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)
“What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)