UNTIL 1984, WHEN A. J. Holden published his edition of Le Roman de Waldef, this romance was known, but rarely studied. While there were entries on it in encyclopedic compendia, and it was occasionally mined for linguistic material, the only sustained discussions of the work as a whole were by Legge, in her survey of Anglo-Norman literature, Levy, in a 1972 article, and Anderson, in an extended entry in a multi-volume work (see Suggested Further Reading). The availability of Holden's edition changed this, though less than might have been expected. The sheer length of the text, as well as its unavailability in a modern English (or French) translation, still prevented it from attracting the attention it deserves, in spite of Rosalind Field's seminal 2000 article “Waldef and the Matter of/with England” and Judith Weiss's discussions of some aspects of it in a series of articles over the past fifteen years or so. We embarked on the present translation in the hope of rescuing this highly interesting narrative from undeserved neglect by making it more accessible both for novices and for seasoned scholars. It has a great deal to offer both categories.

The lengthy genesis of the book had its roots in each translator's dissatisfaction with the romance's academic obscurity, but each of us balked at the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. In the spring of 2011, Thelma Fenster pointed out that a text of this length required a collective effort, and that is how our team came together. During the years we spent working on Waldef we have had few opportunities to meet in person: an initial get-together over lunch to discuss general principles, a break between conference sessions a year later, which we used to review a draft translation of some sections of the text together, and, several years after that, a week when all three of us were able to sit around the same table, putting the finishing touches to our first complete draft. In between, e-mail, cloud-based data sharing, and electronic video-conferencing allowed us to bridge the Atlantic and ignore, for the most part, differences in time zones.