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10/7/26 - The Canterbury Tales

I've had a long day today. I had some deeper, more meaningful ideas I wanted to explore on my feed today, but I don't have the mental bandwidth, so I'm going to write about the book I'm currently reading, 'The Canterbury Tales'
I probably first heard about the Tales when I was about 14 or 15, or at least that's the first time I really thought about them in any significant way, when I was on holiday in England with my family. I thought about them a bit more significantly when I was at University. They weren't directly part of the Literature degree I did, but they came up and were discussed. That's when I learned that they were written in what is called 'middle English' and that it is supposedly even harder to follow than Elizabethan - or Early Modern - English. Old English is for all intents and purposes a completely foreign language, Early Modern English is almost entirely intelligible, if a little archaic at times. Stands to reason that Middle English, the version of the language they were speaking in the Middle Ages, would be somewhere in between. I remember reading a few lines of the Canterbury Tales and having this suspicion confirmed - I recognised a lot of words and I got the general gist of the stanza or two I looked at, but it seemed largely impenetrable.
I realise now I just didn't give it enough time. Like another book I read recently, 'The Wake' which is written in a so-called 'shadow language' which modifies Old English just enough to be readable by modern audiences, I just had to get my mind around a few fairly surface-level features and then I found I could read it quite fluently. The spelling (or 'Orthography' as linguistic nerds would say) was actually the main barrier, in both these books. Paul Kingsnorth, the author of 'The Wake', seemed to have developed a fairly standard way of spelling, but one that differs from what we're used to. Geoffrey Chaucer (or the scribe that wrote the manuscript on which modern versions are based), however, was not burdened by any need to conform to standards. The alphabet at the time was just a versatile tool to be used however one saw fit in order to nail the fluid, spoken word to the page. What further confounds this is that the Tales were written before what is known as the 'Great Vowel Shift', which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - most of the vowels in English changed their values and how they are pronounced.
So, having read the first few tales I'm starting to get a vibe for it. My copy has footnotes with explanations and translations for the words and expressions we simply don't use any more which naturally helps, but honestly most of it can be deduced by context. Many outdated words are even barely changed from their Anglo Saxon origins, and still current in modern German. Being a German speaker myself I didn't even need the footnotes to tell my that 'hals' is 'neck' or 'woot' is 'know', and so on!
I'm getting a little carried away in the linguistics here - I find that kind of stuff fascinating. But it brings me on to what I really wanted to say about it, and that is how surprisingly fluent it is to a modern reader. I mentioned Early Modern English earlier - the version of the language that Shakespeare wrote in - and my hot take is that Chaucer's Middle English is in some ways easier to follow. In all the obvious, visible ways the language is clearly more different to the modern version of English, no doubt. But there is a casual fluency to Chaucer that I don't see in Shakespeare. So much of Shakespeare is technical, sophisticated and dense, whereas Chaucer is more natural and simple. Not to say one is better than the other for this reason, but it is interesting to note.
I love this about Chaucer, and the closely related fact that he was skirting very close to realism in much of his work. He is one of the few writers that not only includes 'regular' people - millers, merchants, cooks, shipmen, parsons - he makes them the protagonists of their own stories, and gives them light and shade and depth and nuance. Every character has an ugly flaw or vice, alongside sympathetic and endearing features. Chaucer is not afraid to show everyday life for everyday people, and examine the beliefs and values of society at the time from multiple viewpoints.
There is a tendency to picture more distant time periods through a hazy, dreamlike lens. So much of what we know is from weathered, bleached and crumbling artifacts and ruins, or from the art that they passed down. Realism has only been a common artistic genre for the last century or maybe a little more, and so even the words passed down to us from most authors come through a heightened, stylised lens, like a bloom filter that just plays into the unreal mythic way we picture the past.
The Canterbury Tales is one of a very few pieces of art that wipes away the vaseline on our lens to the past and really transports us there so we can actually imagine what it was like. And the past, at least the south of England in the 14th century, feels a lot more like the familiar, mundane, complex, boring working life that we are all familiar with than it does Game of Thrones, Robin Hood, Lord of the Rings or Grimm's Fairy Tales.