Book Review: The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer (Standard Ebooks version)

I am flying through the sky with a magic glass on my lap. As I hurtle at terrifying speeds to lands undreamed of, Chaucer's words arrange themselves on the slate. With the merest flick of my fingers another tale appears. In a few hours I will have covered more distance than he ever did in his lifetime. The parchment evidence of his life is now compiled for all to read.

I can't remember when I last read a book aloud. With Chaucer, I found myself mouthing along to the lines - it was the only way to make sense of the rhythms and rhymes. The Standard Ebooks version is a copy of the mid-1800s translation so while the language is somewhat more accessible, there are still lots of explanatory footnotes and a fair bit of dictionary look-ups.

What's fascinating is how the tropes and stereotypes echo down through the ages. The COVID profiteers are no different to the plague doctors:

He kept that he won in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.

It is also delightful to use rhymes to see how language has changed:

Translation
And weakë be the oxen in my plough;
The remnant of my tale is long enow.

Original
And wayke been the oxen in my plough.
The remenant of the tale is long ynough.

I was impressed by just how silly Chaucer is - it really feels like he's making up the story casually as he goes along:

Her yellow hair was braided in a tress,
Behind her back, a yardë long I guess.

Which also brings forth some genuine laughs:

Who couldë rhyme in English properly
His martyrdom? forsooth, it is not I;

The Knight's Tale goes on a bit, and is desperately melodramatic. But the pace is good and the story compelling.

The Miller's Tale is rude

And at the window she put out her hole,
And Absolon him fell ne bet ne werse,
But with his mouth he kiss’d her naked erse
Full savourly. When he was ware of this,
Aback he start, and thought it was amiss,
For well he wist a woman hath no beard.
He felt a thing all rough, and long y-hair’d,
And saidë; “Fy, alas! what have I do?”
“Te he!” quoth she, and clapt the window to;

It gets even more scatalogical:

“Speak, sweetë bird, I know not where thou art.”
This Nicholas anon let fly a fart,
As great as it had been a thunder dent;
That with the stroke he was well nigh y-blent;

Although - content warning - it does have a fair bit of rape and sexual assault in it.

I was fascinated with how much scientific knowledge there was in it. Along with the talk of "infinity" there's a marvellous passage about calculating the time from the sun:

And saw well that the shadow of every tree
Was in its length of the same quantity
That was the body erect that caused it;
And therefore by the shadow he took his wit,
That Phoebus, which that shone so clear and bright,
Degrees was five-and-forty clomb on height;
And for that day, as in that latitude,
It was ten of the clock, he gan conclude;

He also displays a surprisingly amount of knowledge of Islam and some of its central theses.

The Wife of Bath is amazing! A total feminist icon. With her five husbands that she's outlived after gaining their great big tracts of land. She rails against the patriarchy, the fetishisation of chastity, and the hypocrisy of men

But well I wot, express without a lie,
God bade us for to wax and multiply;
That gentle text can I well understand.
Eke well I wot, he said, that mine husbánd
Should leave father and mother, and take to me;
But of no number mentión made he,
Of bigamy or of octogamy;
Why then should men speak of it villainy?

Once you can get past the language barrier and get into the rhythm, the stories are bawdy and jolly.

Sadly, I had to give up reading the Standard Ebooks version halfway through. Although it is perfectly formatted and beautifully typeset, it has numerous typographical errors. It appears most of those typos appear in the Gutenberg version which it is adapted from. I sent a few pull requests to fix the ones I found but it became increasingly frustrating not knowing whether a spelling was archaic or merely transcribed incorrectly.

The other issue is that this is the Purves translation from the mid-1800s. Although it does a reasonable job with explanatory footnotes, it also is weirdly censored in places. For example, in The Wife of Bath, the titular character says:

Is it for ye would have my [love] alone?

What word has been elided? The original is:

Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone?

Yes kids! Chaucer used very naughty words!

So I stopped reading that version and will restart with a more modern and less Bowdlerised version. Any recommendations?