MORIEN

A Metrical Romance rendered into English prose from the Mediaeval Dutch
by Jessie L. Weston, with designs by Caroline Watts. Preface

The metrical romance of which the following pages offer a prose
translation is contained in the mediaeval Dutch version of the
_Lancelot_, where it occupies upwards of five thousand lines, forming
the conclusion of the first existing volume of that compilation. So far
as our present knowledge extends, it is found nowhere else.

Nor do we know the date of the original poem, or the name of the author.
The Dutch MS. is of the commencement of the fourteenth century, and
appears to represent a compilation similar to that with which Sir Thomas
Malory has made us familiar, _i.e._, a condensed rendering of a number
of Arthurian romances which in their original form were independent of
each other. Thus, in the Dutch _Lancelot_ we have not only the latter
portion of the _Lancelot_ proper, the _Queste_, and the _Morte Arthur_,
the ordinary component parts of the prose _Lancelot_ in its most fully
developed form, but also a portion of a _Perceval_ romance, having for
its basis a version near akin to, if not identical with, the poem
of Chretien de Troyes, and a group of episodic romances, some of
considerable length, the majority of which have not yet been discovered
elsewhere. [Footnote: _Cf_. my _Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac_;
Grimm Library, vol. xii., chapter ix., where a brief summary of the
contents of the Dutch _Lancelot_ is given.]