The Pentangle

According to the Gawain-poet, King Solomon originally designed the five-pointed star as his own magic seal. A symbol of truth, the star has five points that link and lock with each other, forming what is called the endless knot. Each line of the pentangle passes over one line and under one line, and joins the other two lines at its ends. The pentangle symbolizes the virtues to which Gawain aspires: to be faultless in his five senses; never to fail in his five fingers; to be faithful to the five wounds that Christ received on the cross; to be strengthened by the five joys that the Virgin Mary had in Jesus (the Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, Ascension, and Assumption); and to possess brotherly love, courtesy, piety, and chastity. The side of the shield facing Gawain contains an image of the Virgin Mary to make sure that Gawain never loses heart.

The Green Girdle

The meaning of the host’s wife’s girdle changes over the course of the narrative. It is made out of green silk and embroidered with gold thread, colors that link it to the Green Knight. She claims it possesses the power to keep its wearer from harm, but we find out in Part 4 that the girdle has no magical properties. After the Green Knight reveals his identity as the host, Gawain curses the girdle as representing cowardice and an excessive love of mortal life. He wears it from then on as a badge of his sinfulness. To show their support, Arthur and his followers wear green silk baldrics that look just like Gawain’s girdle.

____________________________(from the Spark’s Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

SEMINAR 3

THE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s most celebrated work probably designed about 1387 and extending to 17,000 lines in prose and verse of various metres, but predominantly in rhyming couplets. The General Prologue describes the meeting of 29 pilgrims in Trabard Inn. Detailed pen-pictures are given of 21 of them, vividly described, but perhaps corresponding to traditional lists of the orders of society, clerical and lay. The host, Harry Bailly, realizing that this company was the pleasantest he had seen in the tavern that year, proposed that they should while away the tedium of the journey of two days by telling one another stories, suggesting that each should tell two on the outward and two on the homeward way. The proposal was adopted without a dissentient, and as the host announced his intention of travelling with his guests, they appointed him judge of the tales. They approved his plan that the teller of the best tale should be entertained to supper at the Tabard, at the expense of the others. The company then retired to bed and commenced the journey the next morning early.

The work is incomplete; only 23 pilgrims tell stories, and there are 24 stories told altogether (Chaucer tells two). In the scheme the stories are linked by narrative exchanges between the pilgrims and by prologues and epilogues to the tales, but this aspect of the work is also very incomplete. In many cases it is uncertain in what order the stories are meant to come.

(1) The Knight’s Tale. A shortened version of Teseida of Boccaccio. Turned into a contemporary romance.

(2) The Miller’s Tale, a ribald story of deception first of a husband and secondly of a lover. The Tale has been said to be a parody of a courtly love story.

(3) The Reeve’s Tale, also a fabliau. In Chaucer’s context it is an obvious rejoinder to the Miller’s Tale of a duping of a carpenter, the reeve’s profession.

(4) The Cook’s Tale. The tale is incomplete (58 lines). It is another ribald fabliau, and it has been suggested that Chaucer may have decided that the occurrence of three indecent tales together was unbalanced.

(5) The Man of Law’s Tale, a frequently told medieval story of Constance, daughter of a Christian emperor of Rome, who marries the Sultan of Syria.

(6) The Wife of Bath’s Tale is preceded by a 856-line prologue, in which she condemns celibacy by describing her life. Chaucer draws widely on the medieval anti-feminist tradition (e.g. the Roman de la Rose). After this vigorous, learned, and colourful narrative, the following tale, though appropriate, seems rather flat. The tale is another romance.

(7) The Friar’s Tale about a summoner and the devil, obviously told to enrage the summoner on the pilgrimage.

(8) The Summoner’s Tale. The Summoner interrupts the Friar’s narrative and rejoins with a discreditable story about a friar.

(9) The Clerk’s Tale, a story of patient Griselda and her trials by her husband. The poet tells us he took the story from Petrarch, though it is more dependant on a French prose version.

(10) The Merchant’s Tale, a story of an old husband and young wife prompted by the tale of Griselda. There are parallels to the various sections of the story in French, Latin, Italian and German.

(11) The Squire’s Tale, a version of a fairy-tale, incomplete.

(12) The Franklin’s Tale. Chaucer states that the tale is taken from a Breton lay, but it hasn’t survived.

(13) The Physician’s Tale. The original source is Livy’s History, and this is what Chaucer cites, though his version seems to rely on the Roman de la Rose.

(14) The Pardoner’s Tale, a parable that takes covetousness as its theme, relating it to other sins: drunkenness, gluttony, gambling, and swearing.

