[5] In recent years the work has proved a fruitful and versatile resource for the speculative analysis of its themes and its representation of literary archetypes.
[6] It cultivates the literary and social preoccupations and heroic landscapes of its age, and is consciously absorbed within the framework of legendary and folkloric themes which are sometimes referred to as the "Matter of England".
[7] That term should not deflect the recognition that the literary and cultural, as well as the geographical, landscape which the real Fulk inhabited was equally English and Welsh in outlook,[8] as it was also French and Latin in language.
Themes of outlawry, dispossession and restitution, adventure and occasional piety surround the main subject, culminating in Fulk's second marriage, blindness, death, and burial at Alberbury.
Its tales of mysterious lands, imprisoned maidens, prophecies and similarly allegorical or chivalric material are instructive in the operations of the romance idiom.