Canterbury Tales Review

In A Story as Sharp as a Knife, Bringhurst makes brief mention of European cultures’ oral traditions, but speaks of them as something long dead, desiccated and mummified by the advent of the written word, deprived of vibrancy behind the façade of yellowed pages and faded ink.  Books like Cath Maige Tuired and Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry make clear this is not so much the case, that we today can still approach something of these stories even if the druids, or whatever traditional figure would be responsible, are no longer around to perform them like Skaay of the Haida did for Swanton.  Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s famous work of early English poetry, is surely a part of that tradition, a potent reminder of the living nature of stories that serves simultaneously as a time capsule transporting the reader to another time and place.

Presented through a framing story conceit of a group of some thirty people embarking upon a pilgrimage together – to Canterbury, hence the title – who decide to engage in a wager-motivated tale-telling competition, the frame story vividly evokes the characters (more caricatures than characters, really, in most cases) in each of their few appearances, although it can be difficult to keep track of all thirty of them distinctly.  Fortunately, they are not the main focus of the story, and their greatest characterization comes from the tales they choose to tell as part of this tournament.  Each is to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back, for a total of 120 tales, but Chaucer never completed the effort, so we are left with only a fraction of the intended total.  To be honest, I’m not certain I would have made it through all 120 if they existed.

Don’t misunderstand: the poems are worth reading, although perhaps not for the poetry itself, which is fairly straightforward and can be difficult to make sound poetic because of how pronunciation has changed in the intervening centuries.  Much is made of Chaucer’s poetic skill, but, even being able to read this in something close to the original language (unlike other famous poems, like The Divine Comedy, which I read in translation), it was not particularly impressive from a poetry perspective.  That’s not what makes them so interesting.  To me, Canterbury Tales is a goldmine of historical information of exactly the sort a writer needs.  Canterbury Tales live in their own context and bring that context back to life for the reader.

Details like what people wore, how they spoke, what they found amusing, how different social classes and people of different backgrounds interacted with and viewed each other, what was simply considered “normal” are often the hardest to come by in the historical record, and the most valuable to a writer attempting to write about the time period (or an analogous one), whether as historical fiction or any type of speculative fiction.  Physical details can sometimes be inferred based on archeological evidence, but how people interacted with their environments on a daily basis is almost all guesswork, except for sources like this one.  Gaining that immersive perspective of different times and places that is offered by reading what was written by people living in those times and places is a major reason I keep returning to historical works.

The reason I began this post discussing oral literature, other than the topic being much on my mind of late, is that Chaucer’s poems read like poetic recordings of the kinds of anecdotes and commonplace tales that people of the time might have told each other around the fire.  They are not mythical tales, but something quieter, smaller in scope, but no less instructive of the culture for their lack of gods and spirits and other hallmarks of traditional myth.  Some are silly, even farcical, while others pose subtle and challenging questions to the reader, or involve grand evocation of emotion.  I have the impression that Chaucer did not invent most of the stories from scratch, but rather drew from a common cultural archive, though I have no evidence nor research to back up this belief.

As one of the earliest written English stories, Canterbury Tales occupies a certain platform which confers a degree of fame and significance regardless of their actual value, but this is not just a classic because it’s a classic.  More even than other historical works, it is a true portal to the past, replete with everything that implies for the historian, the author, the worldbuilder, and the simply curious.