Everything you need to know to read “The Canterbury Tales” - Iseult Gillespie
A portly Miller, barely sober enough
to sit on his horse,
rambles on about the flighty wife
of a crotchety old carpenter
and the scholar she takes as her lover.
To get some time alone together,
the scholar and the wife
play various tricks
that involve feigning madness,
staging a biblical flood,
and exposing themselves in public.
But the parish clerk
is also lusting after the wife,
and comes by every night
to sing outside her house.
This becomes so tiresome
that she tries to scare him away
by hanging her rear end out the window
for him to kiss.
When this appears not to work,
her scholar decides
to try farting in the same position,
but this time, the clerk
is waiting with a red-hot poker.
This might all sound like a bawdy joke,
but it’s part of one of the most esteemed
works of English literature ever created:
The Canterbury Tales,
which seamlessly blends the lofty
and the lowly.
The work consists of 24 stories,
each told by one
of Chaucer’s spirited characters.
Narrators include
familiar Medieval figures
such as a Knight,
a Clerk,
and a Nun,
and the less recognizable Reeve,
and Mancible,
and others.
The Tales are written in Middle English,
which often looks entirely different
from the language spoken today.
It was used between the 12th
and 15th centuries,
and evolved from Old English
due to increased contact
with European romantic languages
after the Norman Conquest of 1066.
Most of the Middle English alphabet
is still familiar today,
with the inclusion
of a few archaic symbols,
such as yogh, which denotes the y,
j,
or gh sound.
The loquacious cast of the Tales
first meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark.
They have a journey in common:
a pilgrimage to Canterbury
to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett,
a martyred archbishop who was murdered
in his own Cathedral.
Eager and nosy
for some personal details,
the host of the Inn
proposes a competition:
whoever tells the best tale
will be treated to dinner.
If not for their pilgrimage,
many of these figures would never
have had the chance to interact.
This is because Medieval society followed
a feudal system
that divided the clergy and nobility
from the working classes,
made up of peasants and serfs.
By Chaucer’s time,
a professional class of merchants
and intellectuals had also emerged.
Chaucer spent most of his life
as a government official
during the Hundred Years' War,
traveling throughout Italy and France,
as well as his native England.
This may have influenced
the panoramic vision of his work,
and in the Tales,
no level of society is above mockery.
Chaucer uses the quirks
of the characters’ language –
the ribald humor of the Cook,
the solemn prose of the Parson,
and the lofty notions of the Squire –
to satirize their worldviews.
The varied dialects, genres,
and literary tropes
also make the work a vivid record
of the different ways Medieval audiences
entertained themselves.
For instance, the Knight’s tale
of courtly love,
chivalry,
and destiny
riffs on romance,
while the tales of working-class narrators
are generally comedies
filled with scatological language,
sexual deviance,
and slapstick.
This variation
includes something for everyone,
and that’s one reason why readers
continue to delight in the work
in both Middle English and translation.
While the narrative runs
to over 17,000 lines,
it's apparently unfinished,
as the prologue ambitiously
introduces 29 pilgrims
and promises four stories apiece,
and the innkeeper never crowns a victor.
It’s possible that Chaucer was
so caught up in his sumptuous creations
that he delayed picking a winner -
or perhaps he was so fond
of each character
that he just couldn’t choose.
Whatever the reason,
this means that every reader
is free to judge;
the question of who wins is up to you.
