Introduction

Manuscript, Editions, Translations

The lay of Tyolet is preserved only in MS S, f. 15v, col. 1 – 20r, col. 1. It is not found in the Norse Strengleikar collection. First edited by Gaston Paris in 1879 (pp. 40–50), Tyolet had to wait for a new edition until 1976, when it appeared in Prudence M. O’H. Tobin's Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (pp. 227– 53). Tobin's text was reprinted in 1984 by Walter Pagani with a facing Italian translation (pp. 156–95) and again in 1992 by Alexandre Micha with a facing Modern French translation (pp. 182–223). The lay has also been translated into English by Jessie Weston (1900, pp. 57–78) and Margo Vinney (1978), into Modern French by Herman Braet (1979, pp. 27–46), Danielle Régnier-Bohler (1979, pp. 103–18) and Nathalie Desgrugillers (pp. 61–71), into Dutch by Ludo Jongen and Paul Verhuyck (1985, pp. 13–20), into Spanish by Esperanza Castro Cobos (1985, pp. 283–94) and Isabel de Riquer (1987, pp. 83–96) and into Japanese by Hideo Morimoto in Lais bretons féeriques au Moyen Age (1998).

Date, Author

The date we assign to the text depends to a great extent on how confident we are that the author was influenced by texts such as the Lais of Marie de France and the Conte du Graal of Chrétien de Troyes and its Continuations. Tobin (p. 229) is mistaken in thinking that the allusion to Yvain as the son of Morgan may derive from the Merlin of Robert de Boron (see note to v. 630 of the present translation). But her view (ibid.) that Tyolet was probably composed at the beginning of the thirteenth century is as precise as one can be. No information concerning the author is found in the text. On the basis of his failure to respect traditional rules of declension, Tobin (ibid.) suggests that he might have come from the west of France, but this could be an inherited scribal feature and it does not carry conviction as an indicator of authorial provenance.