Originally written in Old French, sometime in the second half of the 12th Century A. This electronic edition was edited, proofed, and prepared by Douglas B. Killings DeTroyes EnterAct. COM , November Carroll, Carleton W. Edited with a translation see Penguin Classics edition below. Kibler, William W. Original text with English translation See Penguin Classics edition below. Micha, Alexandre Ed. Cline, Ruth Harwood Trans.
Carroll Trans. Highly recommended. Owen, D. R Trans. English translation of one of the earliest prose romances concerning Lancelot. 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. 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. 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 a case than to prepare the reader to overlook these common faults, and to set before him the literary significance of this twelfth-century poet. Chretien de Troyes wrote in Champagne during the third quarter of the twelfth century.
She was the daughter of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she is called in English histories, who, coming from the South of France in , first to Paris and later to England, may have had some share in the introduction of those ideals of courtesy and woman service which were soon to become the cult of European society.
