The Canterbury Tales, part zwei

As I vowed, I finished The Canterbury Tales today, after no small effort on my part.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. Each story has a moral attached, such as: don’t spread gossip. Avoid hypocrisy. And never, ever trust a woman.

My verdict on the old C-Tales is: they’re wordy. Very, very wordy. Dozens of verses in each tale were devoted to detailing authors of related texts, the ancestry of the characters, and the beauty, virtue, and wittiness of the heroes. It certainly was distracting from the stories themselves, and, I have to admit, my attention wandered more than once.

One thing to keep in mind if you read The Canterbury Tales is that they are incomplete. Chaucer worked at them for something like thirteen years and then just up and died without finishing them. Therefore, there are some mistakes in the voices of the story, a few of the tales are slightly jumbled, and not all of the characters have their chance to tell a story.

I do feel a bit more informed after reading these tales, though. I certainly have a lot of questions in my mind about medieval culture that will want answering as soon as I get around to it. I also made good use of Google Define and learned what fey, hagiologies, misapropism, petard, and perambulation mean. It’s a little gratifying to think that they didn’t just suck seven days of my life away without leaving me with anything to show for it.

On a note of finality, when I think of The Canterbury Tales I will just remember the astounding misogyny. I know it was a characteristic of the times, but geez, the women in the stories were either conniving, cheating temptresses or silent little pushovers. The only impressive woman character was St. Cecilia in the second nun’s tale, and she got her throat cut in the end. If Geoffrey Chaucer wasn’t so obsessed with sex, I would think that he was gay.

The moral of this story is: I’ve finally finished, and the second I was done with work I ran over to the library and switched the C-tales for The Filth. It’s a beautiful feeling.