This is one of those books I read as a student of language. It is also one of the most significant works in the English language. The Canterbury Tales give students of the English language an excellent sample of Middle English (200 years before Shakespeare). At the same time, they provide an unparalleled glimpse of life in fourteenth-century England. To the adventurous I recommend reading it in the original Middle English.

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai3QQ...

Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1400 CE


From Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations:

"Except for Shakespeare, whom he profoundly influenced, Chaucer is the major literary artist in the English language" (ed. Harold Bloom, 1).

From "Confusion of Orifices in Chaucer's Miller's Tale" by Louise M. Bishop:

"Chaucer uses sensual confusion to poke fun at the limits of human knowledge..." (170).

From The Canterbury Tales (Penguin, trans. Nevill Coghill):

"No English poet has so mannerly an approach to his reader" (xi).
"All Chaucer's heroes regard love when it comes upon them as the most beautiful of absolute disasters, an agony to be as much desired as bemoaned, ever to be pursued, never to be betrayed" (xii).

From The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman:

"As Dante's great poem is called The Divine Comedy, so Chaucer's has been called the Human Comedy" (74).
"The Prologue...is perhaps the most delightful portrait gallery in all literature" (75).
"Chaucer is a perfect yarn spinner, the founder of English realism, and an entrancing human being" (75).

From Genius by Harold Bloom:

"Profoundly impressed and cheerfully irritated by Dante, Chaucer created a parody of Dante the Pilgrim in Chaucer the Pilgrim of the Canterbury Tales" (104).

From The Western Canon by Harold Bloom:

"Turning from what is overpraised to what cannot be overpraised, the Canterbury Tales is a remarkable tonic" (99).

From Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda:

"From Chaucer and Cervantes to Joyce and Proust, our greatest comic writers don't simply make us laugh, they show us what it means to be human" (18).

From The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer:

"At the end of his book, Chaucer primly retracts the Tales along with his other "worldly translations," thus shifting the blame for enjoying them onto the reader" (364).

From The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson:

"Inspired and perhaps influenced, but certainly not distracted, by the world around him, Chaucer yet found time to write thousands of lines, among them some of the best poetry in English" (xv).

From Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald R. Howard:

"Of all the writers Chaucer has had the greatest influence on English literature; he stands at the beginning, the father of English poetry, as Dryden and Arnold called him" (xi).
"Chaucer--unlike most writers, I fear--led an interesting life" (xii).

From Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury by Paul Strohm:

"Chaucer may, in fact must, be seen in double vision: as the medieval poet that he was and as the poet of permanent themes and enduring stature that he aspired to be, situated in the 'then' of his own time but also speaking to the 'now' of ours" (13).

(First, a note about the edition I used--the Penguin paperback with modern English versification by Nevill Coghill. While the translation is exceptional (retention of verse and rhyme), the edition lacks line numbers, footnotes on the page, an informative introduction, and more end notes. Yet, paired with the Everyman's Middle English, and well supplemented, edition, you will be in good standing. The Riverside Chaucer is also a critical text for the serious student.)

It has taken me a long while to catch onto Chaucer's Boccaccio-inspired masterwork (though he never credited Boccaccio). Like most, I read the General Prologue, the Miller's Tale, and the Wife of Bath's Tale in school. I read it again in college. No double the Miller's Tale woes the electric minds of youth, what with its bawdy riffing on orifices, but, in the end, it isn't enough to keep young minds coming back. Like most works of high literature (I'm thinking Moby-Dick especially), one needs much experience in life before being ready to take on such dense books. It is a tragedy that most are completely turned off by these classics by the end of high school. For me, at thirty-five now, this is the first time I can say that I went beyond appreciating the endurance of the work and actually enjoyed it as a common reader.

Aside from helming English literature--alongside his former teacher John Wycliffe, who produced the first English translation of the Bible--the Tales are remarkable for denying the more accepted French of the day for such works that targeted nobility. Like Dante who denied Latin in favor of his Tuscan, Chaucer put English on the literary map. To be more precise, however, if we take consult the Riverside Chaucer text, we find that "...English...had been used in poetry and prose for at least six centuries before Chaucer began to write" (xxix), but the Norman Conquest overshadowed all the regional dialects of English. What Chaucer actually did was to show that "...English could be written with an elegance and power that earlier authors had not attained" (xxx). The work also begins with a realism that was unprecedented in literary works. Chaucer manages to embody thirty-some personalities seemingly effortlessly. The General Prologue begins with an assertion of his poetic ability:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Then the Prologue gives way to a fascinating roll call of characters.

