Introduction to The Canterbury Tales

In this week we saw an introduction to the Canterbury tales. These are a serie of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer who is called the father of English Poetry , in those days there was a lot of changes regarding politics, economy and literature as well. The language was also changing in those days an the Canterbury Tales were wrote in a language called Middle English was used before the Modern English (the one we speak today). In class we have learned that Middle English is the result of the marriage between Anglo Saxon and Norma French; that is why British people can have some French words in nowadays language.

So, once we understand the context on which the tales were written we could get into it and know what it was about. It was based on a group of people who were going on a pilgrimage so they decide to tell each one a story in order to be entertained in their road. So there we can found different stories with different moral to learn from. The people present in the tales were representing the occupation they had those days. So, the one who had the best story would win a meal in the tabern and others woud pay for it.

It was very interesting for me to understand many facts about the language and how it was formed. Also, I did not know the term of frame tale which consists of a narrative that includes a second narrative inside, thus the readers can make a double journey in their reading.

Now it is time for us to read some of those tales and present to our classmates the one we have chosen to analyze.