The Romance of Morien

The Romance of Morien [with
accents]

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Romance of Morien, by Jessie L.
Weston #2 in our series by Jessie L. Weston
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: The Romance of Morien
Author: Jessie L. Weston
Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8447] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on July 11, 2003]

Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
ROMANCE OF MORIEN ***

Produced by David Starner, David Widger, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

ARTHURIAN ROMANCES
Unrepresented in Malory's "Morte d'Arthur"
No. IV.
MORIEN ARTHURIAN ROMANCES

UNREPRESENTED IN MALORY'S "MORTE D'ARTHUR"
I. SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT.
A Middle-English Romance retold in Modern Prose, with Introduction
and Notes, by JESSIE L. WESTON. With Designs by M. M.
CRAWFORD. 1898. 2s. net.
II. TRISTAN AND ISEULT.
Rendered into English from the German of Gottfried of Strassburg by
JESSIE L. WESTON. With Designs by CAROLINE WATTS. Two
vols. 1899. 4s. net.
III. GUINGAMOR, LANVAL, TYOLET, LE BISCLAVERET.
Four Lays rendered into English Prose from the French of Marie de
France and others by JESSIE L. WESTON. With Designs by
CAROLINE WATTS. 1900. 2s. net. [Illustration: They deemed they
had seen the Foul Fiend himself]

MORIEN
A Metrical Romance rendered into English prose from the Mediæval
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 mediæval 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 Chrétien 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.]
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