This masterpiece was written over 600 years ago but I am positive that if you decide to pick it up you will find the stories most interesting!
My favourite tale was The Pardoner's Tale. I always enjoy a story in which greedy, vicious people get what they deserve.

I had tried reading Chaucer at university but Middle English was an obstacle I was not able to overcome. So this time I played safely and opted for this one in modern English .. And I enjoyed it so much!

I only read four tales from this, since those were what were assigned for my class. What I read wasn't too terrible, but I don't exactly have a perfect judgement since I didn't get to read the entirety of the novel.

WHAN that Aprille with his schowres swoote
The drought of Marche hath perced to the roote,t
And bathud every veyne in suich licour,t
Of which vertue engendred is the flour:

What is The Canterbury Tales
It is the month of April, nature is fertile, the time when people fall in love, travel, and go on pilgrimages.
Chaucer decided to go on a pilgrimage and he encountered in Tabard Inn 29 other people that were also going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket who was murdered inside the Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral is about his murder.
The host (innkeeper) says that since the journey from London to Canterbury will be a long one in order to kill boredom they should say 4 stories each: 2 on their way to Canterbury and 2 on their way from Canterbury back to London. And the one who tells the best tale will win a free meal. That means 30 people x 4 stories each = 120 stories. But what we have is 24 stories running over 17000 lines and over 700 pages. Imagine how longer this piece of work would have been if in the end Chaucer had managed to complete it. At least 3000 pages. On the one hand I'm happy because it would have taken me 3 months to finish it, but on the other hand it's sad that this great piece of work is incomplete.
The inspiration for this poem is obvious; The Decameron written by Giovanni Boccaccio 3-4 decades before The Canterbury Tales.
Some say that Chaucer met Boccaccio in Italy and/or read the Decameron since many stories are more than similar and both works end with an apology. Both works also, became part of a trilogy by Pier Paolo Pasolini along with The Arabian Nights
The end of the Canterbury Tales is a sort of apology where Chaucer renounces the Tales and many of his previous works for the vulgar parts in these works and asking for forgiveness from Christ.
An apology I feel he had to make in order to escape death or persecution (?) #religiousterror
I don't agree with him. Your works are great! Keep writing. Oh wait. . .

The Language
The language is Middle English; the 2nd stage of the development of the English language after the first which is Old English (Beowulf) and before the 3rd which is Early Modern English (Shakespeare). The 4th stage is the English we use today.

Even though I was reading this book in glossed Middle English with a lot of footnotes, as the time went by I got used to it and it became easier to read, much easier than Joyce's Ulysses
I'm honest on this, trust me.
And of course I learnt many 'new' words while reading this work:
swyve=fuck
wight=person
queynte=cunt
eek = also
woot=knew
It is through his work that over 2000 English words were first attested in written manuscripts such as (mercenary, shelf, moral, award, vomit, and many more)

My Experience
At the beginning I was scared because this is
a) a long book and
b) a long book written in Middle English.
But as I said I got used to it and enjoyed it with one exception, The Parson's Tale, which wasn't a tale at all but a religious rant err... sermon on the seven deadly sins(with their many sub-branches) and really complex ways of how to repent, and when &c.
Many stories where written as fabliaux (comic farces usually including sexual and scatological obsenities): The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale, The Cook's Tale, The Merchant's Tale

Some where chivalric romances: The Knight's Tale, The Squire's Tale
Some where animal fables: The Nun's Priest's Tale
But let me stop here because this list won't end soon. . .
So, do I recommend this book. No, for many reasons:
a) It's poetry, and not many people read poetry let alone a 'poem' that runs around 700 pages
b) It's in Middle English so reading in Modern English or any other language will diminish the experience, unless you read it in Middle English which is tough for those who don't have a good level in English.
c) It's long and needs time to be read.

BUT, that being said, it certainly is a worthy piece of literature, written by the father of English Literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, and when you'll finish it you will feel that you crossed off one more thing from your bucket list.

