He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.I absolutely love teaching The Canterbury Tales, and when I do it right, I even make my students love it a little too. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. If you enjoyed this pick of the greatest bits of The Canterbury Tales, you can continue your medieval literary odyssey with more facts about Geoffrey Chaucer’s life and work, these classic medieval works of literature, and our short introduction to Chaucer’s successor, John Lydgate. If you’d rather read Chaucer’s masterpiece in modern English, we recommend The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics). The best collection of Chaucer’s work is The Riverside Chaucer: Reissued with a new foreword by Christopher Cannon, which we recommend.

If you want to read The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English, it’s essential to have an edition with good annotations. The descriptions of the pilgrims taking part in the tale-telling contest are brilliantly vivid, illuminating, and entertaining. It also offers a rich and colourful picture of fourteenth-century English life and the various people found in the new society that was being formed in the wake of the Black Death in the 1340s. Okay, so this isn’t one of the tales, but it is part of The Canterbury Tales and is obviously the best place to start reading, since it opens the work. Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne … The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, Amongst other things, ‘The Tale of Sir Thopas’ is a fine example of a poet being prepared to send himself up. The Host, Harry Baillie, gets so annoyed with the awfulness of the poet’s verse that he prevents Chaucer from finishing his tale. The poem concerns a knight, Sir Thopas, who meets a giant while he is searching for his beloved elf queen. And, like the Miller’s Tale, this one is a comic fabliau ending with a colossal fart – we’ll say no more than that.Īnother comic piece, and worthy of inclusion here for two reasons: first, it’s one of two tales in The Canterbury Tales which is told by Geoffrey Chaucer (or a fictionalised version) himself, and second, it’s a marvellous parody of bad poetry. To trentals, and to yeve, for Goddes sake,Īs with the Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale, this is another case of tit-for-tat, with the Summoner responding to the Friar’s story of a lecherous summoner by telling a tale against friars. Hadde preched at a chirche in his manere, To preche, and eek to begge, it is no doute. Lordynges, ther is in Yorkshire, as I gesse, But then one day the summoner meets the Devil in disguise… This is another light tale, though its ending is altogether less comic than one might expect. The Friar’s Tale is about a corrupt and lecherous summoner (see below), who is charged by his archdeacon with extracting money from those who have transgressed. Of contractes and of lakke of sacramentz, He agrees to her terms, and – well, we won’t give away what the hag’s answer is. He meets an ugly hag who promises to tell him the answer – but only if he agrees to grant her a favour in exchange.

After he rapes a maiden, a young knight is sent away to undergo his penance, tasked with finding out what it is that women want. The Wife of Bath is more famous as a character in The Canterbury Tales than her tale, which is a brutal tale of rape set in Arthurian England. Yblessed be God that I have wedded fyve … No man hath swich that in this world alyve is. Which yifte of God hadde he for alle his wyvys! In an attempt to get his own back on the Miller, the Reeve tells this comic tale about a Miller who is duped by a couple of men. The Reeve doesn’t enjoy the Miller’s tale much, not least because the cuckolded husband was a carpenter, and the Reeve himself is a bit of a carpenter himself.

Canterbury tales in middle english