Unfortunately, the first volume of this compilation, which was
originally in four parts, has been lost; consequently we are without any
of the indications, so often to be found in the opening lines of similar
compositions, as to the personality of the compiler, or the material at
his disposal; but judging from those sections in which comparison is
possible, the _Lancelot_, _Queste_, and _Morte Arthur_, the entire work
is a translation, and a very faithful translation, of a French original.
It is quite clear that the Dutch compiler understood his text well, and
though possibly somewhat hampered by the necessity of turning prose into
verse (this version, contrary to the otherwise invariable rule of the
later _Lancelot_ romances, being rhymed), he renders it with remarkable
fidelity. The natural inference, and that drawn by M. Gaston Paris,
who, so far, appears to be the only scholar who has seriously occupied
himself with this interesting version, is that those episodic romances,
of which we possess no other copy, are also derived from a French
source. Most probably, so far as these shorter romances are concerned,
the originals would be metrical, not prose versions, as in the case of
the _Lancelot_ sections.

It is true that with regard to the romance here translated, _Morien_,
the Dutch scholars responsible for the two editions in which it has
appeared, MM. Jonckbloet and Te Winkel, the former the editor of the
whole compilation, the latter of this section only, are both inclined to
regard the poem as an original Dutch composition; but M. Gaston Paris,
in his summary of the romance (_Histoire Litteraire_, vol. xxx. p. 247)
rejects this theory as based on inadequate grounds. It must be admitted
that an original Arthurian romance of the twelfth or thirteenth century,
when at latest such a poem would be written, in a language other than
French, is so far unknown to us; and although as a matter of fact the