While not as approachable as high school teacher's would have you believe, the Canterbury Tales is an entertaining mix of history, lyricism, and satire. In my opinion Chaucer missed a major opportunity to add a pastoral component to his work. The tales either all take place in disparate locations and times, telling of old events and veering toward the more recent recollections of his time, without going into much detail in regard to setting. But they, none of them, seem to immerse the reader in the physical universe, sounding often like people talking at you instead of immersing you in a poetic epic. I found a lot of Chaucer's set pieces somewhat confined in contrast with the works of Dante and Homer, whose writing offer a great sense of expansive wonder.

Aside from the magnificent Prologue to the Tales, the storytellers themselves often seem like floating heads. I would have loved more interpolations, more arguments, debates between the characters and physical descriptions. The lack of description gives the poetry a more austere feel. If you can put up with five hundred pages of rhyming end lines, you will be able to return to this work with much to gain from subsequent re-readings. The original Middle English is less readable than interesting in my view. Why not smooth out your reading experience with a modern rendition? All you will be missing will be the antiquated phraseology and stiff structural differences. I am not a purist when it comes to Chaucer, though I will be hard-pressed to get into his other works like Troilus and Criseyde. I can only take so much Middle English before I tire of rearranging words and meanings to render them intelligible. You could puzzle your way through the manuscript if you want to brag that you read it in the original, but nobody is going to be impressed. It is a distracting way to read until you become so proficient in it that you can do it without thinking. Which I do not have the patience for.

Similarly, I am loathe to start Spenser's Faerie Queene for the same reason, but I know I will eventually relent. Medieval works of the imagination hold a special place in my heart, and I would love to delve more into similar epics.

As for my favorite tales, I really enjoyed the Prologue, the Knight's Tale, and the Canon Yeoman's Tale. I would have liked to see more chivalry, alchemy, and ribaldry, and less squabbling between wives and husbands. Chaucer apparently had a lot to say about the roles within the bonds of matrimony. Like literary fiction today, adultery is an endless topic in fiction/ poetry, one writers never seem to tire of describing ad nauseum. I recommend giving this a try if you were exhausted by sections of it in school or were forced to resort to Cliff's notes. The poetry is engaging in places, and the message always devout, even when the scene described is rather crude. He started a fun contest between two of his storytellers, where one disparages the other in his tale and the other responds by criticizing the other's profession in his. I would have liked to see more of this intertextuality, like a call and response between the participants of the tales, rather than straight, uninterrupted storytelling. Considering that legends and folklore were rife in other medieval works, Chaucer seemed too squeamish to mingle demons and faeries into his stories. He was more concerned with the mundane details of ordinary life, which bookend most of the tales. Occasionally something violent happens, and someone loses a head, or someone gets mooned, and the devil makes a brief appearance, but after a few hundred pages, the characters telling the Tales all blend together. The Prologues introducing each should have done more to develop the characters, to alleviate some of this blurring lines between their personalities. But perhaps I approached the work from too modern a perspective. I find it strange he called it Canterbury Tales instead of Canterbury Poems. There were other collections of prose tales and oral tales at the time, and they were not all poetic in nature. But this was before the printing press, a normal person might be lucky to come across five authentic manuscripts in a lifetime I would think.

Today we have the opposite problem. There is too much text, too many books, and the literature we have access to, along with the myriad commentary, reviews and criticisms, make it impossible to digest the culture of today or assign values to it. What is good literature anymore? What is worth preserving? We seem ready to preserve every Tom, Dick, and Harry's cooking blog, and every angsty fanfiction ever written in the heat of bed-wetting adolescence for the sake of a posterity which is wholly imaginary. I wonder if future generations in the postapocalyptic landscape will have to construct their shelters out of the useless books we filled up the world with during this generation because there will be no other building materials among the desiccated remnants of civilization.

A modern equivalent might be the Spoon River Anthology, which I also recommend. It would make a good college paper, contrasting these two works of poetic fiction. Makes you wonder if in 800 years people will be reading Robinson and Whitman and revering them like we revere Chaucer.

