Welcome to the Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales site! The purpose of this site is to allow the Chaucer curious a single site to launch their exploration into this most wonderful poet.  Are you sick of sites that list 20,000 links all over the place so you never know where you are? Me too. That will not happen here. The main directory is shown below and I promise that you will not get lost. So journey on and begin your pilgrimage.

Geoffrey Chaucer was a busy man (see biography) and he wrote The Canterbury Tales over an extended period of time. The structure of the Tales is this: a group of pilgrims are traveling to Canterbury to pay homage to St. Thomas Becket, ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, current martyr. Becket unfortunately refused to be a puppet of the King of England, Henry II. Henry did not appreciate this and is purported to have ruminated about Becket's demise outloud. Some loyal king's men took it upon themselves to rid Henry of his burden, slaying Becket right on the altar in Canterbury. Becket's popularity immediately increased upon being martyred, the King's did not. The Canterbury pilgrimage then became very popular. Chaucer's pilgrims assemble at the Tabard Inn where the host of the inn, Harry Bailly suggests that each pilgrim tell 2 tales each way on the pilgrimage. There are 29 pilgrims, Pilgrim Chaucer and the Host (Harry Bailly). This assemblege of 31 pilgrims (as suggested in the General Prologue) then would make for a total of 124 tales. Chaucer wrote 24 tales, and the general prologue. Does this suggest that Chaucer's Magnum Opus is unfinished? Maybe, remember that it is the Host's suggestion to tell 4 tales per pilgrim. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to come to your own conclusion whether the Canterbury Tales are complete or not.

Chaucer devises a diverse collection of characters. The pilgrims represent a wide variety of occupations and class-status. The three class stations in Chaucer's time were the clergy, the nobility and everybody else not in the first 2 groups. To wit in the Canterbury Tales we have a monk (clergy) a knight (nobility) and a miller (ordinary guy).  The main narrator of the Tales is an ordinary guy named Chaucer. Call him "pilgrim Chaucer" to separate him from "author Chaucer". Pilgrim Chaucer lets the reader view the other pilgrims through his eyes. We also learn of their personalities through how they tell their tales and how other pilgrims relate to them.

The Tales themselves range in diversity as much as the pilgrims that tell them. There are tales of parody, satire, love and religion among others. Chaucer utilizes several literary genres in some of his tales. Such as fabliau, beast fable and courtly love. But make no mistake: there are not any cookie-cutter hack jobs of these forms. One outstanding feature of Chaucer's work is his ability to utilize these genres but make them uniquely his.

Enough said! The reason you are here is to read Chaucer -- not me. Get moving.

For information related in this site I am indebted to The Riverside Chaucer F.N. Robinson, ed. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987 and The Portable Chaucer Theodore Morrison, ed., Penguin Books 1977.

pilgrims have journed through since April 16, 1999
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