Chaucer

[knightss]

Anyone ever read the Canterbury Tales? I'm in the process of reading it right now... so good. He modeled his stories after The Decameron by Boccaccio (one of my all time favorite novels btw). Amazing so far =)

(i will probably finish reading it tonight)

[Dori]

I read everything up to the Man of Law's Tale. Once I get to finishing it, I probably will attempt the original version in Middle English. It's not terribly hard to translate without any prior knowledge of M. English, but it does require some work . Here's a link to the General prologue in M. English: Wikipedia.

I've had the oppurtunity to listen to bits and pieces being read in the original, and it greatly reinforced my liking for Chaucer.

[awelker]

i've read a couple of the tales for my english lit class. i read the wife of bath and the knights tale. i really liked them. i bought the book at a used book store for like 3 dollars. ill eventually read the rest of it.

[kaytie]

When I read it in school we had a version that had the old English on one side and the contemporary story on the other side. The lines matched up so we could see how certain words had changed.

There's good stuff in there!

[knightss]

Read The Miller's Tale if you get a chance.. so funny =)

[Dori]

Read The Miller's Tale if you get a chance.. so funny =)

Yes, it is quite funny. It's probably my favorite out of the one's I've read.

[baconpatroller]

Yeh, read it, was irritated by it. The stories are entertaining but some of them are little more than clever little dirty jokes. Actually you're probably better off just reading a translation or maybe even the Coles Notes because reading the original is basically impossible without constantly reading the footnotes to figure out what the hell is going on.

[SheldrakeWriter]

Chaucer's good fun. I think he gets a bit grand for himself sometimes. Well, I don't mean that because there are masterpieces among his work, but once you've read a few dirty jokes in the Tales it becomes difficult to take Troilus and Criseyde, for example, seriously. T&C is superb though, and I'm pretty sure influenced Shakespeare's take on it, so perhaps glance at that next.