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My yearlong read for 2024 was a very fancy copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which I had never had to read in school, even during the three weeks when were trying to speed-learn Middle English (I think we might have looked real quick at the prologue, but that was it).
The Canterbury Tales is very serious foundational English literature, which is why there are copies of it with leather binding and gold-edged pages and ribbon bookmarks, and all the bells and whistles. But despite what I thought was a decent amount of familiarity with the idea that classics are usually classics because they are good and entertaining and the things that make stories good and entertaining is that they are usually at least a little bit funny and a little bit insane, I was still not quite prepared for how chaotic this work was. The individual tales vary wildly in tone and genre and content and, occasionally form–most of them are told in verse, but an apparently random handful are told in prose. They each have a prologue that connects them back to the frame story, introducing who will tell the next tale and chronicling the general bickering and nonsense between the pilgrims.
A possible alternate title for this work would be “Are The Straights Okay?: The Poem,” and I must say that from my vantage point the straights do not seem to be particularly okay. A bunch of the stories are basically dumb sitcom Boomer humor about how marriage is terrible and the opposite sex is out to get you and women are awful for not endlessly submissive to their shitty husbands, although there are also a number of stories about how the shitty husbands deserve to be humiliated for being shitty. Some of these are very funny, like The Miller’s Tale, in which a young wife and her affair partner (a student who boards with them) play a series of tricks on both the dimwitted husband and a random local who is also in love with the wife, which culminates in tricking the wannabe affair partner into kissing the actual affair partner’s butthole. But there are other times when the various characters on pilgrimage appear to be trying to earnestly dispense worldly wisdom about marriage and men and women and I’m not sure if their ideas about good marriages or bad marriages are more appalling. The prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, which for some reason is like twice as long as the Tale itself, is simultaneously a full biography of the Wife’s marriages and completely incomprehensible. Reading it made me grimace so hard I almost got my face stuck like that.
Possibly one reason the straights are not okay is that they are all, regardless of their personal level of devotion, extremely Catholic. Catholicism permeates every word of this book, and not just the beliefs of Catholicism, but the omnipresence of the Church as the main institution in society. Catholicism is essentially hostile to both straight people and non-straight people, but differently. It also employed a huge number of people around the 1390s or whenever these poems were being written. Because it employed so many people, they could not all actually be pure of heart and godly of soul and ascetic of body and all that stuff good Catholics are supposed to be. This is great for the poem, and some of the funniest bits are about various clerically employed people who are bad at their jobs or who at least all hate each other. My favorite Tales in the book are the Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale, which come one after the other, because the Friar and the Summoner hate each other’s guts. The Friar’s tale is about how summoners are all nosy, greedy douchebags who would frame their own mothers for crimes for a nickel, which has fun ACAB energy. The Summoner’s tale in return is about how friars are hypocritical layabouts and freeloaders whose supposed vows of poverty rake in too much free loot from people with real jobs, and involves a guy tricking a friar into letting him fart into his hand, and then some sort of weird riddle where they have to figure out how to apportion a fart into equal shares and distribute it to all the friars. But my absolute favorite part, and possibly the best single page of poetry in all of English literature, is the prologue to the Summoner’s tale, in which an angel transports a sleeping friar in a dream to Hell, and the friar is like “I don’t see any friars here, is that ‘cause we’re all so good and holy?” and the angel is like “No, they’re around,” and then it turns out that all the dead friars in Hell live inside Satan’s butthole. Hilarious! Very serious classic literature is all about farts and Satan’s butthole, don’t you know.
Another very funny part is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where a canon shows up like “I heard we’re telling stories” and his yeoman is like “COOL I HAVE A STORY it’s about a canon who is an alchemist and a FRAUD, all the alchemists are FRAUDS, here’s how they trick people into giving them money DON’T GIVE MY BOSS MONEY” and truly people are people at all times in history (this is, in all seriousness, the point of reading classic literature).
Tragically not all of the Tales are this funny. The worst offender unfortunately occurs right at the end, with The Parson’s Tale, which is not a poem nor even a tale, but merely a 50-page sermon on sin (spoiler: Catholics think basically everything is sin). It ends with Chaucer apologizing for everything he’s written and translated in his life that isn’t appropriately religious, including for writing the naughtier of The Canterbury Tales. This is a huge bummer of a note to end on. I am biased because I am an unrepentant Catholic apostate, but I do think that the literary tradition of the West would be significantly impoverished without that section of poetry about dead friars living in Satan’s butthole.
