Chrétien de Troyes’ share in the literary flotation of both these stories entitles him to a place in the history of pure Arthurian romance even above that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey can claim, beyond any question, to be the literary father of King Arthur himself as a romantic hero. But the Arthurian legend, as it emerged from mediæval romance and as we know it in its modern presentment by the poets, contains so much more than the story of Arthur that the French romantic scribes who brought Tristan and Lancelot and Perceval into Arthur’s court must be regarded as the first artistic fashioners of a purely poetic “matter of Britain.” Among them Chrétien, and--if we are to take him as the unquestioned author of the great prose _Lancelot_ romance--Walter Map, stand pre-eminent. As to Chrétien’s signal share in the work there is, at any rate, no controversy, and his name is associated with the poetical treatment of the stories of each of the three celebrated heroes just mentioned. He is believed[96] to have been the author of a lost Tristan poem--probably his first work, composed about 1160,--which is surmised to have been the foundation of the long prose _Tristan_ romance, whence Malory drew much of his material. It is in his _Chevalier de la Charrette_ that we first hear of Lancelot as a lover of Guinevere. His unfinished _Conte del Graal_ is one of the first literary presentations of the story of Perceval. Two other poems of Chrétien are, with the _Conte del Graal_, of exceptional interest as bearing a close relationship to three Welsh prose romances included in _The Red Book of Hergest_, and translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. The Welsh analogue of the _Conte del Graal_ is the so-called ‘mabinogi’ of _Peredur, son of Evrawc_; while the Welsh tales called _Geraint, son of Erbin_, and _The Lady of the Fountain_ resemble, in their main features, Chrétien’s two poems entitled _Erec_ and _Le chevalier au lion_. The Welsh romances, as we have them, are undoubtedly of later date than Chrétien’s poems, and bear such clear traces of Norman-French influence as to have led many critics to deny altogether their Celtic origin. But they are neither translations, nor adaptations of Chrétien’s works.[97] The only explanation that meets all the facts is that the French poems and the Welsh tales follow an older and a simpler Celtic form of the stories embodied in them, which was accessible both to Chrétien and the Welsh writers.