Quick note: this is not the "translation" I read; I read pretty much all of them over the summer and into the fall in middle English, referring to a Penguin edition whenever I got confused. I taught the prologue, the Pardoner's tale, and the Wife of Bath's tale in my class this semester.

And they're wonderful. Chaucer had his finger on the pulse of everything that makes life worth living. These stories are bawdy, ridiculous, argumentative, irrational, and most significantly a product of their times. His characters are equally fascinated with their own bodies as they are their duties to Christ, and this creates a tension unavailable in modern literature. The five-times divorced Wife of Bath quotes scripture (apologizes to Chuck Berry) like she's ringing a bell, and the Pardoner comes right and tells us what a wretched human being he is. These characters bleed, shout, stink, rant, apologize for themselves, and then return to finish their stories - they get distracted, they fail to deliver on what they promise, they get interrupted, they reveal more about being alive than they can possibly imagine. Knights hate Millers. Millers hate reeves. Reeves hate Millers. Summoners hate Friars. It's like a menu at a chinese restaurant, except with the astrological significance.

I'd like to take a moment to talk to anyone who calls anything "overrated." If the CT are overrated, you're wrong.

The theme I tried to emphasize to my class is this: according to Chaucer, we only know people through their stories. We might try to decipher them by what they're wearing, what we've heard about them, what we think about the lot they occupy (Pardoners are fools but Franklins are okay; this Wife of Bath can't hear too well), but when they have to tell us stories it's the only time we can ever know them. And yet even that is unreliable, as GC tells us:

Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere,
To telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere,
Ne thogh I speke hir wordes proprely.
For this ye knowen al so wel as I,
Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.
He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother;
He moot as wel seye o word as another.