A stout carl for the nones

It's possible some people don't realise how clever and appropriate the title of my last blog post, about going to Southwark for the Excel competition with 29 competitors, was. I refer you to the prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

Bifel that, in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage

To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At night was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,

That I was of hir felawshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take our wey ther as I yow devyse.

Which is one of my longtime fascinations that I've never really blogged about here very much, so let me rectify that tonight. I've never been into poetry, as a rule, because there's just so much really, really bad stuff out there that calls itself poetry. But I'll always make an exception for the man who pioneered English-language verse in the 14th century! 

I got into Chaucer in a very piecemeal kind of way when I was young - it wasn't a school thing, at least directly, but I did end up with some kind of book of poems as a youngish teenager which included the portrait of the Miller from the Canterbury Tales, along with a modern-English translation, and I found it fascinating. It was the kind of thing that stuck in my mind, just because of the wild difference six hundred years can make to a language (if it's a relatively new one like English, cobbled together from Anglo-Saxon and Norman French over just a couple of centuries by Chaucer's time). And so when, a while later, I saw those same lines in a book I found in a charity shop in Long Eaton, I bought it and discovered the whole of the Miller's Tale!

The cover's meant to be orange all over; it's been left out in the sun at some point and partly bleached white. There's a stamp on the inside front cover saying it belongs to Carlton-le-Willows School, and it's signed with the name Joanne Penter. I'm very grateful to her for giving it away, because it started me on a new fascination, and got me searching around for other books about the Canterbury Tales! As I recall, the school library was of limited use, not having a copy of the Tales themselves, but I did come across other excerpts and critical analysis here and there. And eventually, as a birthday present, I finally got a complete works of Chaucer in the original Middle English!

Which is completely at odds with my other obsessions of my teenage years, which ran more towards comics and cartoons (I haven't changed much), but there's always been a place in my heart for Chaucer, and I can and do still quote big chunks of the really impressive poetry he managed to produce with such an ugly language. I never liked English lessons at school, and dropped it as soon as I was able to, but if there'd been at least a bit more Chaucer involved, I might have felt very differently.