The Round Table is often described as Wace's ‘most important’ addition to his Norman translation of the Historia regum Britanniae. While its origins remain unclear, it is certainly one of the most important links between the Arthurian section of Wace's Roman de Brut and Arthurian romance. From its first mention by Wace in 1155, the Round Table became much more than a physical object: metonymically, the term also designates the fellowship of Arthur's knights, briefly served as the namesake of a chivalric order founded by King Edward III, and ultimately came to symbolise the entire Arthurian corpus. Its very ubiquitousness and polysemy complicate more detailed study. This may be why the Round Table's presence in early Arthurian romances is frequently taken for granted. Yet a comparative narratological examination of its earliest appearances in Old French, Middle English, and Middle High German verse shows the Round Table's central role in the development of Continental Arthurian verse romance between the late twelfth and the early thirteenth century. Beginning with the romances of Chretien de Troyes, the Round Table supports the creation of an ever-expanding fictional romance world, safely removed from more historical narratives focused on King Arthur himself.

In a seminal 1982 article, Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann demonstrated the usefulness of Wace's Round Table as a political symbol for King Henry II's authority. As she noted, King Arthur does not originally sit at the Round Table himself, which thus sets the king apart from his barons, rendered equal among themselves but emphatically subordinate to the king. Beyond its political significance, however, this original design also makes the Round Table a potent and fundamentally ambiguous narrative device. As we shall see, Wace uses it to isolate Arthur, emphasise royal power and provide a clear historical focus. Yet by initially remaining separate from the (pseudo-)historical Arthur, the Round Table simultaneously provides a stable and effectively ahistorical point of reference for Chretien's romances. Arthur is sidelined, and the Knights of the Round Table become protagonists instead. In Continental romance, the Round Table's narrative potential can therefore be described in terms of what Marie-Laure Ryan calls the ‘aesthetics of proliferation’. As a ‘worldbuilding’ device, the Round Table serves to locate stories in a limitlessly expandable ‘storyworld’, that is to say an imaginary world, distinct from Arthurian history.