Whan That Bonus — Lucas Ranks The Canterbury Tales

That's right, it's that thing I hate where the qualitative is quantified for no discernible purpose. But it is also kinda fun. So here are the rules: this is based solely on my own enjoyment of the extant Canterbury Tales; the General Prologue and Here Taketh the Makere of This Book His Leve are excluded, only portions of the text marked as tales will be considered; prologues count as part of their tale; in the event that I deem two tales to be equally enjoyable there will be a tie;  I'll try and come up with a pithy summation of each tale; and of course, we start with the worst:

24) The Prioress's Tale: Basically Blood Libel. 

This one is just straight-up anti-semitic garbage. It has no redeeming value. It serves no purpose beyond defaming Jews and feeding a Christian persecution complex in spite of the fact that it was written in a country whose Christian king had expelled all Jews more than a century before it was written. It's trash.

23) The Parson's Tale: You're a sinner and you need to confess. Specifically all your sins. And basically everything is a sin. 

This one is just a sermon, and a boring sermon at that. Fascinating from the standpoint of religious history perhaps, but kind of a let down as a finale.

22) The Physician's Tale: A knight kills his daughter so that she won't be forced to accept the advances of a corrupt judge. 

That's right, I'm judging this one by contemporary moral standards. It has been weighed, it has been measured, and it has been found wanting. But seriously, was this story ever satisfying?

20) Tie: The Reeve's Tale: Cambridge students rape a miller's wife and daughter, then beat-up the miller. and The Clerk's Tale: A knight tests his wife's loyalty by pretending to annul their marriage and murder their children, everyone lives happily ever after.

Once again, these clash with my modern sense of morality. They're also both joyless exercises in misery. Further, the Reeve's Tale fails as a funny rejoinder to The Miller's Tale and the Clerk's Tale is so miserable that he feels the need to amend it with a song calling on women not to emulate the protagonist.

18) Tie: The Man of Law's Tale: A long-suffering Christian princess is sustained on the high seas (and other places) by her love of God. and The Merchant's Tale: An elderly knight is deceived by his younger wife and her lover, Proserpina wins a bet with Pluto.

The Man of Law's Tale does have plenty of exciting twists but the passivity of the protagonist leaves it somewhat wanting. Meanwhile, the Merchant's Tale suffers by comparison to other tales of ribaldry that come earlier in the text. But it does set itself apart with the bonkers scene where Proserpina and Pluto comment on the action.

17) The Cook's Tale: An incomplete story about an innkeeper and his wife who moonlights as a prostitute.

Why did I rate this one above actual complete stories? I'm not sure, I started by making the list and then I decid—

16) The Tale of Melibee: Melibee's daughter is viciously maimed by his enemies, his wife convinces him to forgive them.

Chaucer dresses up a treatise on decision-making and forgiveness with a frame narrative about revenge. Not as boring as its reputation would suggest. Still pretty boring. Wait, did I artificially inflate my ranking for this story just because it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be? Hmm. This whole ranking process is starting to seem pretty sus.

15) The Franklin's Tale: A noble woman pines for her husband while he's away and promises to sleep with another man if he can clear the dangerous rocks from the shoreline. 

Is it worse to cheat on your spouse or break a promise that was clearly meant to let someone down easy? Who can say? This one is a little nut-so, but Chaucer does manage to wring some genuine pathos from the premise and maybe a few unintentional laughs from how seriously everyone is taking their impossible promises.

14) The Second Nun's Tale: A life of Saint Cecilia.

Sure, Chaucer's sources are historically inaccurate, but a story about a Saint who was struck on the neck three times with a sword and lived a few more days is pretty fuckin' metal.

13) The Canon's Yeoman's Tale: Chaucer shows off what he know's about alchemy, and an alchemist swindles a priest out of forty pounds.

Once again, there are better tales about swindlers, but I'll give Chaucer points for incorporating technical alchemy jargon into his verse.

12) The Manciple's Tale: Why are crows black? Because a crow once told Apollo that his wife was cheating on him.

This one's buckwild, y'all. Did I mention that Apollo gets mad at the crow because after finding out about his wife's infidelity he straight-up murders her. And he's more mad at the crow for telling him than he is with himself for the murder. Anyway, this one's piggybacking off my childhood love for the Just So Stories.

