The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories running over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. Chaucer was appointed Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace, and in 1389, Clerk of the King's work. It was during this time that Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales. He was a court poet that wrote for nobility.

Although Chaucer wrote other works it is Canterbury Tales that is considered his magnum opus. He uses the stories within stories to satirize, and paint a critical and ironical picture of English society of the times. The fact that all the characters in the story are all from a cornucopia of social classes was something fairly new to English literature. Even poorer, more lowly classes could still call out a more noble, character, like a knight, and stop them mid-story, to criticize and tell their own story instead. Because of all the characters here are on a pilgrimage, they are all concerned with everything spiritual. The work itself is considered incomplete especially considering that all the characters didn't get to tell their stories. The work is generally opened to a lot of different interpretations. 

Canterbury Tales is a sort of stories within stories. We have some 30 pilgrims at a tavern. They are all on pilgrimage to St. Thomas Beckett's Shrine. We have our host proclaiming, "Tell your best stories. The one who tells the best story shall have a feast here when we get back and I shall pay for it." Needless to say, everybody from the knight to the parson tells a story. Some are short, some long, some serious, some jokey, some holy, some about love, some about chivalry, some epic like the knight's tale. What's interesting is that other characters interrupt and/or stop some stories by calling them out and criticizing them [regardless of social class or wealth], sometimes thereby starting their own tale.   

I enjoyed the knight's tale the most. It opens the book and gets the reader acquainted with the style of the book. Two cousins, Palamon and Arcite, both knights are in prison and they chance upon a beautiful woman, Emily from their cell windows. They both claim her but they both can't have her. They end up having this epic duel with 100 warriors on both sides. Palamon is wounded by a chance sword thrust from one of Arcite's men, leaving Arcite the victor, but then Arcite is mortally wounded by his horse throwing him off and falling on him, leaving Palamon to marry Emily. The story is epic and intended to be. The next story is an antithesis to this knight's tale of courtly love and chivalry. In the next story, the miller's story, it is about regular people in love and is more lowbrow.

As stories go, none of them are especially terrific or satisfying in my opinion. In fact, I didn't start to thoroughly enjoy the book until at least 150/484 pages. Why? Because I was expecting the stories to be more thrilling. What I found out was that as I read farther on, the stories didn't become particularly more interesting, rather, my thoughts on them changed. I began to find seemingly unimportant yet realistic stories for the medieval time, to be fun. How, why? I'm not even quite sure. Like I said I didn't get into the book until nearly 150 pages in. In fact, I found the constant rhyming going on nonstop to be quite jarring to get used to, especially considering the format is poetic but of an especially non-epic quality. Homer is forgiven for constant rhyme but I wasn't so sure about Chaucer. Consider the fact that most of these archaic works of literature that I've read have been epic, think Aeneid, Odysee, Iliad, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Divine Comedy, so when you come to Canterbury Tales from all that you just say to yourself, "where's the action?" That was what made Canterbury Tales so hard to get into for me. Eventually, the text speaks for itself and you see how great and important it really is. For me, it took a while to sink in.

It is believed Chaucer got a good deal of his ideas from other literary works. But no other works of literature featured pilgrims telling tales together. In that sense, he's a true visionary. Harold Bloom says the text is mostly original but the idea of the host, a "master of ceremonies" was derived from Dante and Virgil in the Divine Comedy. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is most similar to the Canterbury Tales than any other work. It features a cast of characters telling stories as they flee from the Black Death. It is believed that Chaucer might have known him.

The tales themselves usually center around a single theme, mostly religious. However, the themes here aren't necessarily all religious or set. They're dependent upon the characters themselves and they don't speak in any sort of hierarchy. The passage of the time, or any traveling what so ever, or even locations along the way, is never mentioned. Rather the stories themselves are all that is spoken of. 

The version I read was a modern English translation, translated by Nevill Coghill. His translation is very smooth, breezy even in the most difficult of circumstances. Considering this is almost a 500-page book, the modern translation reads almost like modern-day. Of course, it really doesn't. What I mean is that it's very smooth as opposed to old medieval English. The words used sometimes can still be complicated and I did still have to look words up online at times. Another thing that must be said about Canterbury Tales is that a lot of the lines rhyme and they are definitely in poetic verse. Sometimes the rhyming gets overwhelming. That's typical for a lot of the 14th-century prose. But overall, for my first Canterbury Tales experience, the Penguin Classics modern translation was very good. I'll try reading it again in the future, but a different translation. I would recommend this book to anyone: students, writers, readers who like the western canon especially. A "do not miss" book.