In Charles Dickens’ famous A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, a ghost reminds the protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge of a Christmas when the latter was a child: ‘And Valentine, said Scrooge, and his wild brother, Orson; there they go!’ Dickens’ reference to Valentine and his brother of course harks back to the tradition of these two twins in European literature: thanks to a great number of printed versions from the fifteenth century onwards, versions of this tale crossed many linguistic and cultural borders. For example, the French Valentin et Orson, written in prose in the fifteenth century, was quickly translated into other languages, such as English at the beginning of the sixteenth century and Italian in the middle of the sixteenth century. The English translation in particular provided the source for a considerable number of new versions, and it inspired several later authors – Shakespeare may even have been one of them. More recently, in 1989, the tale was adapted for children by Nancy Ekholm Burkert in her children's book, Valentine and Orson.

The European tradition of Valentin et Orson illustrates the difficulty of positing the French text as the source and model for the whole tradition. Indeed, even though most scholars seem to agree that the tradition has its roots in the French Middle Ages, Valentin et Orson is not the oldest surviving text about the two twin brothers. On the contrary, verse narratives in Middle Dutch, Middle Low German and Old Swedish, anterior to the French prose text, seem to bring us one step closer to a lost French verse original, a chanson de geste, with the hypothetical name of Valentin et Sansnom and presumed written in the first half of the fourteenth century. The oldest surviving text witness is a Middle Dutch fragment. This version seems to stand independently and tell a more developed tale, which was subsequently abbreviated by the other texts. The Middle Low German Valentin und Namelos is the oldest complete version and a text that could, according to previous research, offer us a sense of the shape of the lost French text. It is preserved in two manuscripts, both compilations, from the fifteenth century: Stockholm, Kungliga bibliotheket, Cod. Holm. Vu 73, and Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. 102c in scrinio (Hartebok).