Four Arthurian Romances

Chrétien de Troyes, a poet at the court of Champagne in the twelfth century, wrote the first great Arthurian romances, and this volume translates four of them. In Erec and Enide a knight neglects his duties for love of his wife, then tests her on a perilous journey; Cligès is a story of love and deception in Constantinople; in Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, a knight who breaks his promise to his wife goes mad, recovers and is followed everywhere by a grateful lion; and in Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Lancelot accepts the shame of riding in a criminal's cart to rescue Queen Guinevere.

Chrétien's poems, written between about 1170 and 1190, introduced Lancelot as Guinevere's lover and Camelot as Arthur's court, and they made courtly love the heart of the legend. This prose translation, of 1914, is by W. W. Comfort. Welsh tales of some of the same heroes are in The Mabinogion.