The anonymous Lancelot, probably composed between 1215 and 1220, is acknowledged as the oldest member of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. We may never know the identity of its author(s) beyond Lot's suggestion that he was a cleric of aristocratic background in service at court, whose work combined a Grail story with a courtly story, apparently to make good on what Chrétien had attempted in his Grail story. Although each of the members of the Cycle has its particular perspective and texture, Jean Frappier's concept of the entire Cycle being planned and directed by a single mind that he calls the ‘architect,’ is still convincing. We may never know more about the actual production of the Lancelot than the text itself can actually reveal: did it exist first as a ‘non-cyclic’ work, or was it planned from the start as a cyclic work? On the one hand Elspeth Kennedy argues that the Lancelot existed initially as a small prose romance, courtly in tone and independent of the cyclic intent, before being appropriated as the basis of a large cyclic composition and elaborated to three times its original size to form the cyclic Lancelot. Alexandre Micha, on the other hand, believes that the end of the non-cyclic Lancelot is a truncation of the cyclic version and that the cyclic intent was present from the beginning of the work. The debate has been recently re-opened on Micha's side by Annie Combes, who presents the non-cyclic textual evidence as the effect of important narrative strategies devised to create mystery and to introduce a revised Grail tradition.

Whether we accept the theory of an initially independent narrative or not, the Lancelot exists today in a cyclic environment that is really a dual one: in the Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu trilogy (or Prose Lancelot) which is by far the commonest grouping in the extant cyclic manuscripts and probably its earliest cyclic environment, and in the five-part Cycle formed with the addition of the Estoire and Merlin-Suite. In the trilogy, the Lancelot is the foundation of the edifice: a romance chronicle of the state of Arthurian chivalry and the realm. In the Cycle, the Lancelot is at the center of the new edifice, flanked symmetrically on either side by a Grail narrative and an Arthurian narrative.