Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/878

854 1em (undefined) GOTTFRIED. Meister Gottfried of, the most brilliant of the, flourished about the  and. Of his life and position we have no certain information, for he has told us next to nothing about himself, and contemporary records are dubious and confusing. It would seem, however, that he was a man of and position, who filled an important   in his native  of. His chief work was about, and we may confidently place his death between  and. We know from his writings that he was a man of high, but it is almost certain that he was not a. Of this his occasional sneers at the are perhaps a better proof than the dubious  of much of his work. Gottfried one great, Tristan und Isolt. The story is of ; it came first from and, thence was carried to , and thence to. Few have been so often treated or have had so wide an influence upon. A very few s will suffice to give Gottfried’s version of it. of has a  named, whom he sends to woo vicariously, and bring home as  of , the beautiful ,  of. The goes on his mission, is successful, and sets out with  on the homeward journey. Before they reach, however, they unfortunately drink a  which ’s mother had intended to be given to her daughter by  of. The consequence of the mistake is that the young people fall madly and hopelessly in with one another. The wild force of their soon causes them to disregard  and prudence alike, and the bulk of the  is devoted to an account of the numerous complications which in time arose. Of course soon becomes suspicious, and at last his suspicions become certainties. withdraws to, and enters into an with a  of , whose very —, the white-ed—has a strange  for him. But he finds that he really cares nothing for this new ; the memory of rises powerfully in his ; and he gives utterances to his doubts and perplexities in a, with which the  abruptly concludes. Tristan is thus an unfinished work; still it is a tolerably long one, as it consists of 19,552 short d lines. The style is highly finished. There is an istic choice of fit s, a frequent use of and -, and a skilful management of the. But these are, of course, only side matters. The permanent interest of the consists in its representation of, and in the knowledge it shows of the. The plain, rude, when told by Gottfried, takes a depth and that are hardly its own. All is described, too, with such clear, bright touches, and such vivid force, that the seems somehow a  of. Its indeed is not high; but this objection did not probably occur to those who first read it. If we judge it by a purely standard, we must pronounce it worthy of an important place in the  of. Tristan was not allowed to remain a fragment. Ulrich von Türheim (about ) and Heinrich von Freiberg (about ) both wrote continuations and conclusions of the work, which certainly fell far short of the original. Of Gottfried’s other writings, only some s in the ordinary style of the remain to us. Two longer s, entitled Lobgesang auf die Jungfrau Maria and Gedicht von der Armuth, were long attributed to him, but recent has conclusively proved that they are the work of others. Gottfried’s influence on was very great, and a proof of this is the number of s who treated the  after the plan he had laid down. All these, from Hans Sachs (–) to Immermann (–), may fairly be claimed as his followers.

1em  GÖTTINGEN, the chief of a  of the same name in the  of  and  of, , is pleasantly situated at the foot of the  in the fertile  of the , about 67  to the south of , on the  and. It is traversed by the, which separates the Altstadt from the Neustadt and Masch; and it is surrounded by which are planted with   and form an agreeable. The in the older part of the  are for the most part crooked and narrow, but the newer portions are spaciously and regularly. Apart from the and the numerous , it has few  of any public importance. There are several thriving, including, besides the various branches of the , the  of  and , and of physical and. The, the famous Georgia Augusta, founded by in , and opened in , rapidly attained a leading position, and in   its  numbered 1547. disturbances, in which both s and were implicated, lowered the attendance to 860 in ; and the expulsion of the famous seven  (,, , , , and the ) in  still 