As the earliest Arthurian verse-novel in the German language, Hartmann von Aue's Erec was highly influential, not only on the many Arthurian works that followed, but also on courtly narrative verse in general. However, his tale is of more than antiquarian interest. Its subjects--the individual in conflict with society and the destructive force of possessive love--are modern, and its language, when transferred into prose, is more direct and lucid than most contemporary writing. Indeed, it was the conviction that the story deserved a much larger audience than that of medieval scholars which inspired this translation, the first into English.