Week 12 Reading Diary: The Canterbury Tales, Extra Credit

(Dorigen and Aurelius, via Wikipedia)

I'd actually read part of the Canterbury Tales before in a Puffin edition, but I've always really wanted to read more tales from it and I had the excuse for this unit! The prose retelling actually worked really well for me--I'm not a big fan of prose retellings in general (I had several bad experiences with various versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey when I was younger and now I tend to avoid them like the plague), but this Week I read two and I liked both of them! Maybe I should give more of them a try...they tend to be easier to fly through than the actual poems, although obviously I adore the poem forms too...anyway, here were some of the stories I read and enjoyed:

1) The Friar's Tale: The Story of the Summoner--(I skipped the Wife of Bath's tale because I've already read it, but I really, really enjoy that one and there's a lot of overlapping mythology from various places and basically I recommend it highly)--This story was deliciously creepy, from the meeting on the road to the strange traveler being cagey and refusing to tell his story to the Summoner, to the bitter end when the Summoner finally got himself in over his head. It was very satisfying to see that someone as unpleasant as the Summoner got what he deserved, and strange for the fiend to almost come in as the hero of the story. I've already done a Storytelling this week, but if I had to do another one I would probably retell this one from the point of view of the fiend? Or the old lady? Or maybe the Summoner's horse...or pan...this one would be a good one to retell from a different point of view...

2) The Franklin's Tale: The Promise of Dorigen--I really loved this one, because it had so many generous people in it and it was largely due to them that Dorigen (or anybody else, for that matter) didn't end up in an unhappy situation. It's my pet peeve when ladies who do the littlest thing wrong are forced to leave their husbands and have unhappy endings--there are a lot of those stories out there--and I was worried, for a moment, when Dorigen made her promise to Aurelius, that this was going to be another one that made me want to throw the computer across the room after reading. But it wasn't! And Aurelius's sub-tale was lovely, with the moral magician, and Arviragus was great because he honestly loved Dorigen and he was a good person anyway. So, yeah...I loved all the characters, and if I were to write a story about this one I would probably bring it into the present day. Because I love doing that!

Source: The Chaucer Story Book by Eva March Tappan (1908). Untextbook.