So why read Chaucer in this day and age? Because it reminds us that human nature persists, and that storytelling is an art that never dies, only changes form. Poetry is also meant to be a form of narrative art. We so often today consider poetry a way to describe feelings through free verse, subscribing to haiku brevity or the sappy sentimentality of postmodern multimedia poetry, where slang is mingled with gross intimacy to produce a quaint and vague irritant to our sensibilities. But for thousands of years people sat down and set words to meter as if language were an instrument they were playing. These constraints forced their narrative down a narrow track which carved a deep crevice through history and etches its way into the soul if you study it to extract the meaning and suck the marrow from its skeleton. I wish there were more epic poems being written today.

***MAJOR SPOILERS ALERT***

An essay that I wrote nearly a decade ago about The Canterbury Tales and its portrayal of women. It was for a course that I did, so the language is a bit academic and phoney.

The Canterbury Tales is a 14th century poem written by Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem offers us a vivid portrait of 14th century English society and the prevalent social order while also shedding light on the importance of and attitudes towards religion and status of and attitudes towards women in medieval society. The poem begins with a general introduction of the setting and an array of characters. At the beginning of The General Prologue, the narrator is resting at the Tabard inn in Southwark before his journey on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is spring time and the drought of March has given way to the sweet showers of April which has inspired people to go on pilgrimages. The inn where the narrator is resting is visited by 29 other pilgrims. The narrator meets the lot of them and gets to know them quite well. The narrator is a devout Christian and there is a sense of fellowship with the pilgrims who have arrived at the Tabard inn. The narrator proceeds to describe each and every pilgrim of the party beginning with the Knight.

It is interesting that the narrator introduces the chivalrous Knight, his well-mannered son (the squire) and the son's servant at the beginning itself. This could indicate that the narrator was acknowledging the Knight’s social status. The Knights represented the upper classes of the 14th century and were generally looked up to by one and all. The narrator is highly impressed by the knight who has won many battles but is meek in manner. The narrator then proceeds to introduce the religious order represented by the Nun/Prioress with excellent table manners, the monk with modern ideas and the friar (a religious beggar) who absolved people in return for gifts.

The religious order is described with both veneration as well as contempt. Even though Chaucer is extremely impressed by the nun/prioresses’ impeccable table manners, he also seems to be slightly irritated by her overreaction at the treatment of animals. The monk is interested in a life of luxury and has turned his back on ideas of self-denial and restraint, instead choosing a life of luxury and pleasure. It is impossible to know what Chaucer actually feels about the Monk and his ways as the monks’ ways are merely described as facts and the poet passes no judgment. The friars were beggars who were allowed to beg within a certain limit. However, Chaucer describes the friar as a cunning and lecherous man who begged beyond his allowed limits. He would deal with rich folks to receive gifts and avoid dealing with the poor at all. Chaucer describes the friar as representative of the corruption that has seeped into the prevalent religious order in medieval England.

We are then introduced to the pompous merchant, the student who is an ardent pursuer of education, the sergeant of the law and the Franklin who believes in having a good time. While we get detailed and vivid descriptions about the above mentioned people, Chaucer is not that kind to some of the lower classes of pilgrims. The haberdasher, dyer, carpenter, tapestry maker, weaver and their cook who are described only in terms of their tools and polished gear. This was also the case with the description of the squire’s servant who is described in terms of the weapons that he carries on his body. Also among the pilgrims is the shrewd skipper of Maudelayne, the skilled physician, the Wife of Bath who is a deaf clothier, the noble parson, his devout brother, the bawdy miller, the manciple, the cunning reeve (a foreman), the dishonest summoner and the pardoner who rode with the summoner.

There are a few instances in The Canterbury Tales which may point towards the importance of religion in medieval Britain. The narrator is impressed by the Knight who has carried his sword across all the lands of Christendom and even the lands of the heathen. This probably establishes the narrator's bigotry. The Prioress’s Tale which has a story about a Jew murdering a schoolboy is another example of religious bigotry in The Canterbury tales. In the Second Nun’s Tale Cecilia rebels against paganism, idolatry and continues to preach and teach Christianity even after she receives three strokes to the neck to kill her. The Second Nun’s Tale is an example of a religious biography. At the end of The Canterbury Tales there is a retraction or an apology of sorts by Chaucer. This apology might have been attached to the poem due to the fact that some of the tales narrated by the pilgrims during the pilgrimage involved farcical portrayal of infidelity, sanctioned lustful behavior and open suspicion and criticism of the prevalent religious order. These might have been perceived as blasphemous by the authorities. In The Knights Tale, Emily the Fair is portrayed as helpless even as Arcite and Palamon fight for her hand. It is interesting that Emily is unaware of the rivalry between the two men until the Duke of Thesus confronts the two fighting men. It must be noted that neither the Duke of Thesus nor the two men asks Emily the Fair whom she prefers or whether she prefers either of the two men. Even as Arcite and Palamon get ready to fight a tournament for Emily’s hand, Emily prays to Diana to make her a virgin for life and wishes to walk the woodlands wild and not to be a wife or be with child.

