Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes Read Free Book Online

nineteenth century.
    Thanks to Malory, the Arthurian materials were never lost sight of so completely in England, and Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
reflect the vogue for Arthuriana in the Romantic period. Today in both England and America there is a renewed and lively interest in the Arthurian legends that Chrétien was the first to exploit as the subject matter for romance. All those who have celebrated and still celebrate King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table – from the anonymous authors of the
Lancelot-Graal
through Malory and Tennyson to Steinbeck, Boorman and Bradley today – are forever in his debt.
    William W. Kibler
June 1989

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

    It is acknowledged as fact that there exists no adequate edition of Chrétien’s romances on which to base a translation. Like any medieval text that exists in more than one manuscript, there are significant variations between one version and the next. Wording often differs slightly from text to text, lines may be inverted or moved, and occasionally whole passages are altered significantly or omitted. It is the editor’s job to make sense of these variants and to produce a text that is as authoritative as possible. The first editor of Chrétien’s romances, Wendelin Foerster, produced a composite text for each poem based on all manuscripts known to him. This composite edition, although highly personal in many cases and occasionally productive of lines that could not be found in any medieval version, is still generally recognized as the best overall edition of Chrétien’s works. A second approach to editing Chrétien was taken by Mario Roques and Alexandre Micha in their editions of
Erec, Cligés, Lancelot
, and
Yvain
for the Classiques français du moyen âge series. They chose a single manuscript, the so-called ‘Guiot MS’, which they believed to be the best overall and the closest to Chrétien’s usage, and reproduced it as exactly as possible, eliminating only some of the most flagrant scribal slips. However, this ultra-conservative approach resulted in a text that in many instances was demonstrably not that of the great Champenois poet. With the exception of
Cligés
, therefore, for which we have used the Foerster edition as the base, the following translations are all done from new editions of the romances. These editions, like Roques’s and Micha’s, are based on the Guiot MS, but we have attempted to find a middle ground between Foerster’s eclecticism and Roques’s conservatism, intervening and emending whenever there was a problem in Guiot and a satisfactory solution could be found in the other manuscripts. These editions, along with facing-page translations, were first published in the Garland Library of Medieval Literature. 1
    Specific textual problems affecting the translations are discussed in the notes to the GLML editions. However, the line-for-line translations in the GLML have been rearranged and substantially revised for this volume in light of the most recent scholarship. Reconsideration of the syntax or interpretation of a number of lines of the original has led in some instances to modifications in the translations. Of particular value in this respect have been Brian Woledge’s recent two volumes of
Commentaire sur Yvain.
As the changes are for the most part minor and of interest only to Old French textual specialists, we have refrained from mentioning them in the notes to the present translations. Nor have we sought to use the notes to guide our readers’ interpretations of Chrétien, preferring to limit ourselves to explaining historical, topical, and classical allusions that might enhance their understanding and appreciation of the text.
    The gap of eight hundred years between the composition of these poems and our reading them cannot be wholly bridged by the notes. Some terminology and institutions that were familiar then are no longer with us