Abstract/Summary

Although sustained interest in Arthur appears to emerge much later in Ireland than in other parts of Europe, the composition of five indigenous romances, the particularly high rate of manuscript survival of two of them, and the allusions in contemporary poetry suggest a respectable degree of success for this mode of writing from the fifteenth century onwards. The correspondences between the Irish Arthurian romances and English and French romance narratives are close enough to be tantalising, but never close enough to be certain. What we seem to have (to a greater or lesser extent) in these five works is not straightforward translation from individual source texts, but the sort of recombination of familiar motifs that constituted the standard way of composing romance across medieval western Europe. Romance, after all, is a very derivative genre, albeit often artfully so - it could be argued that this process of composition draws these Irish Arthurian romances particularly close to wider European practices of romance composition.