The wrapper-story sets up like The Arabian Nights where the story around all the stories keeps the time element moving along. The Host decides to while away the travel time of their pilgrimage by having a story contest. Each of the thirty characters is to tell two stories there and two stories back. Thus, the original conception was to have one hundred and twenty stories (twenty more than Boccaccio, mind), but, sadly, Chaucer died in 1400 before he could finish. The criteria by which the tales will be judged by the Host: "...who gives the fullest measure / Of good morality and general pleasure..." (24).

Like Dante, again, and as others we will see later (Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, et al.), Chaucer has all of history, literature, theology, and philosophy at his disposal. Through his characters, he reveals an enormous store of information. Among the works referenced or alluded to: Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, Livy, Petrarch, Ovid, Augustine, Suetonius, Lucan, Valerius, the Bible. And the way in which he threads all these sources into the Tales is well-measured and -calculated.

The Knight's Tale leads off, and with its noble theme of chivalry (indeed, it brings ancient Greece into the fourteenth century), so treasured in Chaucer's day, it acts as a sort of bait-and-switch when turning next to the Miller's Tale. This is perhaps the most notorious of all the Tales (pun intended), what with its image of Alison sticking her "hole" out the window and Absalon kissing it: "And Absalon has kissed her nether eye" (106). It also introduces the word "quim" as Coghill translates it, and a vulgar depiction Nicolas grabbing Alison's pudendum (according to the Riverside Chaucer). Thus, in the first two tales, we see the poet's mastery of the chivalrous and the bawdy. He is daring enough to have a character blast a fart in someone's face and a Catholic member of the clergy shamelessly brag about his avarice. At the same time, Chaucer has no problem digging through the annals of history to highlight the Christian concept of pride before the fall.

Overall, these stories and their raconteurs put on display our humanity in all of its paradoxes, lows, and highs. As the Host says, "Now isn't in a marvel of God's grace / That an illiterate fellow can outpace / The wisdom of a heap of learned men?" (18). These common people deal with all the struggles we all do, and they cope with them in different ways. As the host urges storytellers to leave sad, depressing tales and lighten the mood with farce, so is life in its vicissitudes. Chaucer, himself, as the poet-pilgrim, isn't above self-deprecation--his own tale is interrupted because it is so bad.

Ovid is the most present source in the Tales. They are rife with transformations, though perhaps not from one creature to another; these transformations are more human: social, moral, ethical. In the Monk's tale, we get a veritable encyclopedia of transformations, tragedies, and moral transgressions, beginning with Lucifer and ending with Croesus. (Humorously, the monk gets cut off because he is killing the mood.) Emotional transformations abound: "Ever the latter end of joy is woe..."(224). Nothing is permanent. Nothing stays the same. All is change, as Democritus taught.

While these tales anticipate the bodily humor of Rabelais, they also prefigure twentieth-century feminism with the provocative, confident, enchanting proto-feminist The Wife of Bath. So secure is her mark upon the work that no conversation of Chaucer is complete without her. From the start of her prologue, The Wife of Bath shatters female stereotypes (or perhaps, in context, I should say expectations). Far from the lowly servant to her husband, it is she who pines for the reigns to the relationship. And she is ready to argue not only for equality, but for the upper hand, using a wealth of examples from the very Bible that men hold over her! She speaks forth with a boldness that is as shocking as it is admirable. In the opening lines--"If there were no authority on earth / Except experience, mine, for what it's worth, / And that's enough for me..."--The Wife of Bath gives a precursor to nineteenth-century American self-reliance. She is secure with and proud of her sexuality; no repression for this wife; and in this category, men are pitiful ("What means of paying her can he invent / Unless he use his silly instrument?") and women free ("In wifehood I will use my instrument / As freely as my Maker me it sent"). Truly she boasts in her "quoniam," a word to be savored in posterity along with the Miller's Tale's "quim": "And truly, as my husbands said to me, / I had the finest quoniam that might be...." But all this attention-grabbing prologue is not merely for flipping the conception of men and women on its head. The prologue sets the stage for a tale that argues a cunning theory. If men allow the woman to have mastery over them, everyone gets what they want! That, however, is a simple and somewhat cheeky rendering of a tale with so clever a capstone on the central question of what women desire the most.

