#Canterbury tales middle english audio how to#
#Canterbury tales middle english audio free#

LibriVox provides a useful collection of audio recordings of the various tales. It can also be fun to listen to an audio version of the tales in Middle English. Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook provides a good online Middle English/Modern English version of “The Prologue.” Librarius provides parallel original text and translated text for many of the other tales. It takes some getting used to – and it can help to have an edition with the original Middle English and the modern English translation side by side. Once you’ve laughed until you’ve cried from reading “The Miller’s Tale,” maybe you’ll even feel brave enough to try the late Middle English in which Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. Think you wouldn’t be interested in this 600-year-old collection of tales? You might be surprised! An easy way to dip a toe into The Canterbury Tales is to read a modern English translation. Nevertheless, The Canterbury Tales – twenty-four tales with over 17,000 lines of poetry – is considered by virtually everyone to be his masterpiece. Other tales are told by a knight, a reeve, a cook, a man of law, a friar, a summoner, a clerk, a squire, a franklin, a physician, a pardoner, a shipman, a prioress, a monk, and a nun’s priest.Ĭhaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales in 1387, and it appears that the collection was unfinished when he died in 1400.

And of course, no one can forget the wife of Bath’s Arthurian legend, her pre-feminist insights about women’s authority honed from her five marriages. We listen as the merchant spins his fable and as the miller – who admits he is quite drunk – tells the uproarious and bawdy story of a cuckolded carpenter. As Oxford scholar Nevill Coghill notes, The Canterbury Tales offers readers a “concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and ignorant, rogue and righteous, land and sea, town and country.” Pilgrims from all walks of life tell tales. What emerges from this narrative device is one of the great masterworks of world literature.

#Canterbury tales middle english audio free#

The prize for the winner? A free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return from Canterbury.

Storytelling was an immensely popular form of entertainment in England at that time, and storytellers had enjoyed besting one another in contests for centuries. How would they while away their time? By holding a storytelling competition, of course, and regaling each other with one tale after another. What a magical storytelling device! Imagine thirty travelers walking from London to Canterbury to worship at the shrine of St. While I was by no means a scholar of medieval literature (modern literature being far more to my taste, as you know if you are a devoted StoryWeb reader), I reveled in learning about the language, the religious pilgrimage Chaucer’s narrators were on, loved delving into their various voices.

#Canterbury tales middle english audio how to#

Oh, how I loved learning how to recite these opening lines to “The Prologue” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,