ABSTRACT
There are close to 120 romances in Middle English (not counting those in Chaucer and Gower). Of these some thirty are Arthurian-more than one fourth. These range in length from extensive reworkings of the French Vulgate like Lovelich’s Merlin at nearly 28,000 lines, down to ballads of a few hundred lines. Some versions are in alliterative verse, others are in couplets or in tailrime stanzas, and, of course, Malory’s cycle is in prose. While most are anonymous, one is by the greatest Middle English poet, Chaucer. While many exist in several versions and manuscripts, some survive to us miraculously in single copies.
