SOURCE: Sobel, Eli. Introduction to The Tristan Romance in the Meisterlieder of Hans Sachs. University of California Publications in Modern Philology 40, no. 2 (1963): 223-55.

In the following essay, Sobel considers Sachs's handling of the popular German romance of Tristan and Isolde, arguing that his version was unique among writers who have dealt with the story.

The romance of Tristan and Isolde was introduced to the German public by the late twelfth-century poet Eilhart von Oberge. Later, about 1210, Gottfried von Strassburg produced his masterful Middle High German rendering, a version based on the Old French poem by Thomas of Brittany. But Gottfried's work, although over 19,500 lines long, is a fragment and ends before Tristan is wed to Isolde of the White Hands and before the other adventures that precede the death of Tristan.¹ In the hands of Ulrich von Türheim (1240), Heinrich von Freiberg (1290), and an anonymous third poet, the...