Some time in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Guillaume le Clerc composed the story of Fergus, a romance in which the main character features as a -new- Perceval in a realistically depicted Scottish landscape. Shortly thereafter, perhaps as early as 1250, the story was translated into Middle Dutch. The Ferguut, however, is an adaptation of the Old French Fergus, rather than a slavish translation. The result is a romance which possesses all the appeal of the Old French Fergus, but at the same time reveals something of the Middle Dutch romancer's tastes and techniques. This volume...

The romances translated here are contained in the so-called Lancelot Compilation. Compiled in the early fourteenth century by five scribes, its 241 extant folios contain the lion's share of Arthurian romance in Middle Dutch, no fewer than ten texts. The core of this compilation is comprised of translations into rhymed couplets of the Lancelot-Queste-Mort, into which seven additional romances have been inserted. The result is a compilation that successfully transforms a number of disparate texts into an ordered sequence of ten Arthurian romances, a project that rivals similar ones in better...

Available for the first time in paperback for the student, scholar or interested general reader, these acclaimed volumes from D.S. Brewer's Arthurian Archives series enable access to key texts - often for the first time - by the non-specialist. This specially-priced set includes Roman van Walewein, Ferguut and five interpolated romances from the Lancelot Compilation. Scholars of Arthurian romance who wish to add Middle Netherlandic texts to their scholarly discussion, or anyone simply wanting the pleasure of reading a good medieval story, will welcome these volumes... each translation reads...

Three volumes of Norse Arthurian romances in acclaimed editions in a specially-priced set.

Erec is the earliest extant German Arthurian romance, freely adapted and translated into Middle High German by the Swabian knight, Hartmann von Aue, from the first Old French Arthurian romance, Chretien de Troyes' Erec et Enide. Hartmann's work dates from c. 1180, but the only (almost) complete manuscript dates from the early sixteenth century, copied into the huge two-volume Ambraser Heldenbuch, now housed in Vienna - the most comprehensive extant compilation of medieval German romances and epics, commissioned by Emperor Maximilian I. Otherwise, only a few earlier medieval fragments survive....

The Tristano Corsiniano is preserved in a unique manuscript of the Biblioteca Corsiniana housed at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome (MS 55.K.5; formerly Rossi 2593). Written in a mixture of northeastern Italian dialects, the manuscript was probably copied in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The contents are a much abbreviated descendent of the noted French prose Roman de Tristan; opening with Dinadan's amusing discourses and misadventures, the majority of the story concerns the famous three-day Tournament at Loverzep, and concludes with King Arthur and Lancelot visiting...

Wigamur is an anonymously-authored, thirteenth-century Middle High German romance about a king's son who is lost to his parents in infancy. The eponymous hero, after being carried off in childhood by a mermaid, rescues an eagle which becomes his constant companion; in subsequent adventures he also rescues a maiden, becomes a Knight of the Round Table, and finally confronts a knight who of course proves to be his father, from whom he inherits a kingdom. The romance is perhaps the most most fully realized example of the Fair Unknown, or Bel Inconnu, motif in both the German and larger European...