The introduction pursues three aims: it examines the problems of representing beginnings in literary history in general; it explains the value of a literary history that focuses on the beginnings, rather than the subsequent development, of vernacular literatures in medieval Europe; and it describes the advantages of a comparative approach. In respect of the first aim, it argues that we should neither posit a unitary beginning for literature in any language nor think in terms of causes and effects: every literary tradition passes through multiple moments of incipience and opening, and their study reveals conditions of possibility, not mechanistic causes. Second, a concentration on beginning obliges us to define what begins, thereby bringing to light the distinctive features of each vernacular literature. Third, the comparative perspective reveals the matrix of defining characteristics that the nascent European literatures of the Middle Ages all share: their manuscript materiality, their institutionalization in systems of textual practice which confer stability and persistence in space and time, and, finally, their linguistic vernacularity, which defines them over against their respective ‘parental’ literacies in Latin, Greek, or Church Slavonic.

This chapter surveys the formation of German vernacular literature between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Instead of one single beginning, from which all the rest flows, we encounter a series of inaugural gestures and moments of inception, not all of which extended into posterity. The great monuments of Old High German literature, produced in the ninth century, are isolated works that did not give rise to continuous traditions of textual production; for that development, we have to wait until the second half of the eleventh century, when an astonishingly self-assured and formally sophisticated literature – now linguistically Middle High German – burst onto the scene. In the course of the twelfth century, religious genres were joined by secular ones, and the pragmatic functions of informing and instructing the public were supplemented by an interest in the potentialities of poetic language and distinctly literary modes of cognition. Finally, by the early thirteenth century, a palpable sense had emerged among collectors and authors that German literature has both a canon and a history; the constitution of manuscript anthologies and literary genealogies represents a further beginning in the formation of German literature as a dynamic system, as well as itself positing beginnings.

The court, says Hartmann von Aue in the prologue to his Arthurian romance Iwein (c. 1190/1200), is not what it was in Arthur's time. Yet, he adds, ‘I should not want to have lived then, and not be alive now, when their story must still delight us; then they had pleasure by performing the deeds’ (ed. G. F. Benecke and K. Lachmann, rev. L. Wolff, Berlin, 1968, 54–8). In refusing to swap a world with fine stories but no fine deeds for one that has the deeds but not the stories, Hartmann expresses his preference for living in the present, when there are two distinct orders of reality: one factual and deficient, the other literary and perfect. The rise of romance in the twelfth century fostered the awareness that literature can make and give access to a reality all of its own; the modern term for this kind of writing, for which the authors of medieval romances had no name, is ‘fiction’.

The absence of the word does not mean that the concept did not exist; statements like Hartmann's show that medieval authors did conceive of a specifically literary order of reality. Critical debates have therefore been more concerned with two other questions: how far romance fiction was influenced by Latin rhetoric and poetics, and how different it is from modern literary fiction.

The story

(1) Gottfried's narrative begins with Tristan's parents, Riwalin, the lord of Parmenie, and Blanscheflur, the sister of King Mark of Cornwall. They fall in love while Riwalin is perfecting his chivalry at Mark's court; she becomes pregnant and elopes with him to Parmenie, where they marry. Riwalin is killed in a war with his old enemy Duke Morgan; grief-stricken, Blanscheflur gives birth to a son and dies. (245–1790)

(2) The orphan is adopted by Riwalin's marshal, Rual, and his wife Floraete. In order to protect Riwalin's heir from Morgan's violence, they give out that the child is their own; they baptize him Tristan. The boy receives training in all the accomplishments that make the perfect knight and courtier. Fourteen years old, he is kidnapped by Norwegian merchants and eventually released in Cornwall. Thanks to his skills as huntsman, musician and linguist, he wins the favour of King Mark and his court, pretending all the while to be the son of a merchant from Parmenie. The pretence ends when Rual, who has been searching for his foster-son for over three years, turns up in Cornwall and reveals to Mark and Tristan that they are uncle and nephew. The king accepts Tristan as legitimate kin, and dubs him a knight. (1791–5068)

(3) Tristan goes home to Parmenie as Riwalin's successor. He enfeoffs his vassals, avenges his father's death by killing Morgan, and knights Rual's sons along with several others, including his tutor and loyal friend Curvenal.

The love of Tristan and Isolde reaches its full potential not in the life they have lived, but in literature. It flourishes in the idyll of the grotto, which is simultaneously Gottfried's bright graceful style, and it endures in memory – the joint recollection of the lovers and, crucially, the commemoration that Gottfried posits as constitutive of the literary process. Past love is offered like a eucharist for the sustenance of noble hearts, those contemporaries of the author whose sensibility is aroused, sharpened and confirmed by the story of bittersweet passion. Thus the love of Tristan and Isolde does not grow cold, the past is remembered and renewed in the present, death becomes new life. In what, though, does this new life consist? Is it active imitation of the exemplary lovers in one's own affairs? Or is it realized in the contemplative self-immersion of noble hearts in the fictional structures of the literary text? The drift of Gottfried's great macrostructural commentaries runs in the latter direction, toward a renewal of love in the imagination, not in practice. This bold conception of the fictive potential of literature, and its articulation by means of stupendous metaphors, make Tristan a landmark in world literature.

Gottfried himself staked a claim to the title of landmark, not in world literature, of course, but in the German literature of his day. In his literary excursus he insinuates his status as laureate in the flourishing tradition of German poetry.

God creates, man imitates. Such were the limits placed on human creativity by Hugh of St Victor (1097–1141), who formulated a hierarchical division of labour between God, nature and man: God alone can make something out of nothing; nature brings forth what was hidden; the human artificer copies nature, joining what was dispersed and separating what was joined (PL 176, 747). Hugh gives a theologian's perspective on what in any case was an important characteristic of medieval art and literature, the one that modern observers are also most likely to find disconcerting: its traditionalism. Visual artists reproduced models; lyric poets drew on a common stock of situations, roles, metaphors and genres, reworking and recombining them; narrative authors retold stories about people whose names and exploits were already fixed in the repertoire of tradition. Gottfried, on his own admission, is no exception: ‘I know well that there have been many who have told the story of Tristan’ (131–2). The tradition not only provided Gottfried with a story, however; it also presented him with different ways of telling it. In order to see which possibilities Gottfried took up and developed, we must approach his work through the tradition out of which it came.

Traditionalism need not mean monotony or lack of originality, in spite of what detractors of medieval literature might say.