Chaucer's work, like Homer, like Dante, sings and much as it informs. If one puts in the time to learn the pronunciations of the Middle English and the effort to chat the passages aloud, one will be most rewarded. The language, far from being harsh in its Germanic influence, is intoxicating. The rime riche and ever-changing schemes that match the tone of the story being told raise the literature far above mere storytelling. Chaucer, in the end, is an artist in full command of his craft. His work stands centuries later as the genesis of English literature and continues to speak to us through the ages.

I'm gonna start texting in Chaucer's English.

*declares war on abbreviation*

It's been a while since I've been on Goodreads - a good 6 months anyways - and I've got a lot of catching up to do! So all my reviews from this point on this year will be short and sweet reflections.

I decided to pick up The Canterbury tales because of a perverse need to read the classics. Not all the time, mind. Just enough to make me realize that they're better read in a group - preferably with someone who gets it.

But I will admit that I was pleasantly - and happily - surprised, as this adaptation of the original language was wonderfully and lovingly interpreted, with much of the original cadence and gist that the original has. Not an easy feat to be sure, but I applaud the author's honor to be true to it. It would have been daunting.

The reader's digest on this book of stories is that it is a group of strangers on their way to Canterbury on a pilgrimage. Their group tour leader basically cajoles them all to tell a story to the others to pass the time of day as they travel - because as we all know, travel back then was arduous (and sometimes dangerous) and there were no distractions to while away the time. So what better time distraction than listening to a story! And back then, they could really tell stories!

So the stories ranged from bad to good - and were long or short - but let me tell you they really entertained. There were some that had me laughing out loud - they were hilariously bawdy and crude. Others had great morals to offer. And the longest and most tedious was the one told by the preacher. (Go figure). That story was grueling to go through and in the end made me ever so glad that I'm alive and well in the 21st century and living in North America. No wonder they had to repent for sins - they really had to adhere to the letter of the religious law ...... or else.

Anyways it was a fun read. It also made me a little sad when I thought about whether or not this sort of thing could happen in our modern age. A group of strangers stuck together in an extended circumstance with no other distractions other than the stories we could tell each other. (insert sad face emoticon here).

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #44: The Canterbury Tales (~1380-1400), by Geoffrey Chaucer

The story in a nutshell:
Written in stops and starts from roughly 1380 to 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales takes as its framing device an event that was common during its Late Medieval times, but that no one had ever thought of doing a story collection about before -- it's set among a group of unrelated tourists, making a pilgrimage from southern London to the Cathedral of Canterbury (one of the most important Christian sites in England, and home of that country's oldest Archbishop), during which the tour organizer suggests a story competition to while away their time, the winner of which will receive a free dinner at the end of their trip, and with the stories themselves bouncing from chivalrous tales by the nobility to pious tales by the clergy, to bawdy tales from the commoners present. (Although be aware that over 80 slightly different handwritten versions of this book exist from the century following Chaucer's death, because of movable type still technically not existing yet, none of which are in Chaucer's original hand, making it impossible to determine the stories' true original order; and in fact we don't even know whether the infamously "unfinished" tales are in that state accidentally, or were done on purpose by Chaucer as a sly joke about how boring they are.)

And indeed, this is what made the Tales so widely reproduced and passionately loved once printing presses did finally make it to England, a century after Chaucer's death, for being clever to the point sometimes of laugh-out-loud funny, and with it not just being a story collection but no less than a grand satire of all the different ways stories were even told back then. Don't forget, before the rise of "Modern English" during the Early Renaissance, there were actually a dozen different types of "Middle English" used throughout the country, each of them with their own idioms and slightly different grammar rules, all of which Chaucer manages to ape at one point or another; and of course don't forget the already mentioned differing expectations among social classes of what stories were even supposed to be about, not to mention the sometimes even different language that existed between the rich and the poor, making this one of the first times in English history that a writer makes fun of specific groups by creating puns out of their local dialect. (Just to cite one good example, among the nobility, to "take pity" meant a selfless act of sympathy, while among the lower classes it was slang for having sex, a double-entrendre that Chaucer makes great use of in his book.) Less an interesting literary story and more an interesting literary exercise, The Canterbury Tales profoundly helped shape not only the modern English language we use today, but how we even think of the proper role and structure of the narrative format in general.

