MS 444D in the National Library of Wales is known as the Prose Yvain but consists of seven apparently unrelated Arthurian episodes. The only previous studies of the manuscript have traced the sources of several of the episodes (e.g., Chrétien de Troyes, the Prose Tristan) but have identified no organizing or connecting principle. A re-examination, however, authorizes speculation that the episodes preserved in 444D may have been the raw material for an Arthurian cycle that was, to the best of our knowledge, never realized.

Manuscript 444D in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, preserves an anonymous fourteenth-century composition known as the Prose Yvain, which is not, as the title might suggest, a prosification of Chrétien's romance concerning Yvain. MS 444D has never been edited, although a 1929 Swansea M.A. thesis by Meta McRitchie includes a flawed transcription.2 Apart from that thesis (and several very brief notices or descriptions), the only publications devoted to this work, to my knowledge, are two short articles, one by Lynette Muir in Romania in 1964, the other a piece I contributed to the Mélanges for Jean-Claude Faucon. I have also undertaken an edition of the text.

The manuscript itself is decidedly unprepossessing, written in a somewhat awkward hand on mediocre vellum with a good many stains and holes. More important, it lacks eleven of the numbered sixty-five folios (fols. 2–3, 6–8, 13–15, 22–23, 30).