Deciphering Chaucer

While written English predates Geoffrey Chaucer by over six centuries, the Norman Conquest of 1066 made French, well, the lingua franc of England for a few hundred intervening years. Written English started making a comeback one hundred years before Chaucer's pen started flying but the efforts were often regional and unfocused. Chaucer is credited with bringing back a lot of legitimacy to written English. It is interesting to note that many of Chaucer's contemporaries were opting to write in French and Latin.

Finding Time to Read Chaucer

Most high school readers of Chaucer encounter a modern translation of his texts. My college Chaucerian text, The Riverside Chaucer, uses Middle English, so we learned to comprehend, pronounce and discuss Middle English in class. I took my Chaucer survey course in my last semester of undergrad along with seven other senior level courses, which I really don't recommend doing. I had classes on Shakespeare, Henry James and Chaucer competing weekly for the Densest Reading Material prize.

Since I was assigned to read a James novel, a Shakespeare play and a tale from The Canterbury Tales each week (on top of my other assignments) I was having trouble scheduling time to sleep, much less time to slog through Chaucer's Middle English. It does help that pronunciation of consonants is largely the same between Middle and Modern English and that Chaucer wrote in rhyming verse so inflection, cadence and syllable count enabled me to approximately pronounce what I read. This often gave me insight into the meaning.

The Language of Chaucer

That said, there are still key differences between modern and Middle English. Spelling, especially vowel usage, is one significant difference that takes getting used to. Two key examples mentioned in the Riverside are the interchangeability of i and y (lif or lyf for life) and the ou/ow variation (you and yow). Paying attention to spelling variations did make Chaucer's works a bit easier to decipher.

The real stumbling block, however, comes in word choice. The famous opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, / The drought of March hath perced to the roote" is not too difficult to comprehend. "Shoures soote" may give you pause until you realize that "shoures" and "showers" sound remarkably similar. "Soote" is not a word that we encounter anymore, nor does it sound much like its modern decendent "sweet."

Further along, however, we come to a pair of lines that definitely need footnote support: "And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, / To ferne halwes, kowthe in soodry londes." Rough, unofficial translation: "Pilgrims seek foreign shores,/ To distant shrines well-known in various (sundry) lands."

I struggled mightily as I began toiling through The Canterbury Tales. I often looked at footnotes to see modern translations of particularly enigmatic words but footnotes often didn't provide enough, if any, information. I would then thumb through the glossary or explanatory notes at the back. I flipped back and forth far too often to be efficient. I started to worry that I wouldn't have enough time in a day to finish all the reading.

Illuminating the Test: Chaucer

At some point in the first tale, The Knight's Tale, a wonderful transformation began to take place. I started to intuitively feel the cadence of the verse and naturally pronounce the y or ow sounds correctly. I still had to glance down for help with unfamiliar words but those words were usually explained in the footnotes.

By the time I got to the second tale, the hilariously bawdy Miller's Tale, I was in the Middle English zone. There is something really beautiful about reading Chaucer in its "original" form without the filters of modern translators. Part of the beauty of Chaucer's work is in the poetic language, another part is in the personal effort to comprehend.

I consider language to be malleable. Reading Chaucer brought that point home. When we started reading The Canterbury Tales, I labored through the tales. As I started to get the hang of Middle English, I began to see the connections between the language of 14th-century England and our modern usage. Much like the thrill of reading a foreign language, cracking Middle English became an exercise in mental multi-tasking.

For my final paper, I'd come far enough along to work out an element of The Canterbury Tales that was, according to my world-renowned Chaucerian professor, yet to be explored. I looked at the role of absent family members mentioned by the pilgrims in character development. While my paper had as much scholarly merit as most efforts by undergraduates writing outside of their expertise, I was proud of how far I'd come in understanding, and appreciating, Middle English.