Nat. 375 and Chantilly 472 contain many other romances contemporary to and sometimes inspired by those of Chrétien. Twenty-three other manuscripts contain just one of Chrétien’s romances, usually accompanied by one work by some other author. Erec, Cligés, The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion exist more or less complete in seven manuscripts each, while The Story of the Grail is preserved by no less than fifteen.

The number of manuscripts of Chrétien’s works that have come down to us from the medieval period is eloquent testimony to his popularity and importance, although from numerous fragments we can suspect that even more manuscripts were destroyed than have been saved. His romances are most often found in manuscript collections, like Bibl. Nat. 794 and 1450, that contain pseudo-historical accounts of ancient history, to which the Arthurian material was purportedly linked, or in manuscripts containing a wide variety of other courtly romances. His unfinished The Story of the Grail is found most frequently with its verse continuations (see Appendix).

From manuscript evidence we know that both The Story of the Grail and The Knight of the Cart were left unfinished by Chrétien. Many believe that he abandoned The Knight of the Cart because he was dissatisfied with the subject matter, which may have been imposed on him by his patroness, Marie de Champagne; and most critics accept that The Story of the Grail was interrupted by Chrétien’s death, or by that of his patron, Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders. The other romances – Erec and Enide, Cligés, and The Knight with the Lion were completed by Chrétien. Three additional narrative poems have been ascribed to him, with varying degrees of success. Despite the doubts of its most recent editor (A. J. Holden 1988), many believe that the hagiographical romance William of England, whose author names himself Crestéens in its first line, is by our poet; on the other hand, attempted attributions to Chrétien of Le Chevalier à l’épée (The Knight with the Sword) and La Mule sans frein (The Unbridled Mule), two romances found with The Story of the Grail in MS Berne 354, have not met with widespread acceptance. In addition to these narrative works, Chrétien has left us two lyric poems in the courtly manner, which make him the first identifiable practitioner in northern France of the courtly lyric style begun by the troubadours in the South in the early years of the twelfth century.

In the prologue to Cligés, his second romance, Chrétien includes a list of works he had previously composed:

Cil qui fist d’Erec et d’Enide,
Et les comandemanz d’Ovide
Et l’art d’amors en romanz mist,
Et le mors de l’espaule fist,
Del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde,
Et de la hupe et de l’aronde
Et del rossignol la muance,
Un novel conte recomance
D’un vaslet qui an Grece fu
Del lignage le roi Artu. [1–10]

[He who wrote Erec and Enide, who translated Ovid’s Commandments and the Art of Love into French, who wrote The Shoulder Bite, and about King Mark and Isolde the Blonde, and of the metamorphosis of the hoopoe, swallow, and nightingale, begins now a new tale of a youth who, in Greece, was of King Arthur’s line.]

Since this prologue mentions only Erec among his major romances, it is assumed that The Knight of the Cart, The Knight with the Lion and The Story of the Grail all postdate Cligés. From this listing it seems established that early in his career Chrétien perfected his technique by practising the then popular literary mode of translations and adaptations of tales from Latin into the vernacular. The ‘comandemanz d’Ovide’ is usually identified with Ovid’s Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love); the ‘art d’amors’ is Ovid’s Ars amatoria (Art of Love), and the ‘mors de l’espaule’ is the Pelops story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 6. These works by Chrétien have all been lost. However, the ‘muance de la hupe et de l’aronde et del rossignol’ (the Philomela story in Metamorphoses 6) is preserved in the late thirteenth-century Ovide moralisé, a lengthy allegorical treatment of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in a version that is most probably by our author.

Chrétien also informs us in this passage that he composed a poem ‘Del roi Marc et d’Iseut la blonde’. As far as we know, this was the first treatment of that famous Breton legend in French. Chrétien does not tell us whether he had written a full account of the tragic loves of Tristan and Isolde, and scholars today generally agree that he treated only an episode of that legend since Mark’s name, and not Tristan’s, is linked with Isolde’s. But we are none the less permitted to believe that he is in some measure responsible for the subsequent success of that story, as he was to be in large measure for that of King Arthur. Indeed, in his earliest romances Chrétien seems obsessed with the Tristan legend, which he mentions several times in Erec and Enide and against which his Cligés (often referred to as an ‘anti-Tristan’) is seen to react.

In the prologues to his other romances (only The Knight with the Lion has no prologue) Chrétien often speaks in the first person about his poetry and purposes. He gives us the fullest version of his name, Crestïens de Troies, in the prologue to Erec, and this designation is also used by Huon de Mery in the Tornoiement Antecrist, by Gerbert de Montreuil in his Continuation of The Story of the Grail and by the anonymous authors of Hunbaut, Le Chevalier à l’épée, and the Didot-Perceval. In the prologues to Cligés (l. 45), The Knight of the Cart (l. 25), and The Story of the Grail (l. 62), and in the closing lines of The Knight with the Lion (l. 6821), he calls himself simply Crestïens.