Love Me, Hurt Me, Heal Me—Isolde Healer and Isolde Lover in Gottfried's Tristan

This article examines representations of women as healers and lovers in Gottfried's von Strassburg Tristan. I argue that Gottfried's casting of women—Queen Isolde, Isolde the Fair, and Tristan's mother Blanscheflur—as healers emphasizes notions of gender disparities that lie at the core of medico‐scientific and literary depictions of lovesickness. Gottfried, however, in contrast to other authors whose names are associated with the Tristan and Isolde story, creates two Isoldes out of one. By carving the character of Queen Isolde out of Isolde the Fair, Gottfried ingeniously separates the hurtful and healing Queen Isolde from the lover, Isolde the Fair. In doing so, he abandons the tension that is constitutive of the depictions of unfulfilled love in Minnesang poetry where women are both adored and dreaded, bring both intense joy and unbearable misery, and carry the key to greatest physical wellbeing as well as to death. He is able, in turn, to create the experience of love—though still painful—as something based on parity and correspondence. Gottfried's subtle rewriting of the roles of Isolde the Fair and Queen Isolde especially with regard to their capacities as healers is, I argue, a key element in his conception of a novel kind of male‐female relationship, commonly referred to by scholars as Tristanminne.