Friedrich Ranke was a German medievalist philologist and folklorist. His Old Norse textbook Altnordisches Elementarbuch remains a standard, and all literature concerning Gottfried von Strassburgs Tristan und Isold uses Ranke's line numbering for references to the text.

Gottfried von Strassburg is the author of the Middle High German courtly romance Tristan, an adaptation of the 12th-century Tristan and Iseult legend. Gottfried's work is regarded, alongside the Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, as one of the great narrative masterpieces of the German Middle Ages. He is probably also the composer of a small number of surviving lyrics. His work became a source of inspiration for Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde (1865).