his own death, his eventual imprisonment, and his final vengeance on his stepfather. After succeeding in claiming his inheritance, however, Bevis is driven into exile and separated from Josiane, with whom he is reunited only after each of them has contracted, in form only, a second union. The story also relates the hero's death and the fortunes of his two sons. Texts The oldest version known, , is an Anglo-Norman text that dates back to the first half of the 13th century. It consists of 3,850 verses written in s. Three continental French chansons de geste of , all in decasyllables, were written in the 13th century. One is preserved in BnF Français 25516. They consist of between 10,000 and 20,000 verses. A French prose version was made before 1469. is an Old Norse translation of a lost version of the Anglo-Norman poem. The earliest manuscript of the saga dates to c. 1400. The English metrical romance, (see Matter of England), is founded based on some French origins, varying slightly from those that have been preserved. The oldest manuscript dates from the beginning of the 14th century. A translation into Irish survives in a 15th-century manuscript. The printed editions of the story were most numerous in Italy, where or was the subject of more than one poem, and the tale was interpolated in the , the Italian compilation of Carolingian legend. An anonymous was printed in 1480, and a "Tuscan", in fact Padan of the Po Valley, version in 1497. From Italian, it passed into Yiddish, where the became the first non-religious book to be printed in Yiddish. The most popular and critically honored Yiddish-language chivalry romance. In Russia, the romance attained an unparalleled popularity and became a part of Russian folklore. The Russian rendition of the romance appeared in mid-16th century, translated from a Polish or Old Belarusian version, which were in turn, translated from a Croatian rendition of the Italian romance, made in Ragusa. The resulting narrative, called (, lit. The Story of ), gradually merged with Russian folktales, and the principal character attained many features of a Russian folk hero (bogatyr). Since the 18th century until 1918, various versions of the had been widely circulated (particularly among the lower classes) as a . Such writers as Derzhavin and Pushkin praised 's literary value. The latter used some elements of the in his fairy tales and attempted to