in the Everyman Library
catalogue. Highly recommended.

RECOMMENDED READING--

Anonymous: "Lancelot of the Lake" (Trans: Corin Corely; Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1989). English translation of one of the
earliest prose romances concerning Lancelot.

Anonymous: "The Mabinogion" (Ed: Jeffrey Gantz; Penguin Classics,
London, 1976). Contains a translation of "Geraint and Enid", an earlier
Welsh version of "Erec et Enide".

Anonymous: "Yvain and Gawain", "Sir Percyvell of Gales", and "The Anturs
of Arther" (Ed: Maldwyn Mills; Everyman, London, 1992). NOTE: Texts are
in Middle-English; "Yvain and Gawain" is a Middle-English work based
almost exclusively on Chretien DeTroyes' "Yvain".

Malory, Sir Thomas: "Le Morte D'Arthur" (Ed: Janet Cowen; Penguin
Classics, London, 1969).

*****

INTRODUCTION

Chretien De Troyes has had the peculiar fortune of becoming the best
known of the old French poets to students of mediaeval literature, and
of remaining practically unknown to any one else. The acquaintance of
students with the work of Chretien has been made possible in academic
circles by the admirable critical editions of his romances undertaken
and carried to completion during the past thirty years by Professor
Wendelin Foerster of Bonn. At the same time the want of public
familiarity with Chretien's work is due to the almost complete lack of
translations of his romances into the modern tongues. The man who, so
far as we know, first recounted the romantic adventures of Arthur's
knights, Gawain. Yvain, Erec, Lancelot, and Perceval, has been
forgotten; whereas posterity has been kinder to his debtors, Wolfram
yon Eschenbach, Malory, Lord Tennyson, and Richard Wagner. The present
volume has grown out of the desire to place these romances of adventure
before the reader of English in a prose version based directly upon the
oldest form in which they exist.

Such extravagant claims for Chretien's art have been made in some
quarters that one feels disinclined to give them even an echo here.
The modem reader may form his own estimate of the poet's art, and that
estimate will probably not be high. Monotony, lack of proportion,
vain repetitions, insufficient motivation, wearisome subtleties, and
threatened, if not actual, indelicacy are among the most salient defects
which will arrest, and mayhap confound, the reader unfamiliar with
mediaeval literary craft. No greater service can be performed by an
editor in such