11) The Monk's Tale: A collection of anecdotes about the downfall of various biblical and historical figures (Boom! Roasted!)

Once again, this tale benefits from the accidental comedy of its rapid fire succession of tragic downfalls, often without much context.

10) The Shipman's Tale: A monk carries on an affair with his friend's wife and swindles the friend out of a hundred franks.

Man, medieval humor sure involves a lot of cuckolding. At least this one also has someone getting ripped off. But it's actually pretty funny. Wow, I had to qualify that with two adverbs.

9) The Knight's Tale: Two friends battle to the death for the love of an unattainable woman, although they seem about to reconcile, Saturn intervenes to favor Venus's preferred champion.

This story is pretty compelling, but c'mon, Palamon is totally in the wrong. First, you can't call dibs on a person, full stop. Second, even if you could, when you and your friend are both prisoners for life with no hope of escape, you can both pine after the same unattainable person, it won't make a difference. Third, what's up with Saturn killing Arcite after he'd already defeated Palamon. Dick move, Saturn. And bear in mind that I'm saying this about a god who famously ate his children.

7) Tie: The Squire's Tale: A flight of fancy amongst the khans (unfinished). and The Tale of Sir Thopas: A knight errant has a run-in with a giant and bravely flees (unfinished).

Neither one of these stories is finished, but they're both a lot of fun. I'm not one hundred percent sure that The Squire's Tale is meant to be parodic, but Sir Thopas definitely is and what there is of it is a hoot. Very much in the mold of the Sir Robin segment of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

6) The Nun's Priest's Tale: A animal fable with a timeless moral: don't run your mouth off when you've got a cock in it.

I couldn't resist. A funny and harrowing story about a rooster outsmarting a fox, literally escaping from the jaws of his captor. 10/10, no notes.

5) The Miller's Tale: A Oxford student and his lover use chicanery to make love under her husband's nose, also to trick a romantic rival into anilingus, turns out that everyone's humiliated in the end. 

What's this you say? A tale about an old man whose young, beautiful wife cuckolds him with their lodger? And it has fart jokes? Well, that might just be the Canterburiest Tale of them all.

3) Tie: The Friar's Tale: A summoner makes a deal with the devil, gets sent to hell with an old woman's pot. and The Summoner's Tale: A friar receives a fart as alms, a squire earns a new coat for devising a way to divide said fart up amongst the whole convent.

That's right, it turns out that the real Canterbury Tales are the enemies we make along the way. But for serious, these are both actually pretty clever little stories that also function as pretty damning critiques of the way medieval clergy abused their offices for financial gain. Also, how does one divide a fart equally between twelve people? The answer may surprise you.

2) The Pardoner's Tale: Three carousers set out to kill Death, end up killing each other.

That's right, the Pardoner's Tale takes the number two spot. Not just because of his macabre tale of how greed destroys everything, but because of his naked honesty about how he just rips people off in his prologue. It's some of Chaucer's best character work in the whole text, and it pays off wonderfully when he ends the tale by trying to swindle his fellow travelers in spite of the fact that he's just confessed that he's a fraud.

1) The Wife of Bath's Tale: What do women really want out of relationships? Autonomy.

Sure, not everything about this tale, or the much longer prologue, has aged well (the protagonist of the tale is a rapist, the Wife of Bath's relationship with her most recent husband is improved (?) by a horrific act of spousal abuse). That said, the Wife of Bath is the character in The Canterbury Tales. She's allowed by be pious and raunchy, and at its heart, her tale has a moral about equality of the sexes (though it is admittedly on its own in that regard when compared to the anti-feminist stories that mostly populate the book). In any case, if you only read one of these stories, make it this one.

Well, that's that. I'm officially, finally, done with blogging about The Canterbury Tales.

Links:

So The Canterbury Tales was adapted into a stage musical in the 60's. At one point I considered seeing if I could get ahold of the cast recording and blog about it. Instead I'm just going to link to one of the songs: "I Have a Noble Cock". It's a translation of an anonymous Middle English poem entitled "I Haue a Gentil Cook". Okay, last puerile joke of the post, I promise.