Canterbury Tales

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—witty, bawdy, zany, satirical, and literary. From the late medieval period on, Chaucer has been considered the "father of English poetry." Indeed, his Middle English verse electrified the day with its satire of English society. Writing in the later 14th century, he caused ripples with his bold move to write in the vernacular English instead of the expected literary Latin. With prophetic wisdom, he sensed the potential of English to absorb elements from many languages, making it the literary language of the future—opening the way for Shakespeare.

In the tales, a group of pilgrims bound for Canterbury Cathedral agree to pass the weary miles by taking turns at storytelling—and thus begins English literature's greatest collection of chivalric romances, bawdy tales, fables, legends, and other stories. 

This is one of our favorite versions for kids, retold by Geraldine McCaughrean and illustrated by Victor Ambrus.

Table of Contents:

• The journey begins
• The Knight's tale of Chivalry and Rivalry
• The Miller's story is A Barrel of Laughs
• The Nun's Priest (Brother John) describes The Nightmare Beast of the Firebrand Tail
• The Reeve insists on recounting A Racket at the Mill
• The Scholar is persuaded to tell us The Test of a Good Wife
• The Wife of Bath tells us What Women Most Desire
• The Pardoner's gruesome tale, Death's Murderers
• A Gem of a Poem called Sir Topas written and recited by myself, Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Franklin's romance, entitles Love on the Rocks
• The Magistrate's sad story of Snowy Crow
• The Canon's Yeoman arrives and warns us of Fool's Gold
• Going to the Devil, as told by the Friar
• The Merchant's tale of Old January and Young May
• Our journey ends in Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer started work on The Canterbury Tales in about 1387. He portrayed a set of some thirty pilgrims and intended that each pilgrim should tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. But he never finished or revised the work and died in 1400.

He drew his stories from all over Europe, from ancient writers, and from the East. The title of each story came from the name of the pilgrim who told it, e.g. The Pardoner's Tale, and he gave most of the stories a prologue. In this version, [the publishers chose] a title that reflects the story rather than the teller. The prologues become the pilgrims' conversation with each other before a new story is started. Chaucer wrote the stories in Middle English in rhyming verse. The first two lines in the original sound like this:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...