A. La corte de Alfonso VIII - Gonzalo de Berceo

Manuscripts A, B, and L, individually, offer somewhat different versions of the
third branch of the RAlix, but preserve in common a version clearly more ancient than
that of AdeP. By isolating features common now to two, now to all three manuscripts, a
rough image is obtained of the archetype utilized by Alexander of Paris as the nucleus of
the standard third branch; the archetype reflects in turn, more or less faithfully, the poem
in Alexandrines on Alexander's Oriental campaign which was composed by Lambert le
Tort and which formed the gravitational center of the cyclic poem on Alexander. In A,
the third branch is the briefest of the versions; in L, it represents a mingling of standard
version traits with archetype traits; while in B, it represents a hypothetical third stage of
reworking the archetype material, the first stage having been the archetype; the second
stage, the archetype plus certain interpolations such as the chapters on the Perilous Valley
and the Fountain of Youth which from there found their way into the standard third
branch; and the third stage, the second plus such interpolations as the B version of the
twelve peers and
an expanded rehash of the Perilous Valley material linked to a lengthy
description of Babylon. The features characterizing the third stage of development of the
B-stem material are absent from A, L, and all the extant manuscripts of AdeP, but Claude
Fauchet, in his Recueil
de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise [sic], cites, from a
manuscript now lost, seven lines of verse which correspond to part of the B description of
Babylon and which are drawn from a manuscript of the B-stem closely allied to the
extant Venice manuscript.
Manuscript A, besides containing the standard version of the fourth branch, gives
the commencement of a different work which is possibly a version of the fourth branch
both earlier than, and a source of, the standard version. Manuscript B contains at the
beginning of the fourth branch eight stanzas that may possibly reflect an earlier redaction
of some of the standard material, but subsequently conforms to the standard version. L
conforms in general to the standard. (Willis, The Debt 1-3)
Tres de las cuatro versiones del RAlix se encuentran hoy representadas por un solo
manuscrito; el resto de los manuscritos se conforma más o menos a una familia,
aunque
varios muestran omisiones notables, adiciones, y reorganizaciones del material, y
representan en común la forma en la que, hacia el final del siglo XII, un tal Alexander de
París conformó el RAlix, en gran parte a base de material preexistente. En esta forma
llamada Alexander de
París, o estándar, el poema está dispuesto en líneas dodecasílabas