The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue:

Written in the late 1300s soon after the Bubonic plague killed millions of people in England
and Europe. He wrote in Middle English, the common language of his day. The poem is a
collection of narrative stories built around a frame narrative (a story within a story) about a
group of pilgrims making their journey to Canterbury Cathedral. His work addresses gender
relations, religion, and immorality. He uses satire to call attention to the pilgrims hypocrisy
through their preoccupation with worldly endeavors while on a religious pilgrimage.

The narrator is who is meant to be Chaucer himself meets 29 pilgrims outside the gates of
London at the Tabard Inn. The inns owner and host sets up a challenge: Each pilgrim should
tell __ stories on their journey. He will go with them to determine the winner and all will pay
for the winner’s lodging upon their return.

In the video, you will hear descriptions of the pilgrims.

TedED: Everything You Need to Know to Read The Canterbury Tales:

Summarize 3 new details about The Canterbury Tales that you learned from this video:

● I learned that Geoffrey Chaucer failed to finish The Canterbury Tales before he died. For this
reason, The Canterbury Tales has Parson's Tale in which some of the stories of the pilgrims
who took part in the event of telling the stories are not finished.
● As the video describes, The Canterbury Tales was written in Middle English, a linguistic
commonality of the times. As a result, this set of vocabulary used just seems to have made
the text toilsome in regard to existing readers today; yet it contained priceless nuggets of
information regarding English society and culture of old.
● The Canterbury Tales centered around the plot that was much wider in terms of a structure
of a Frame Story where the pilgrimage to Canterbury forms a super-imposed plot for the
Canterbury tales told by the pilgrims. The device would provide Chaucer a means of dealing
with all kinds of different themes and viewpoints under one holistic framework.
 Go back into today’s announcement and open the 2-page
text you will need to answer these questions.

A form of storytelling that presents a series of events or experiences

Ballads Romances

Allegories Moral Tales

Religious

Love

Exemplary life Societal issues

“SIr GAwain and the Green Knight”

The King Arthur romances

“Piers Plowman”

“The Canterbury Tales.”

“The Canterbury Tales.”

Nuanced characterization

Figurative language

Irony

Provides a framework for multiple stories within a larger narrative

“The Canterbury Tales”

“Decameron” “Arabian Nights”