According to Walter Bishop, its English editor, Jordain "stands at the point in the development of the genre when the primitive martial and crusading spirit had already begun to yield to the spirit of sheer adventure." It is the first vernacular French work to incorporate the story of Apollonius of Tyre. A mid-12th century reference in a poem of Giraut de Cabreira shows that the story was well-known by then to Occitan troubadours. There was a vernacular French text in circulation, which now survives only in fragments. It was also accessible in Latin through Godfrey of Viterbo's Pantheon (late 11th century) and the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri (10th century).
