Books: Canterbury Tales

If you have struggled with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the past and don’t like reading verse peppered with odd spellings from Middle English, you might want to check out, The Canterbury Tales: A retelling by Peter Ackroyd. That is if you’re so inclined. I do realize that many modern readers dread the thought of reading Chaucer. “Which is unfortunate,” says the librarian. Really. The Canterbury Tales is quite a read and now with a contemporary prose version to clear everything up, it would be a perfect opportunity to introduce yourself to some of the most interesting characters in literature. Chaucer can be incredibly bawdy, funny and serious at the same time, and a lot of other things too. Most readers will be shocked at just how explicit Chaucer can be, for a Middle English type of guy that is. The plot: love, sex, infidelity, villainy, drunkenness and murder, to name a few. However, the “English teacher synopsis,” version would be that it’s about a motley group of pilgrims who meet in a London inn on their way to Canterbury and agree to take part in a storytelling competition. Most of you have survived a High School English brush with the Tales and emerged battered and beaten. Don’t let this slow you down. Pick up Ackroyd’s version and give it another chance. I’m sure you missed most of the ribald jokes and naughty stories the first time around. My English teacher glossed over all this stuff. And then we students got bogged down in a Middle English spelling test in which I scored a perfect 78, I’m proud to say. Best score in the class. But it didn’t matter we were all numb. Now Ackroyd has done us a favor by sweeping away all this arcane stuff, the odd spellings, the definitions of strange words and even the scholarly annotations. Instead he has rendered a contemporary prose version that I suspect is just about how Chaucer would have expressed himself in modern English. But I may be wrong of course. But who cares. Enjoy the stories and see just how things never change. “Nothing new under the sun”, as Solemn said. The same traits you see in people today were there on the way to Canterbury 1000 years ago. (Oh, check out the clever cover art of the Penguin edition).