long, and is written, like all courtly romances, in rhyming couplets.
The first section (ll. 1-44) of the prologue is written in quatrains and is referred to as the "strophic prologue", while pairs of quatrains, of sententious content, mark the main divisions of the story. The initial letters of the quatrains, indicated by large initials in some manuscripts, form an acrostic with the names Gotefrid-Tristan-Isolde, which runs throughout the poem. In addition, the initial letters of the quatrains in the prologue give the name Dieterich, which is assumed to have been the name of Gottfried's patron.
If Gottfried had completed Tristan it would probably have been around 24,000 lines long.
Read more about this topic: Gottfried Von Strassburg
Famous quotes containing the word text:
“I am so glad you have been able to preserve the text in all of its impurity.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren’t a little flower somebody sewed on.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)