Rewriting romance does not always go to plan. One example of how adapting popular romance tales can produce complex and ambiguous results can be found on fols 125v–129v of the fifteenth-century compilation manuscript British Library Cotton Caligula A.ii. These folios contain the only copy extant of Chevalere Assigne, a remarkably short adaptation of the medieval swan children story. The closest cognate of this 370-line alliterative version of the narrative is the Beatrix version of La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, the first part of the Old French Crusade cycle, which runs to 3,196 lines and provides a prequel to the more famous tale of the Swan Knight.

The plot is a compelling one, incorporating themes of transformation and retribution that bridge the generic boundaries of folktale and romance. However, the English version of the story is no straightforward retelling of a familiar tale. Rather, the late fourteenth-century Chevalere Assigne represents an intriguing endpoint to a process of adapting, shortening, and reframing a distinctive storyline. The fact that the central images of this heavily abridged verse adaptation have remained recognisable from when they are first known to have been recorded in the twelfth-century Latin prose Dolopathos neatly illustrates the persistence of romance ‘memes’. Such persistence is a capacity that Helen Cooper ascribes to the ability of these literary motifs to ‘replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on occasion to adapt, mutate and therefore survive in different forms and cultures’. Many of the romance memes Cooper discusses can be found in this poem: the supernatural, the protagonists of mysterious birth, and the clash of good against evil are all central to the tale. Moreover, the scheming of the evil mother-in-law who has the swan children abducted, their mother's role as a falsely accused heroine, and the fortuitousness with which the abandoned children come to be raised by a hermit are recognisable building blocks of an archetypal romance narrative. These combine with the dramatic final scenes, in which God leads the young hero to victory in battle, to create that sense of familiarity that Cooper asserts can turn a good story into ‘the most mind-engaging form that there is’.

These are the words with which David Robson praises the ‘bluntness’ and ‘humility’ of Peter Ackroyd's 2010 adaptation of Malory's Morte Darthur. Highlighting the fact that he has made ‘no effort to give the narrative a postmodern twist’, Robson admires how Ackroyd ‘has simply condensed Malory's book, stripping out the rambling and repetitive elements that would have little appeal to a modern readership’, and turning Malory's prose into a ‘contemporary idiom’.

Ackroyd's adaptation of a single prose source in English into a new English prose work may seem tame when compared with the more ambitious adaptations being produced in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, in which prose and verse sources from different languages were fashioned into vast narrative chronologies of King Arthur and his court. Nonetheless, Ackroyd's work is a part of that tradition of adaptation, condensation and modernisation and it is on account of works such as his that medieval Arthurian romance collections still seem strikingly familiar to contemporary readers. While the exact elements of the plot vary, the central characters, the images and the main events of the Arthurian story have remained recognisable over the centuries. As a result, Wace's Roman de Brut, a twelfth-century Norman verse adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, can still be seen shaping Ackroyd's work.

This chapter examines some of the core structural features of the five chronographies in this study with the aim of highlighting common strategies of adaptation and identifying the organisational choices open to late medieval compilers and adaptors of Arthurian material. As discussed in the Introduction, the term ‘cycle’ may be too prescriptive to provide a helpful basis for discussing structure and genre. In contrast, the word ‘adaptation’ appositely describes a process that, in the case of these medieval authors, we can assume to have included selecting, sometimes translating, always ordering, usually pruning and frequently re-phrasing earlier Arthurian material. It is therefore a term that is sufficiently broad to encompass the heavily involved editing of authors such as Malory, as well as the sometimes less interventionist approach of the Dutch Lancelot-author, for example. In order to clarify how these five texts are constructed, this chapter will include an overview of source treatment in each work and highlight those elements of the adaptive process that are of particular interest in the individual collections. To ensure a rounded impression of the works, this will be followed in Chapter 3 by an illustrative discussion of the style in which the five adaptors present their material.

It is beyond the scope of this study to fully explicate the relationship between each work and its sources, although this relationship is of course vital to understanding the adaptive process of each author.

One of the striking differences between the very earliest Arthurian works and their fifteenth-century counterparts is the number and variety of characters that populate Arthur's court. Where eleventh-century depictions of the king portray him with a retinue of two or three knights, later descriptions of Camelot contain whole clans of knights, with a wide range of backgrounds and allegiances. Clearly, the introduction of new characters, as well as the interpolation, combination or integration of heroes and storylines from different traditions, is a key method by which Arthurian chronographies were created and expanded. Thus the Morte combines the Vulgate Cycle with the prose Tristan, adding decisive new storylines such as Gareth's expanded adventures. Meanwhile, Gonnot's BN.fr.112 interlaces a wide array of sources including the prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, and the Buch combines Wolfram's Parzival and Albrecht's Der Juengere Titurel with a redaction of the French prose Lancelot, adding in several other German protagonists of both known and unknown provenance. In contrast, the Tavola is the fairly straightforward result of combining the prose Tristan as its main source with a heavily abridged redaction of the Mort Artu and elements from unknown sources, while the Dutch Lancelot compiler places Dutch-derived protagonists such as Moriaen alongside French-derived protagonists such as Lancelot and Walewein.

