Canterbury Tales

[Calidore]

Looks like you should have made this a poll, cacian.

I vaguely remember reading a few of these in either late grade school or early high school. Unsurprisingly for a teenage boy, my only clear memory is of "a fart as great as a thunder-clap."

Is there a good modern-spelling version with notes out there? I'd be interested in reading the book again as an adult, but I have no interest in trying to decipher Middle English.

[qimissung]

This one purports to be reader friendly, with modern spelling:

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/we...hy/canterbury/


I like this one:


http://classiclit.about.com/library/...u-can-pard.htm

[Calidore]

Cool, thanks for the links!

[cacian]

Looks like you should have made this a poll, cacian.

I vaguely remember reading a few of these in either late grade school or early high school. Unsurprisingly for a teenage boy, my only clear memory is of "a fart as great as a thunder-clap."

Is there a good modern-spelling version with notes out there? I'd be interested in reading the book again as an adult, but I have no interest in trying to decipher Middle English.

Hehe the quote is funny. True about Middle English it is very depressing to look at.

[MorpheusSandman]

Is there a good modern-spelling version with notes out there? I'd be interested in reading the book again as an adult, but I have no interest in trying to decipher Middle English.

I'd recommend the David Wright translation from Oxford World Classics. There are also some side-by-side translations online, which are really helpful. I was also quite trepidatious about trying to learn Middle English, but I was surprised by how easy it was to pick up. Much of the language remains unchanged from modern English, and the bits that are different are often only slightly different so it's easy to understand in the context. The words that are radically different tend to appear often enough so you remember what they mean. By the time I got to about the 5th or 6th tale, I rarely had to glance at the footnotes in my Riverside Edition to translate anything. FWIW, Chaucer is much, much better in ME because the sound is so unique and incapable of being reproduced without lessening either the effect or obscuring the meaning.

[Lokasenna]

Middle English really is not that difficult, and Chaucer's language in particular is very accessible - compared to other popular Middle English texts, such as Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's works are immediately comprehensible.

My advice is to obtain a copy of the Riverside Chaucer and just go for it - you'll be amazed at how easy you find it to understand.

[Charles Darnay]

I found the language of the Gawain poet much easier to digest than Chaucer - but that might be because the lines are less dense. But I agree that ME is not overwhelmingly difficult and is extremely fun, particularly if you read it out loud.

[Seasider]

I took my English "A" Level in 1954 And the Chaucer section was The Prologue and The Prioresses' Tale. It would not be set now I suspect because it tells the story of a young boy who has to pass through the Jewish Ghetto to get to school. He is deeply pious,even at 7 years old and he loves singing hymns to The Virgin Mary on his walk. This so enrages the Jews that they capture him, slit his throat and throw him into a sort of water butt.

His mother goes looking for him and after a lot of fruitless searching, decides to sing the same hymns as her son did. Suddenly she hears his voice and led by it she finds his body. She asks him how is it he can still sing and the boy tells her that The Virgin put something on his tongue, I forget what, and that enabled him to keep singing. She takes the object off his mouth and he dies.
All the town's Jews were hanged.

The antisemitism was never pointed out,let alone discussed. It was described to me as the kind of tale The Prioress would have told because of her extreme piety. Though Chaucer goes to a lot of trouble to expose that in his description of her speech and behaviour. It's my least favourite for obvious reasons and when I thought about it in later years I was shocked that it had been on our syllabus a mere 10 years after the revelation of The Holocaust.

As for my favourite it is The Nun's Priest's Tale followed by The Miller's Tale.(Which is a hoot)
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