Four Arthurian Legends

Four romances from the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: Erec et Enide, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot.

Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère who flourished in the late 12th century. Little is known of his life, but he seems to have been from Troyes, or at least intimately connected with it, and between 1160 and 1172 he served at the court of his patroness Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, perhaps as herald-at-arms (as Gaston Paris speculated).

His work on Arthurian subjects represents some of the best regarded of medieval literature. Chrétien de Troyes is generally considered as the first identified major French Language novelist. Chrétien's works include five major poems in rhyming eight-syllable couplets. Four of these are complete and included within this book; Erec and Enide (c. 1170); Cligès (c. 1176); Yvain, the Knight of the Lion; and Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart both written simultaneously between 1177 and 1181.