ABSTRACT
Although it has long been posited that there is a connection between the love lyrics of the Middles Ages and medieval romances, it is difficult to prove the point. The famous French scholar Joseph Anglade searched for mentions of Arthurian personae in the troubadour poems of southern France, which were written in the Provençal language, and could find preciously few: twenty-four mentions of Arthur and only one of Guinevere, while there were fifty-nine mentions of Tristan and Isolde. Still Rita Lejeune, in her article in Roger Sherman Loomis’s Arthurian Literature of the Middle Ages (Clarendon Press, 1959, pp. 393 ff.), tried to insist that the computations were misleading because they did not account for the richness of the oral tradition.
