My internet connection is a bit dodgy tonight, so I'm hoping this goes through and doesn't get lost in cyberspace. Because I'm not typing it again, I'll tell you that.
Anyway, a couple of days ago I bought myself a new copy of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer. My brother borrowed my old one and lost it, somehow. It's about 1500 pages and the size of a house, so it seems to me you'd have to be pretty creative to lose something like that, but never mind. I also really shouldn't be spending twenty-something quid on a book until I get paid next week, since the Cambridge memory competition seriously drained my bank account, but never mind. I can always rob a bank or something.
Anyway, I've been into Chaucer for a long time, ever since stumbling across the Miller's Tale when I was somewhere in the region of 14 years old. I'm not sure exactly what the appeal is - I don't mind a bit of poetry from time to time, but Chaucer's the only great poet I could do the life and works of on Mastermind. The Middle English is something to do with it, I'm sure - reading his works is like a puzzle, you need to translate it into modern words and still appreciate the poetic effects he manages to achieve with a horribly cumbersome language. There's a reason all the poets before the 14th century wrote in Latin or French, they're much easier to make something beautiful from than the English of Chaucer's time.
Then there's the fun of trying to establish exactly what Chaucer originally wrote, since he came from a time before the printing press was invented and no two manuscripts are quite the same. What I'd really like to do some day is discover a lost 14th/15th century manuscript of one of his more obscure poems and keep it to myself until I've transcribed it and compared it to the other existing ones. That would show all those professor types and book-losing English-literature-PhDs how cool I am!
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