Women are often portrayed as untrustworthy and easily vulnerable to seduction in The Canterbury Tales. The women in The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale exemplify the sexually liberated female characters in the poem. These stories may also represent the male anxiety regarding the fidelity of the females. The female characters may also represent many of the negative stereotypes of women that existed in medieval England. In The Miller’s Tale the astrology student who stays for rent at a carpenter’s house makes passes at the carpenter’s wife. However, the carpenter’s wife does go to church after a rendezvous with the student to “search her conscience and do the work of Christ” where she is also courted by a parish clerk named Absalon. In the Reeve’s tale a pair of bible clerks beds the wife and daughter of a cheating miller. The clerk reacts to The Miller’s Tale with the following words: “guests who stay the night are dangerous. A man can’t be too careful when he brings a stranger in among his private things”. This may represent male anxiety about his woman’s fidelity, but the tale is also a morality tale where the dishonest miller is tricked by the Bible clerks and is taught a lesson. In both these tales, Chaucer combines the serious with the farcical. The Manciple concludes his tale of jealousy and murder by addressing his fellow pilgrims in the following “Never tell anyone in all your life that any other has enjoyed his wife, for he will hate you mortally”. The Monk narrates the tale of Samson (who was betrayed by his lover Dalia) and advises men to hold back secrets from their wives unless they want to sacrifice the safety of their limbs and lives like Samson.

The Merchant’s Tale, which is a fabliau, has May, the beautiful wife of January, the old knights wife climb the pear tree to make love with Damian, the knight’s squire. Not only does she make love to Damian but she also indirectly cures her husband’s blindness when King Pluto gives him back his eyesight as he is shocked by the act of lust. January and May are named after the seasons probably indicating that May who represents spring triumphs over January who represents cold and winter.

However, at no point does Chaucer judge or criticize the women for their amoral behavior in any of these tales. We cannot conclude that a view of the characters who narrates the tales in the poem indicates Chaucer’s own views on female infidelity or his own male anxiety.

The Wife of Bath is the strongest female character in The Canterbury Tales and has very strong views on marriage and maidenhood and the role of women in society. The Wife of Bath expresses her disdain for religious order very early in her tale when she says that there are no more fairies in Briton like in the time of King Arthur, but instead it is the friars who walk the length of the land and the women have to fear the friars as they might lay claim upon the women’s virtue. She herself admits that she has been married five times. The very fact that The Wife of Bath has married five times shows that she has little or no regard for the teachings of the church which prevent women from remarrying. However, her disdain for the religious order does not in anyway indicate her feelings about God. “For Hadde God commanded maydenhede, thanne hadde he dampned weddyng with dede, and certainly if seed were never sown, How ever could virginity be grown?” she says. She also says that both Abraham and Jacob had several brides. She also demands to know about a time or text where God disparages or sets prohibition upon marriages. The Wife of Bath’s use of God to defend her five marriages and her promiscuity shows that despite her disdain for the religious order and its teachings, she is actually a very devout person.

The Wife of Bath also resorts to provocation when she wonders aloud about the uses of the male and female genitalia. She contends that male and female genitalia were not simply to tell a male from a female or for excretion but also for propagation. She does defend herself by saying that her words are not intended to offend but only to amuse.

Despite all her talk on behalf of women, the Wife of Bath has no illusions about the sanctity of a woman’s behavior. In her prologue she is candid about ways in which a knowing woman can prove that her husband is at fault.

