Telling stories for the sake of a free feed. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

8 min readSep 27, 2024

To read The Canterbury Tales in its entirety is a feat in itself, even to find one that is completely unabridged. The Canterbury Tales is a long dreaded work like one of those bug bosses of lit, like Joyce’s two big novels, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or anything that still survives from the 18th century. Chaucer’s opus had first seen the light of day in the 15th century, and has since been through numerous translations to make it more palatable to the modern readers. That’s me.

And I’m glad that we have the modernised translations of Chaucer, because the original auld English is as understandable as a Welsh after eight pints to me. But as Dante had helped boost the Florentian vernacular to the Italian peninsula, so did Chaucer normalised Middle English to the masses, smacking those pretentious snotty Latin and French into gradual oblivion. And what the English had learned, I suppose, was that their language has a sonorous beauty to it, suitable to trade in storytelling, suitable for a vehicle of contemplation and meditation.

Chaucer’s tales connect us to the past to stories that have been long familiar in the Western cannon and beyond, told in verse by the various voices. Each storyteller owes the host a couple of stories, on the way to Canterbury and from Canterbury, and thus if completed, the work would have been at least a thousand pages long. Chaucer, who worked on the verses during some downtime while he was politically out of favour, would not have time in the remains of his life to complete his tales.

But it is an important work, paving way for other English heavyweights for much later, Shakespeare being one. English was here to stay and The Canterbury Tales provided a foundation for that. But for all else, the core of the tales is as the title suggests, is in the storytelling. People hungered for stories then as they do now. Granted that the stories are adaptations of existing stories, but if we take other great works of literatures such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the fables, these are instructive stories in which our culture and moral code are deeply rooted in.

Thirty strangers tell tales, for the sake of a free dinner

The premise for the tale is simple: The host of the inn, curious of the strangers in his inn, coaxed each of the stranger to tell him four stories each, two on the way to Canterbury and two back (they never made it back to tell all the stories on account of the author’s passing). The pilgrims are on the way to pay homage to Saint Thomas Beckett, a saint who was murdered in the Canterbury Cathedral by the knights of Henry II. What for? I really have no idea, I just googled this up like ten seconds ago.

The pilgrims were varied in rank, profession and gender. Some of these professions are quite commonplace like the nun, the cook and the monk. Some of these are a bit more obscure and archaic, such as the reeve (the supervisor of a landowner’s estate), the summoner (those who summon people to the courts, usually someone corrupt) and the knight. Some are very specific, like the canon’s yeoman, the wife of Bath and even Chaucer himself, who he depicted as a useless, fat git.

The tales are mixed in variety and in language. The pilgrims, after all, are telling a tale that had previously existed, not a tale from their own lives, as we know it. There are tales which borrowed from history — the downfall of leaders; there are tales from popular tales such as Teseida, borrowed from Bocaccio’s Decameron (a work of which many critics pointed out provided the framework for Chaucer’s own opus), or in the case of the Merchant’s tale, from the Persian based Arabian nights.

No, my memory is too fallible to remember all the stories in the book, but I remember these stuck out to me:

The Miller’s tale — a carpenter’s wife bedded a lodging student. A monk who was also after her tale was taught a lesson, when she tricked him to pucker up in the dark and gave him her arse instead (and add a fart for good measure). The second time around, the student offered his arse but the monk poked him with a red hot poker.
The Wife of Bath’s tale — the narrator tells her story of her five husbands and how useless and fickle men can be, and how she used her sexuality to get what she wants
The Knight’s tale — a bit extra, but two knights who were prisoners of war fell in love with a princess, and fought each other to near death. Bitch didn’t even know that they were fighting over her in the first place. LOL.

There are other stories in my mind, but as a passing reader, I cannot attach whose tales the story belongs to. Yet, for whatever version is available in your edition, I wouldn’t miss any of the tales.

The Canterbury Tales is a wonderful mess

Put thirty people of different backgrounds into the same table, add a few drinks for revelry’s sake and you’d get a bloody good time. Some of the tales are serious in nature, contemplative, but a fair number of these tales are of the comedic vein. What we get is a balance of the human spectrum from sorrow to joy, light-hearted to serious, from the praise of humanity to the mockery of it. Some instructs, and some are just plain entertainment. It is in short, Netflix in the 15th century.

