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 today. To eliminate them entirely, however, would be to create a false modernity, so we have in some instances preferred to respect the works’ ‘otherness’ and retain archaic words for which there exist no precise modern equivalent. These terms are explained in the Glossary of Medieval Terms that immediately follows the Appendix.

As Cervantes once lamented, reading a translation is like viewing a tapestry from the back. Through the knots and loose ends you can make out the central design and colour, but it is impossible to recreate the original in all its subtlety, detail and energy. We have attempted to provide a straightforward English prose rendition of Chrétien’s romances, but one which retains some of the richness and flow of the original. We have sought to remain as faithful as possible to Chrétien’s text, while keeping in mind the habits and needs of the contemporary reader. The elliptical nature of Old French syntax, as well as its tendency to separate relative clauses from their antecedents and to use a postpositioned subject, frequently necessitated substantial syntactical modifications. Like other writers of his day, Chrétien made little effort to avoid ambiguity in his use of personal pronouns, so we have frequently clarified ambiguous referents by the use of proper names. Nor have we attempted to reproduce the tenses of the original exactly, for Old French allowed apparently indiscriminate switching between past and present for narrative, a technique which only appears inattentive in modern English.

Divisions into paragraphs according to modern usage have been provided by the translators. Medieval manuscripts divided the poems into lengthy sections, often of many hundreds of lines each, by the use of decorative initials, but these were the work of the scribes rather than the poet and vary in frequency and placement from manuscript to manuscript. The line numbers provided in the running heads correspond to those in the editions used to make the translations.

Until 1987 the only available English translation of Chrétien’s major romances (except The Story of the Grail) was that by W. W. Comfort, published in the Everyman’s Library series in 1914 and reprinted well into the 1980s. Although accurate in the main, its Victorian style had become antiquated and accessible only with difficulty.