The Wife of Bath’s prologue probably enhances the male anxiety regarding the fidelity of females when she says that “And so I tell this tale to every man, Its all for sale and let him win who can. No empty- handed man can lure a bird.” In many ways, The Wife of Bath is symbolic of many negative stereotypes of women as gold diggers and lustful creatures that existed during the medieval times.

But so candid is The Wife of Bath about her own marriages and woman’s dominance in the bedroom that one cannot help but feel that Chaucer portrays sex as celebratory (despite the obvious economic connotations) and women in particular as liberated individuals. In fact when The Wife of Bath ends her tale by begging Jesus to hear her prayer to cut short the lives of men who refuse to be governed by women, one cannot help but feel that Chaucer intended more through his portrayal of the Wife of Bath than to simply perpetrate existing negative stereotypes about women. We must remember that Chaucer refrains from passing judgment on the Wife of Bath’s character and in The Friar’s Prologue (which follows The Wife of Bath’s tale) the Friar, who is part of the religious order says that much of what was spoken by the Wife of Bath was extremely impressive.

Griselda in The Clerk’s Tale is an example of a submissive female character in the poem. In a way Griselda’s character is the exact opposite of The Wife of Bath who has many nontraditional views on the role of women in 14th century British society. She continues to sacrifice her children in complete obedience to her husband who is testing her loyalty towards him by continuously torturing her, first by making her believe that her kids would be murdered and secondly by taking another wife for himself. But Griselda remains loyal throughout the torture inflicted upon her. Griselda is unimaginably virtuous (in fact when Walter, the Marquis first lays eyes on her, it is her perceived goodness and virtuousness that attracts him to her and not her beauty.). But the clerk himself at the end of the tale reminds the women among the pilgrims that his tale does not imply that all of them should follow Griselda’s example and live a life of virtuousness. But that everyone should be virtuous and constant in their own degree. However, in the envoy to his tale, the clerk recommends that women indulge themselves in over the top behavior and enjoy themselves to their hearts content.

The Canterbury Tales mostly portrays women as untrustworthy especially when it comes to their sexuality.

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.

I didn't understand most of it and yes that's largely my problem. But doesn't change the fact that I had a headache while reading this book and it hurt even more when I tried to make sense of it. Definitely need a literary guide or those paraphrased books for this one!

A very beautiful hardback edition (deluxe gift edition) of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - great as a gift. Each double page spread has a banner, translations of the stories are great, and there are full page length plates of original manuscripts dotted around. I like that each tale starts off with a small summary in Modern English. There is a small, interesting section after the intro discussing “The Kelmscott Chaucer” and the beautiful illustrations in what is considered “one of the world’s finest books”. An introduction and biography of Chaucer is also included in this version.

What a lark what a plunge! Virginia might have said about these fractal gems fitted together to glimpse a day in the life. As ribald as Shandy or Pantagruel and cleverly freighted with guidelines for living in that day's time. Would love to read a bilateral new/old English version - did recently read a doctoral dissertation with "Tales" use to show vernacular and shading in biblical propping. Chaucer's tales contest like one of these competition tv shows .. who can woo the rabble?! There are books, beautiful books not-yet-read, standing the test of time, quality for the ages.

Read this years ago. Wonderful stories and use of language.

I don't think I've ever felt more humbled while reading a book. Of course I had read some of these tales as a schoolboy, but really hadn't the education to understand what I was reading. Chaucer's characters are so varied in style and spirit, yet with great ease manage to drop references from Solomon to Ovid, Catullus to Cato, Boethius to Dante and sometimes all within a single paragraph.

How can it be that some fellow from the Dark Ages could be better read than my modern self? How is it possible, without the printing press (not to mention Kindle, Google and the Internets), that Chaucer was able to recall a dozen different supporting quotations from writers and philosophers from through the ages in defense of nearly any argument his characters might make?

There are few writers that create simultaneously high-brow and low-brow humour and Chaucer masters this cause from cover to cover. To call this work a masterpiece is an understatement. It is the masterpiece of English literature. It is the one book that I would give 6 stars or more if only there were more to give.

Nearly medieval porn. Back when men were beasts and women were chattel. Like today, but all the cosmetics and grammar are stripped raw. Forced to read this in college. Can't forget it. Not necessarily enjoyable, but pure historical power.