A Bluffer's Guide to the Canterbury Tales

The Writer

Born in 1343, Geoffrey Chaucer is second only to Shakespeare in the annals of English literature. The son of a London wine merchant, Chaucer worked as a courtier for King Edward III before becoming a civil servant and diplomat, representing his country during missions to France , Spain and Italy . Oh, he was a poet too.

Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which developed after the Norman conquest in 1066. While Old English is a foreign language to most of us today, Middle English can be enjoyed without too much difficulty. Besides ‘The Canterbury Tales’, famous works of Middle English include the Arthurian tale ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and the famous religious poem ‘Piers Plowman’.

‘The Canterbury Tales’ is a wildly varied grab-bag of stories bound together by the overall plot, which involves a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral. The pilgrims congregate at an inn, and the innkeeper suggests they pass the time by telling each other stories. And so it begins...

Ranging from knight to priest to ploughman, the pilgrims are a cross-section of society. Their stories are by turns funny, bawdy, serious and satirical. Chaucer connects the stories with descriptions of how the pilgrims bicker and undercut each other's tales. The Miller, for example, responds to the Knight's elegant romance with a down-and-dirty tale of infidelity. It's this mingling of styles that makes ‘The Tales’ such a grand, all-encompassing work.

It's hardly surprising that Chaucer died before finishing his great work. After all, there are more than 30 pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, and Chaucer had intended for each one to tell four stories. Which amounts to a LOT of poetry! Despite not completing this Herculean task, Chaucer did leave us 24 tales in total.

Latin was regarded as the ‘proper’ language for literature before Chaucer came along and showed everyone that a bona fide literary masterpiece could also be written in English. In this way, ‘The Tales’ paved the way for every author who has written in English since.