A while ago I published a brief post on Medieval literature, and have been meaning for a long time to put up texts from this wonderfully creative period. It is about time I did! So here is an example from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. This is regarded as the greatest work of the period, and Chaucer as the father of English poetry. The English language had been growing in status during the Middle Ages, both as a scholarly and literary medium. Since the Norman invasion, French had become the language of the court, and Latin had maintained its position as the medium for the highest levels of thinking and creativity. But the winds were changing in the fifteenth century. The Canterbury Tales contain a series of stories related by individuals from varied strata of society: the Wife of Bath, the Knight, the Miller, the Franklin etc. Each character entertains his or her companions with a tale during the famous pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered on the orders of King Henry II on 29th December 1120. As a consequence, he became a martyr and a saint.
Each tale is wonderfully rich and entertaining, full of action, love stories, philosophical reflections, and sometimes bawdy humour! They are written in the classic iambic pentametre of English verse, more precisely in 'Herioc Verse' (ten syllable rhyming couplets).
Below is an extract from The Knight's Tale, the point at which the young Theban lover Arcite, banished from Athens, and pining for his belovéd Emyle, decides to pull himself together and out of his hopelessly languishing lover state, dress up as a pauper and return in disguise to the Greek city. Do not be put off by Middle English. This is not Old English (which would be incomprehensible, and needs to be learned as another language), but the English language gradually blossoming into what we know today. There are lexical difficulties (well explained by the notes from the Norton Edition), and syntactical intricacies which come from a naturally poetic style, and convention, and a more germanic word order: 'Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was...' - nothing too obscure! I have a particular fondness for this tale, because it is the one I studied at school when I was seveneen/eighteen. Click on the link below to access the excerpt:
