The text of Tristan is 19,548 lines long, and is written, like all courtly romances, in rhyming couplets.
The first section (ll. 1-44) of the prologue is written in quatrains and is referred to as the "strophic prologue", while pairs of quatrains, of sententious content, mark the main divisions of the story. The initial letters of the quatrains, indicated by large initials in some manuscripts, form an acrostic with the names Gotefrid-Tristan-Isolde, which runs throughout the poem. In addition, the initial letters of the quatrains in the prologue give the name Dieterich, which is assumed to have been the name of Gottfried's patron.
If Gottfried had completed Tristan it would probably have been around 24,000 lines long.
