Reading Notes: Reading A: Canterbury Tales

For this week’s reading I chose Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales retold by Eva March Tappan. When I saw these tales on the reading I was really interested in them. While I have never actually read them before, I have heard the name brought up in many conversations and was curious what the tales were about.  The tales only consisted of four stories, each of them having a different type of lesson learned at the end. I was surprised to find that the stories all had happy endings. I have usually been changing a story’s ending to reflect something happy but with these tales I am going to have to try a different approach to create a new tale. My favorite tale out of the four was, The Franklin’s Tale: The Promise of Dorigen. In the tale, a husband and wife are happily married, the husband return from a journey safely, the “other man” is okay with the wife not being in love with him, and the wizard does not expect payment from the “other man” because he did what was right. The last line of the tale was, “Now of these three generous men, which one was the most generous?” What I really liked about the tal was the happy ending and the fact that all of the characters were generous and kind to each. While I would not want to change the essence of the story at all, I think a gender swap of the main characters or even change the story to a modern high school theme. If I was to pick a least favorite story, it would have to be The Pardoner’s Tale: The Revelers Who Went out to Meet Death. The only reason this story would be considered my least favorite is that all of the men died at the end of the story. However, the tale does a great job of getting the reader to hate the characters, so that by the end of the story, the reader hopes they all die. This could be changed to where one of the characters is actually a good man, and learns a lesson.  

Three pet tombstones at Marble Hill Ruins. Source: Wikimedia Commons