The genesis of the Merlin is a complex romance project in the image of its eponymous character. It is a work with a history, firstly because it was fashioned from a variety of earlier texts, and secondly because it was inserted into one cycle, then into another. Like a polychrome print that needs several inkings before the final printing can be made, the romance combines figures and colors from earlier works, but the end result is a flawless landscape, a literary monument so tightly woven and self-contained that it fits almost intact into a very different textual environment, like a painting that serves first as the central panel of a triptych and then as the center of a polyptych. The romance's plasticity comes from the character of Merlin himself, whose literary representations evolved throughout the twelfth century until they melded solidly together in our romance, in a skillful combination of physical and moral traits, prophetic and magical powers that had hitherto been scattered widely in the texts. In their new environment they acquire a prodigious hierarchy and coherence, the hallmark of an outstanding fictional achievement.

The forty-six manuscripts and eight fragments in which it has survived suggest that the Roman de Merlin (written c. 1205) was a great success in the Middle Ages. But the character of Merlin himself, under the name of Myrddin, was already a glorious figure from the Celtic legends that must have circulated before the twelfth century. Merlin's Celtic ancestry has not always been obvious to critics, but today we accept it and acknowledge the importance of Celtic folklore in his makeup, even though so little remains from a literature that was primarily oral. SixWelsh poems found in manuscripts ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century portray Myrddin as a warrior chief. Whether they give him the status of king or great lord, in all of them he goes mad after the battle of Arferdydd, where he witnesses the death of his lord and nephews. He flees civilization and lives in the woods in harmony with nature. In other sources he has the gift of prophecy, which he exercises from time to time in enigmatic language. Thus, the solitary figure we can glimpse in silhouette already combines the attributes of the wild man with those of the seer.

The early thirteenth-century French Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) brings together the stories of Arthur with those of the Grail, a conjunction of materials that continues to fascinate the Western imagination today. It is a vast compendium of Arthurian literature whose importance for the development of European fiction is finally being appreciated. Representing what is probably the earliest large-scale use of prose for fiction in the West, it also exemplifies the taste for big cyclic compositions that shaped much of European narrative fiction for three centuries. Dante admired the meandering seductiveness of the Cycle's storytelling, Malory relied on it in large part for his fifteenth-century Arthuriad, and it spawned a progeny of adaptations in other languages. Despite its impressive medieval pedigree, the Lancelot-Grail's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critics pronounced it soporific, boring, worthless, while it fared no better with ‘scientific’ nineteenth-century critics who berated it for being repetitive, derivative, unfocused, and prosaic. Scholarship on the work was hampered until recently by the complexity of its manuscript tradition, the compilatory nature of the Cycle, its gigantic size, and its complex artistry. However, modern critical editions of all five branches of the Cycle have fanned scholarly interest in this vast text, while on a broader front the recent English translation of Sommer's Vulgate Cycle under the general direction of Norris J. Lacy (Lancelot-Grail: the Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, 5 vols. [New York: Garland, 1993–96]) opens up this medieval bestseller to a much wider audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

This volume attempts to convey to modern readers the appeal that such an unwieldy text must have had for its medieval audiences, and the richness of composition that made it compelling. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle could be described summarily as an anonymous text comprising at least five different works, possibly by five different authors, a text with no clear provenance although the majority of its manuscripts come from the north-east corner of France and what is now Belgium and Flanders. This description of the Cycle in terms of what it does not have, has the advantage of compelling us to focus largely, though not exclusively, on the text itself as our primary source of documentation.

The large number of films either inspired by Arthurian themes (modern in scope) or drawn more closely from Arthurian works of literature is testimony to the continuing power of the Arthurian legends to fascinate and inspire, in the true spirit of the medieval tradition of continuation. The change of medium is not restricted to feature films, since television producers have adapted the cinematic art to the small screen with serializations and made-for-television movies. Kevin Harty lists 564 medieval movies produced since the first film was made in 1897, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the medium, to the present day, and a total of 79 Arthurian movies, the earliest of which were French. But if the sheer quantity of output is evidence of the modern vitality of the medium, a rapid breakdown of the films reveals that the English-speaking world has a proprietary hold, and in the words of a recent author, ‘overall quality does not seem to be on the upswing in Arthurian films.’ The medieval sources most frequently exploited for Arthurian film, insofar as sources can be adduced, tend to be of anglophone origin, especially Malory's Death of Arthur, but the Perceval story, based on Chrétien de Troyes's Le Conte du Graal or Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the Tristan and Isolde story, and Le Chevalier de la Charrette also have their place. Medieval Arthurian literature sprang from a common Celtic heritage – the matter of Brittany as well as Britain – which was actively exploited at a time when the English court's official language was the Norman variety of French, but in the domain of film, there is a linguistic and cultural divide. Anglophone directors understandably have a predilection for the English medieval tradition, French directors tend to take the French tradition, and German directors the German tradition, but it has been suggested that anglophone audiences view the Arthurian legends through a different lens from that of francophone audiences because of historically-determined differences in cultural perception. For native English speakers, King Arthur is not only a literary figure but also a historical figure, and this linkage influences the significance they would attach to Arthurian legends.

Given the great size of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle itself, and the range and diversity of its influence, this bibliography is very selective, aiming to provide readers with the primary resources for the French text itself. More detailed bibliographical references can be found in the individual chapters.

EDITIONS

Bogdanow, Fanni, ed. La version Post-Vulgate de la Queste del Saint Graal et de la Mort Artu: Troisième partie du Roman de Graal. Vols. I, II, IV.1. Paris, 1991.

Frappier, Jean, ed. La Mort le roi Artu: roman du XIIIe siècle. 3rd. ed. Geneva, 1964.

