Read this as junior in college for an English Lit course. We had to memorize the prologue and recite it in class. Even to this day I still remember the first few lines, so I guess it definitely made an impression on me. Loved the beauty of the old english even it at times it can be hard to spit out.

3.0 barely passing stars

A few witty lines, an occasional life lesson, but mostly..... a boring lot of hot air.

A Classic that Set the Stage for both Pre-modern and Modern Fiction

A group of strangers find themselves at an inn on the way to a festival.

The hosts suggests they share tales.

These strangers - representing the full stratification of medieval Britain - from the noble Knight to the self-described immoral Pardoner, each share a tale.

Some are good. Some are not. One, the Pardoner's tale - is considered to be the greatest short story of all time.

But as a whole, this work is timeless and has deservedly withstood history's meandering. Is it because it survived, and such things have value because they survived? Or is it more than that?

I believe it is more than that because it's incredible.

These tales just give a slice of humanity, and show the power of society, and make me proud to be a human

I read Noah Harari's Sapiens, and understood that humanity's true power lies not in its intelligence alone. Dolphins are intelligent, perhaps more intelligent in some regards.

Humanity's power lies in its ability to cooperate through the power of illusion.

From drawing up magically-enforced contracts to pay five hundred workers artificially-imbued monetary units so that they might build a building over the course of five years, to nations and borders, we as a species can make things up to arbitrarily agree on, and then make very real things happen.

And in human society, one of our inventions is a division of labor. It's not always fair, in fact it rarely is - but humans can do it on a scale unimaginable to any other species. And this division of labor is effectively a mass cooperation, and can bring extraordinary things.

In the Canterbury Tales one bit of each of Medieval England's labor and class divisions finds themselves at the host's Inn with Chaucer -



In the diagram above, they not only show the levels of Class, from Knight to Pardoner, but levels of morality.

The Knight is the most moral. He fights and does not talk about it. He is at the top.

The Pardoner is at the other end - the man who sells religious pardons and keeps money for himself, and he is the least moral.

Chaucer gives the Pardoner a break though - the Pardoner admits his immorality to all assembled, and then gives the best tale - some say the greatest short story in history.

And from Knight to Pardoner, they bring the tales of humanity - and it is all incredible.

Some stories are better than others. The Physician's Tale is perhaps incomplete. The Prioress's Tale is filled with anti-Semitism, which was the pervasive style of the era in England, so we'll not cast aspersions on Chaucer, but rather cast aspersions on his pre-Enlightenment time.

The Nun's Priest's tale is a Bestiary tale - of a rooster named Chaunticleer and a fox named Don Russell. Bestiary tales have animals with the characteristics of humans, and this implies that some human habits are animal-like.

But no - animals outside of humanity could not tell this set of tales. Only humans, and human society could tell this set of tales.

Was Chaucer a story-maker? Or a story-teller?

IE was he just like Aesop in the sense that he wrote down the tales of the time? Or did he make these tales?

The answer is that it doesn't really matter. Aesop found a way to get his tales into writing, and so did Chaucer.

And one way or another, they laid the foundation for future fiction.

For this, I am grateful. So read The Canterbury Tales - you'll be taking in the foundations of fiction, and seeing a collection of the fictions that bring humanity together. And perhaps like me, you might read Chaucer and be proud to be part of humanity after you turn the last page.