Chrétien de Troyes ‘began the story of perceval till death overtook him and prevented him completing it’: so we are told by Gerbert. Unfinished at his death – suspended almost in mid-sentence – Chrétien's last Arthurian romance, Perceval: the Story of the Grail, was evidently seen as too good and too intriguing to leave; not only did its tantalising theme inspire quite separate works, but his own incomplete poem was taken up, expanded and finally brought to a conclusion in four continuations.

This, The Complete Story of the Grail, is a translation of Chrétien's romance and all four of those continuations. Written throughout in verse, in rhyming couplets of eight-syllable lines, they have survived in fifteen manuscripts: some of these contain only Chrétien's poem; others contain Chrétien and one, two or three continuations; only two contain all four; and the First Continuation exists in three redactions which, although telling essentially the same stories in the same order, are of vastly differing lengths: the long redaction – translated here – is more than twice as long as the short. This apparently erratic copying of The Story of the Grail might suggest that it was held in less esteem than other Arthurian works. And indeed, the scholarly attention given to the Perceval Continuations has been considerably less than that devoted to the great Arthurian prose cycle, the Lancelot-Grail. There seems to have been a worry and preoccupation with assessing how far the Continuations consistently develop the strands introduced by Chrétien; and because in many respects they don't – they go their own sweet ways in massive digressions, introducing narratives that have nothing whatever to do with the Grail (or with perceval, who barely features in the first Continuation) – they seem to have been deemed of little serious consequence, a relatively minor body of work, the more so since the last two Continuations in particular borrow numerous episodes from other existing romances.