Lancelot Compilation

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The Lancelot Compilation is a Middle Dutch book from around 1320 that brings together seven Arthurian romances within the three parts of the Lancelot-Grail cycle. In the Low Countries, Arthurian stories were common in spoken form, and the oldest written Middle Dutch romances date from the late 1200s; this collection is the largest of its kind in Middle Dutch. There are three main witnesses to the Lancelot en prose tradition: the Lancelot Compilation itself, the rhyming collection Lantsloot vander Haghedochte, and a prose translation known as the Rotterdam Fragments. Lanceloet en het hert met het witte voet is an original tale in which Lancelot fights seven lions to win the hart’s white foot so he can marry a princess. This shows Lancelot’s popularity. The manuscript is the second of two translation collections of Old French Arthurian romances; the first is lost. The surviving manuscript (The Hague, KB129 A 10) has three columns and 480 folio pages, totaling about 90,000 lines of verse.