Although their primary focus lies elsewhere, the previous two chapters have both engaged obliquely with questions of narrative closure. Walter Map's possible involvement in expanding Anselot's tirade against the fils à vilain reminds us that interpolation is not something that ‘just happens’ to medieval texts. Rather, it is a conscious process, undertaken by a specific individual who either finds the original composition lacking in some way or wants to add his own contribution to it. Interpolation of this kind is based on the premise that a vernacular narrative is ‘open’ in a way that scriptural or classical texts are not: it can legitimately be expanded or modified to suit different tastes or circumstances. A different kind of non-closure is associated with Anselot's story. Our account of its development features an author who composes a second narrative in parallel to his first but leaves it unfinished, before incorporating this incomplete text into a continuation of the original romance. Even without the strong probability that the process of continuation required a significant rewriting of the first ending, this points to a general sense that vernacular fiction is not bound by the same concept of completion as other works with which readers and copyists came into contact. Precisely what our poet and his contemporaries thought about the nature of closure is more difficult to determine, however.