As established in the previous chapter, the organic ‘rise, prime and decline’ structure of the core Arthurian narrative invites compilers and re-writers to insert material into the central sections of the established plotline. In doing so, they succeed in incorporating varied material whilst keeping the indispensable narrative elements surrounding the rise and fall of the Arthurian world in place. As a result, it is these central sections that depart most noticeably from the narrative style and structure of earlier sources such as the Lancelot–Grail cycle. This is mainly because the introduction of ‘timeless’ new adventures into the central parts of the core Arthurian narrative necessarily puts different characters centre stage and detracts from the plot development tracking the rise and decline of characters more central in the older sources. Due to these changes, and possibly as a result of texts based directly or indirectly on oral traditions also being incorporated, overall plot development is altered in decisive ways. This tendency becomes increasingly pronounced as the chronog-raphies develop away from their twelfth- and thirteenth-century models, suggesting that the process of adaptation gives rise to texts with specific structural features that accumulate as time goes by. This chapter will continue to look at the Tavola Ritonda (1320s), the Morte Darthur (1470s) and the Buch der Abenteuer (1470s) as early and late examples of how narrative cohesion and the development of suspense are altered in the central sections of Arthurian chronographies.

Apart from the sheer length of Arthurian chronographies, one of the most striking aspects of the works in this study is the diversity of styles and narrative strategies the authors and adaptors deploy. These strategies are to some degree a reflection of the process of adapting sources outlined in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, far from simply being predictable solutions to the wide-ranging stylistic demands of their assorted sources and plot-lines, the adaptors' choices of narrative technique and self-presentation clearly reflect a wide range of literary aims and abilities. This chapter will examine the five adaptations in turn and use comparable passages of the works as a basis for discussing the stylistic execution of the authors concerned.

The literary merits of all of the works in question have already been discussed extensively: the Tavola, the Gonnot, the Dutch Lancelot and the Buch by the studies of Delcorno Branca, Pickford, Besamusca and Bastert, respectively, and the Morte by critics ranging from Field to Jeremy Smith. What this chapter will do therefore is offer a fresh perspective on the texts, by examining how the adaptors handle three key stylistic features of each text: first, the introduction of new chapters or adventures; second, the self-presentation of the author or narrator figure; and third, the style of descriptive writing.

Of the five texts, the two verse collections, the Buch and the Lancelot, are the most stylistically complex and the two adaptors accomplish the feat of creating a lengthy verse chronography with varying success in terms of consistency and readability.

One of the things the writers of late Arthurian collections have in common is that they all base their work on an already rich tradition that had blossomed centuries earlier. These writers therefore needed to combine a wide range of source materials from different traditions and in different languages, most notably French and other vernaculars. Given the popularity of Arthurian stories in the thirteenth century, the tales would have been familiar to a large proportion of their audience, making it necessary for later adaptors to remain close to their source material. As Jane Taylor puts it:

In addition to this, the authors also needed to reconcile contradictions between sources, and above all to create a plausible time structure within which to accommodate all the adventures they wished to include.

Taking the Buch and the Morte as two very different examples of particularly late chronographies, this chapter compares the representation of time in these works to the more elaborate descriptive contextualisation of the Lancelot–Grail cycle, which is a common indirect source of both works.

Note on the Texts and Manuscripts

This section offers a brief overview of the content and codicological background of each of the five adaptations in this study in order to introduce the texts and illustrate the material context within which the structural arrangement of the overall works can be understood.

The Tavola Ritonda

The Tavola Ritonda is the oldest Arthurian adaptation in this study. It survives in eight manuscripts, suggesting that it was a fairly popular text in the late middle ages. of these manuscripts the three regarded as the most reliable are the Florentine Mediceo-Laurenziana, pluteo XLIV, nr 27 – this is the oldest version extant and has been dated to the mid-fourteenth century – the Magliabechiana in the National Central Library of Florence, Palchetto 2, nr 68, which has been dated to 1391, and a manuscript of the Communal Library of Siena, dated to 1468. There have been two editions of the text: Polidori's influential nineteenth-century edition has now been superseded by Marie-José Heijkant's edition of 1997, which is based on a wider range of manuscripts.

The main source of the work is an earlier Italian translation of the thirteenth-century French Tristan en Prose, to which relatively free renderings of redactions of a prose Queste and a prose Mort Artu, as well as additional fragments from the Palamède tradition have been added alongside some apparently original tales and linking passages to create an Arthurian collection based around Tristano, but incorporating Lancilotto.

This study has covered several aspects of late Arthurian chronographies as a group. The central conclusions emerging from the chapters above are:

1. that one of the defining features the chronographies in question share is that of lengthened central sections created by adaptors adding new characters and adventures into the phase of Arthur's prime.

2. that these central sections are characterised by a ‘timelessness’ resulting from the adaptors' condensation of sources and removal of chronological context and that this timelessness is expressed in different ways by the various adaptors.

3. that Arthur's lengthened prime gradually reshapes the plot development of chronographies, reducing the tension of the collections and variously placing more emphasis on genealogical progression, structural apparatus and characterisation to unite the texts and retain readers' interest.

4. that this alteration of the plotline has a strong influence on the changing characterisation of Arthurian protagonists in late medieval romance adaptations, leading to the creation of more detailed and ambivalent Arthurian knights such as Lancelot and Perceval and a more static role for King Arthur.

Whether these common features are significant enough to create a subgenre unto itself is entirely a question of definition. In any case, establishing such a genre is not the primary concern of this study. Rather, its aim is to provide a vocabulary and a framework of comparison within which the structure of the individual chronographies can be better judged and understood.