The stories change with the moods of the characters; some, who were offended by another’s tale would find a tale which mocks the profession of the offender. The form of the verses, that is the language and the rhyme would also follow the status of the profession. Those who hold the key to language, and therefore hold higher status in society, such as the prioress and the man of law, would use the rhyme royal. Those who hold lower status, such as the cook and the miller, would only tell their verses in rhyming couplets until the tale’s ends.

In between the tales, the pilgrims would also discuss the techniques and the methods of the storytelling, discussing even the meter used for telling such tales:

“Tragedy means a certain kind of story,
As old books tell, of those who fell from glory,
People that stood in great prosperity
And were cast down out of their high degree
Into calamity, and so they died.
Such tales are usually versified
In six-foot lines they call Hexameter.
Many are told in prose, if you prefer,
And other metres suited to the stuff;
This explanation ought to be enough.”

But the pilgrims, and us as the readers, are bound by the fabric of the storytelling. Perhaps the stories themselves don’t matter exactly. The stories are mere vehicles to induce emotion such as romance (as in the Knight’s tale), or to convey a message and instruct the listeners to be better men (as in the case of the Man of Law’s tale, even in the light of taking the religious path). These didactic passages are also plentiful in between the tales as in the prologue of the Man of Law’s tale:

“Let us no longer waste the time, I say.
My lords, time wastes itself by night and day,
Steals from us secretly, asleep or waking,
If we are negligent. For time is making
Stealthy escape, a stream that never again
Turns to the hills, but glides on the plain.”

We can accuse Chaucer of inconsistency, but we need to be mindful that perhaps, Chaucer was not really writing for anybody else but himself. Who would have read the tales, where most of the population would not have access to literature and most of the printed work during that time was also focused on religious or political beliefs? It is ironic that The Canterbury Tales, then, years later would be more widely read in the 20th and 21st century more than ever.

How relevant is the work today?

It is a question that should be asked for any works of literature penned by authors who have gone under pushing daisies for some time. We have always come back to the Iliad and the Odyssey and it has shaped popular culture in its hero’s journey in the literature that came after and even in the movies. Shakespeare, with his contemplations of human frailty will never be unrelatable. The list goes on.

Yet, some of the attitudes of the pilgrims as a collective are outdated, especially when it comes to terms to the attitudes towardswomen. It is reflective of the times when women are treated as mere breeders — an object of sexual and romantic devotions. That is not to say that women are silenced. The nuns and the wife of Bath voiced their stories, but in the case of the wife of Bath, her tale is cautionary to potential husbands, for women will use their sexuality as a means to an end. Yet, her tale can be treated as a pioneer in feminist voice, as she voices her discontent of being a woman during the medieval times.

More often that not, however, the women in the tales are often the cause of the conflict, as in the case of the knight’s tale and the miller’s tale. They are objects of affection for men, a currency to be traded in marriages and their consent have an eerie silence to them. But we have to forgive the prejudices of the writers following the context to which they are subjected to, otherwise we would never be able to enjoy these great works.

But let us not nitpick. Each of Chaucer’s tale may be imperfect and unoriginal but they have a depth which merits study, if you have the time and dedication (I unfortunately don’t). Further study helps the enjoyment of the text but by how much? As a mere reader, I was happy with the modern translation and will probably in my life never venture to read the original old English. I have a better chance reading Dostoyevsky in his original Russian than I do reading Chaucer’s middle English.

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Storytelling, save from our basic need of food, shelter and sex, is an innate need which transcends class, gender, nationality or culture. The plethora of characters in The Canterbury Tales are bound by the common need for storytelling, though admittedly, each may have a purpose of their own rather than a free dinner. Storytelling is the display of our intellect and creativity at its fullest, it is also an important avenue to human connection.

In this way, it will always be relevant.

Telling stories for the sake of a free feed. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Thirty strangers tell tales, for the sake of a free dinner

The Canterbury Tales is a wonderful mess

How relevant is the work today?

Further reading / watching

Written by Kit Teguh