The Canterbury Tales is very serious foundational English literature, which is why there are copies of it with leather binding and gold-edged pages and ribbon bookmarks, and all the bells and whistles. But despite what I thought was a decent amount of familiarity with the idea that classics are usually classics because they are good and entertaining and the things that make stories good and entertaining is that they are usually at least a little bit funny and a little bit insane, I was still not quite prepared for how chaotic this work was. The individual tales vary wildly in tone and genre and content and, occasionally form–most of them are told in verse, but an apparently random handful are told in prose. They each have a prologue that connects them back to the frame story, introducing who will tell the next tale and chronicling the general bickering and nonsense between the pilgrims.
A possible alternate title for this work would be “Are The Straights Okay?: The Poem,” and I must say that from my vantage point the straights do not seem to be particularly okay. A bunch of the stories are basically dumb sitcom Boomer humor about how marriage is terrible and the opposite sex is out to get you and women are awful for not endlessly submissive to their shitty husbands, although there are also a number of stories about how the shitty husbands deserve to be humiliated for being shitty. Some of these are very funny, like The Miller’s Tale, in which a young wife and her affair partner (a student who boards with them) play a series of tricks on both the dimwitted husband and a random local who is also in love with the wife, which culminates in tricking the wannabe affair partner into kissing the actual affair partner’s butthole. But there are other times when the various characters on pilgrimage appear to be trying to earnestly dispense worldly wisdom about marriage and men and women and I’m not sure if their ideas about good marriages or bad marriages are more appalling. The prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, which for some reason is like twice as long as the Tale itself, is simultaneously a full biography of the Wife’s marriages and completely incomprehensible. Reading it made me grimace so hard I almost got my face stuck like that.
Possibly one reason the straights are not okay is that they are all, regardless of their personal level of devotion, extremely Catholic. Catholicism permeates every word of this book, and not just the beliefs of Catholicism, but the omnipresence of the Church as the main institution in society. Catholicism is essentially hostile to both straight people and non-straight people, but differently. It also employed a huge number of people around the 1390s or whenever these poems were being written. Because it employed so many people, they could not all actually be pure of heart and godly of soul and ascetic of body and all that stuff good Catholics are supposed to be. This is great for the poem, and some of the funniest bits are about various clerically employed people who are bad at their jobs or who at least all hate each other. My favorite Tales in the book are the Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale, which come one after the other, because the Friar and the Summoner hate each other’s guts. The Friar’s tale is about how summoners are all nosy, greedy douchebags who would frame their own mothers for crimes for a nickel, which has fun ACAB energy. The Summoner’s tale in return is about how friars are hypocritical layabouts and freeloaders whose supposed vows of poverty rake in too much free loot from people with real jobs, and involves a guy tricking a friar into letting him fart into his hand, and then some sort of weird riddle where they have to figure out how to apportion a fart into equal shares and distribute it to all the friars. But my absolute favorite part, and possibly the best single page of poetry in all of English literature, is the prologue to the Summoner’s tale, in which an angel transports a sleeping friar in a dream to Hell, and the friar is like “I don’t see any friars here, is that ‘cause we’re all so good and holy?” and the angel is like “No, they’re around,” and then it turns out that all the dead friars in Hell live inside Satan’s butthole. Hilarious! Very serious classic literature is all about farts and Satan’s butthole, don’t you know.
Another very funny part is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where a canon shows up like “I heard we’re telling stories” and his yeoman is like “COOL I HAVE A STORY it’s about a canon who is an alchemist and a FRAUD, all the alchemists are FRAUDS, here’s how they trick people into giving them money DON’T GIVE MY BOSS MONEY” and truly people are people at all times in history (this is, in all seriousness, the point of reading classic literature).
Tragically not all of the Tales are this funny. The worst offender unfortunately occurs right at the end, with The Parson’s Tale, which is not a poem nor even a tale, but merely a 50-page sermon on sin (spoiler: Catholics think basically everything is sin). It ends with Chaucer apologizing for everything he’s written and translated in his life that isn’t appropriately religious, including for writing the naughtier of The Canterbury Tales. This is a huge bummer of a note to end on. I am biased because I am an unrepentant Catholic apostate, but I do think that the literary tradition of the West would be significantly impoverished without that section of poetry about dead friars living in Satan’s butthole.