Hucher, Eugène, ed. Le Saint Graal. 3 vols. Le Mans, 1875.

Hutchings, Gweneth. Le roman en prose de Lancelot du Lac: le Conte de la Charrette. Paris, 1938.

Kennedy, Elspeth, ed. Lancelot do Lac: The non-cyclic Old French Prose Romance. 2 vols. Oxford, 1980.

Micha, Alexandre, ed. Lancelot: roman en prose du XIIIe siècle. 9 vols. Geneva and Paris, 1978–83.

Micha, Alexandre, ed. Merlin: roman du XIIIe siècle. Geneva, 1979.

Paris, Gaston, and Jacob Ulrich, eds. Merlin: roman en prose du XIIIe siècle. Paris, 1886.

Pauphilet, Albert. La Queste del Saint Graal. Paris, 1921.

Ponceau, Jean-Paul, ed. L’Estoire del Saint Graal. 2 vols. Paris, 1997.

Sommer, H. Oskar, ed. The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances. Vols. 1–7. Washington, D.C., 1908–13. Reprinted New York, 1979.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Cable, James, trans. The Death of King Arthur. Harmondsworth, 1971.

Carman, J. Neale, trans. From Camelot to Joyous Guard: The Old French ‘La Mort le roi Artu.’ Ed. with intro. by Norris J. Lacy. Lawrence, KS, 1974.

Corley, Corin, trans. Lancelot of the Lake, with introduction by Elspeth Kennedy. Oxford, 1989.

Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation. General ed. Norris J. Lacy, with intro. by E. Jane Burns. New York and London, 1996. Vol. I: The History of the Holy Grail (trans. Carol J. Chase) and The Story of Merlin (trans. Rupert T. Pickens). Vol. II: Lancelot, part I (trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg); Lancelot, part II (trans. CarletonW. Carroll); Lancelot, part III (trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg). Vol III: Lancelot, part IV (trans. Roberta L. Krueger); Lancelot, part V (trans. William W. Kibler); Lancelot, part VI (trans. Carleton W. Carroll).

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.

The importance of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle was recognized early in Germany – too early perhaps, for the reception of the work is highly fragmented, like a broken line of stops and starts. The long process of appropriation began before the mid-thirteenth century and reached its peak in the second half of the fifteenth century. Even so, a complete German translation of the Lancelot–Queste– Mort Artu trilogy did not appear for another hundred years, and the sole surviving manuscript, dated 1576, also marks the end of the history of the Cycle. Neither of the translations was printed, and we have no illuminated luxury codices that might have sustained an interest in the Cycle after the end of the Middle Ages. So the first – and for a long time the only – German prose romance was practically unknown, even after the discovery of its two oldest fragments which date back to the High Middle Ages. Scholarly interest in the prose romance revived with the publication of the first volume of a critical edition, in 1948. The (limited) popularity of the Cycle in recent years – Tankred Dorst's play Merlin oder Das wüste Land (1981) and Christoph Hein's Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (1989), for example – owe more to Malory/Caxton, T. H. White, and Hollywood's Grail films than to research.

Shortly after the completion of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, efforts were made to adapt it into German. The oldest extant fragment (M) dates from the midthirteenth century. Its language points to the Mosel region. Fragment A, in contrast, was made twenty years later and comes from the Main-Franconian area, so we know that initial interest in the Cycle was not limited to territory west of the Rhine. The German Prosa-Lancelot is as anonymous as its French counterpart. Who the translators were and who they worked for is a mystery, and the hypothesis that they were Cistercians is a mere assumption based on the romance's so-called Cistercian patterns of thought. Cistercians did begin to write religious prose in the vernacular in the mid-thirteenth century, but none of the extant manuscripts indicates a connection with a monastery or religious order. We can safely assume that the translators were related to the secular nobility.

The Queste del saint Graal, composed c. 1225–1230, survives in a large number of manuscripts – currently forty-three complete manuscripts – which contain either the entire Lancelot-Grail Cycle or the Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu trilogy. In the epilogue, the name ‘Mestre Gautier Map’ purports to be the one who, ‘pour l’amour du roi Henri son seigneur,’ transposed from Latin into French this estoire that has been kept since the days of Arthur in the armoire [library] at Salesbieres [Salisbury]. The attribution of the narrative to Gautier Map, a cleric who lived at the court of Henry II and composed works in Latin, is of course a literary hoax. The hoax testifies nevertheless to the anonymous author's desire to inscribe the genesis and the trajectory of this disconcerting text in a space-time that goes from the fictional world of Arthur to the Norman kingdom of England at the end of the twelfth century, the time and the place in which the Arthurian legend did in fact come into its own, no doubt promoted by the Plantagenets.

One more fact seems certain. Even though the origin of the Lancelot-Grail still eludes us, the Queste, a narrative whose real title is given in the epilogue as Les Aventures del seint Graal (280), presents itself as the expected and programmed continuation of the Lancelot and, given the reduction of the normal resources of the narrative it entails, it announces La Mort le roi Artu as the text that will conclude the Cycle. There may have been, as Elspeth Kennedy believes, a non-cyclic Lancelot that focused on the heroic and amorous adventures of the titular hero and located the quest for the Holy Grail and its hero, Perceval, in a time long past. The Lancelot has nonetheless come down to us as a narrative whose hero was given the ‘droit nom’ of Galaad, which his son will eventually bear; a narrative in which the quest for the holy Grail is defined as the quest for the grans repostailles, the secrets of Our Lord, and is projected into the future; a narrative which announces several times that the quest will be completed by Galahad because Lancelot's sin of adultery will disqualify him from being the Elect.