 The work is in the same poetic form as the majority of medieval French "romans", although significantly shorter than the romances of Chrétien de Troyes).The work has come down to us in 20 manuscripts, though manuscripts C and G are the ones most commonly referred to, with the Folio Classiques edition using the former, which has 958 lines, and the Livre de Poche edition using the latter of 965 verses.The oldest extant version was written in the late 13th Century, in approximately 1288, and the presumed date for the composition of the work is the first half of that century.