The argument for it being a classic:
The ways that this single volume has had an impact on society is almost innumerable, say its fans, the most important being many of the things already mentioned -- how by being one of the first books to be widely printed and distributed during the Renaissance, for example, it not only became the very first English "bestseller," but profoundly helped spread and normalize the use of so-called "chancery standard," the form of English invented by the government's then-burgeoning civil service, of which Chaucer was a well-paid veteran his entire adult life. (In fact, Chaucer in many ways was a precursor to the fabled "Renaissance Man" just around the historical corner -- he was a well-educated master of not only language but also math and proto-science, even while being an accomplished politician, office manager and sociologist.) Then there's the fact that Chaucer subverted the very way that stories were even told, bypassing the usual pecking order of the Middle Ages (in which it was expected that knights go first in all public endeavors, from telling stories to using the bathroom, then priests, then aristocrats, then merchants, then laborers, etc), mixing up his own story order between high-class and low-class tales and often having them be angry reactions to the story just told, ironically making this an early example of our modern notion of moral relativity; and by consciously inserting witty "fourth wall" references to the act of writing itself -- including the aforementioned "unfinished" stories that may or may not be deliberate jokes, as well as making himself an actual character in his own book, albeit a self-deprecatory version of himself who is often berated by the rest of the group for being a nerdy, unimaginative bookworm -- Chaucer also turns in a fine early example of metafictional postmodernism, only half a millennium before the term was first invented. And on top of all this, say its fans, it's simply an entertaining manuscript, full of fart jokes and pointed barbs at both corrupt clergy and dumb white-trash, the final element in the equation for elevating a book from merely "important" to a full "classic."

The argument against:
There's really only one main argument against this book that you see online, a huge problem that stops its haters from even reading it and coming up with other criticisms, which is the dense, obtuse Middle English that the original is written in, an outdated form of the language that literally hasn't been used in 600 years now; and indeed, you are in for a chore if you try to read the book this way yourself, despite your pretentious friend's insistence that Middle English is easy to follow once you "get the hang of it." (Liars! LIARS!) But I myself happened to read a modern translation of the book, making this criticism not really applicable to my specific review.

My verdict:
So yes, it's important to know that I read a modern translation of The Canterbury Tales, which I'm sure has purists foaming at the mouth even as we speak; and I gotta plainly admit, I highly recommend that you do the same unless you're specifically studying Middle English, in that otherwise you won't even have a chance of getting the full gist of what Chaucer is trying to say. If you do read the modern version, then, like me you'll realize that its fans are correct, that this is a much smarter and more contemporary book than what you thought could ever be accomplished during its time period, which as a side benefit offers a treasure trove of supplemental information about such period events as the 1381 Peasant's Revolt, the Great Schism of the Catholic Church, the Hundred Years' War and the invention of tree-based paper. (Of course, this then brings up the question we often seem to be debating among older titles here, of whether a book can truly be called a "classic" if it requires a week of homework beforehand to even understand what's going on; and along those lines, I highly recommend doing a close reading of this book's long Wikipedia entry before tackling the manuscript itself.) It really is surprising to see how readable and sometimes even lowbrow filthy this book actually gets at points; and although a little of this stuff goes a long way (I only read about half the book myself, then read simple recaps of the second half as a way of "finishing"), it's also an unexpected delight, and about the closest you'll get to a book this old still feeling fresh and relatable. Like most pre-Victorian books being reviewed in this series, it comes with a limited recommendation only, and I'll warn you that you need to strongly be in the mood to read this book in order to actually read this book; but certainly I think it's safe to call The Canterbury Tales a classic, a designation I don't envision it losing for a long, long time.

Is it a classic? Yes

(And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)

Few years ago I read the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, and while reading the Canterbury Tales I felt like I was back in time. I really enjoy reading the Medieval books, the romantic ones with the well known chivalry style, and noble characters.

On the contrary, Decameron and The Canterbury Tales represent more the "measly" middle ages. Thus the plague, the peasantry, the religious dogmas, and the real life of people from each degree such as the religious ones, nobles, and knights.

It is necessary to read these books in order to have a further comprehension about what is moral and unmoral, what is logical and not logical. Both Chaucer and Boccaccio wrote about stories that really happened in those times not because they wanted to make us judge a certain character or behavior, or worse they wanted to condemn those people. On the contrary, they simply wanted to show to us how people truly were back then. It doesn't matter how strongly the religious/else authority can impose people's behavior, the genuine human nature can't be changed or manipulated.

Изключителен Чосър! Талант, духовитост, закачлив хумор... " Кентърбърийските разкази" преливат от живот. Разкошни са! Невероятен превод на Александър Шурбанов- това е цяло изкуство и майсторство.

Read The General Prologue and The Pardoner's Tale for class. Very witty indeed.

But the middle english had me crying, so it was hard to enjoy and read without getting bored every 15 minutes.

4 stars.