While the Charlemagne epics provided us with dramatic contexts of murder, treason, and power struggles for trial by battle, trial by fire — the ordeal of choice in cases involving adultery — is more at home in the romance. This ordeal makes its most famous literary appearance in one of the great narrative traditions of medieval literature, the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde. In the case of the Tristan material as Gottfried von Straßburg shaped it, including his famous commentary on the ordeal by fire, we are in the fortunate position of being able to compare contemporary attitudes toward both ordeals portrayed in the same work, ordeals that, as we have seen in the introduction, suffered widely different fates historically. Although we know little about Gottfried von Straßburg, except that he probably received a master's degree from the new university in Paris and served in the office of the bishop of Strasbourg, he does tell us something about his sources, the principal one being Thomas of Britain. It is clear from the prologue that he knew other versions of the Tristan story, but Thomas's is the only one of which he approved. Such explicit statements about sources are rare in medieval literature, but an even more interesting aspect is why Gottfried believed that Thomas's version of the story was best. Perhaps his choice had to do with Isolde; in Thomas, Tristan's love for Isolde means more to him than his honor.