(15) The Shipman’s Tale. There is a similar story in Decameron (Day 8, Tale1)

(16) The Prioress’s Tale, a bland story seen by some critics as a comment on the uncritical nature of the prioress.

(17) Chaucer’s tale of Sir Thopas, a burlesque of the metrical romances.

(18) When the Host interrupts the tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer moves to the opposite extreme with a heavy prose homily (sermon), ‘The Tale of Melibeus’, which dates from Italy in the 1240-s.

(19) The Monk’s Tale, composed of a number of tragedies taken from different authors. Those stories describe the capricious turning of Fortune’s wheel in the lives of various figures, from Satan and Adam to Chaucer’s contemporaries. Why the self-indulgent monk begins with such a pedantic prologue, and tells so serious and dull a tale is somewhat of a puzzle. It is perhaps an attempt to keep up the solemn facade. At all events, the Knight interrupts him and saves the pilgrims from further boredom.

(20) The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, related to the French cycle of Renart (Reynard).

(21) The Second Nun’s Tale, a story of miracles and martyrdom of the noble Roman maiden Cecilia and her husband Valerian. Probably translated from the life of St. Cecilia in the Golden Legend.

(22) The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, told by a character who joins the pilgrims at this late stage with his master, a story of an alchemist who tricks a priest.

(23) The Mancilpe’s Tale, a fable of a tell-tale crow told by many authors from Ovid in Metamorphoses onward.

(24) The Parson’s Tale, a long prose treatise dealing with Seven Deadly Sins. Followed by Chaucer’s Retraction.

Questions and tasks:

1. Read the following parts of the book: the General Prologue; the Miller’s Tale; the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale; The Pardoner’ Tale (with the introduction); the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

2. Analyse the compositional structure of the Canterbury Tales.

3. Bring out Chaucer’s mastery of a pen-portrait in the General Prologue. What sort of people go on the pilgrimage? Are they more of literary and social types or individuals?

4. Speak on the Canterbury Tales as an encyclopaedia of medieval genres. What literary forms and modes are involved in the game?

5. What are Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary innovations? In what respects s he still a medieval poet and what features can be seen as the influence of the Renaissance?

Materials for the seminar

1. The plan of the book as compared to Boccaccio’s Decameron

The device of the framing fiction – to gather together a group of people and make them tell stories – was common in the Later Middle Ages. There is no evidence Chaucer ever read Decameron. But even if – as seems likely – the English author never knew about his Italian precedents, the technique itself was in the air.

The choice of pilgrims as the tellers, however, was Chaucer’s own, and it was a very clever choice:

1. It was only on a pilgrimage that such a motley crowd could have come together. Chaucer’s pilgrims come from all social strata, apart from aristocracy and serfs, and are representative of the whole English society of the age. (see p. 2 for more detail)

2. Medieval pilgrims were notorious tale-tellers – ‘liars’, according to the more austere Langland.

Also, the stories are framed with prologues and epilogues and linked by narrative exchanges between the pilgrims.

Even if the framing device of the book was not original, Chaucer’s artistic exploitation was quite different from Boccaccio:

- Boccaccio’s tellers belong to the same social group, unlike Chaucer’s;

- in Boccaccio, in fact, tales are attributed to tellers at random, the choice of a story to tell is hardly conditioned by the teller’s temperament or background. In Chaucer’s book there is fascinating accord between the tellers and the tales attributed to them;

- Boccaccio’s main interest is on the stories, not the tellers, in fact, there are hardly any characters at all.[1] For Chaucer, the tales appear more of a means of revealing a character than an end in themselves.

Chaucer conducts two fictions simultaneously, that of the individual story and that of the pilgrim to whom he has assigned it. The second fiction is developed through the General Prologue, and also through the ‘links’, the interchanges between stories.

(E.G. – the animosity between the Miller and the Reeve, who, formerly a carpenter, feels himself slandered in the figure of the Miller’s silly carpenter. So he replies with a story that scorns a miller. In the similar way, the Friar and the Summoner argue at the end of the Wife of Bath’s prologue. The Friar then tells a story that is offensive to the Summoner, and the latter retaliates with even a more offensive story about a friar. The Wife of Bath, as an expert in matrimonial affairs, begins a series of novellas related to marriage. Her feminist approach is confronted by the Clerk of Oxford, etc.)

We are given at once a story and a drama.

In addition to it, there is the figure of the narrator, who is in the very midst of the pilgrims. The image of the reporter is a half-burlesque version of Chaucer himself. He partakes in all the activities and relationships, and assesses things from within. We feel that his attitude and cast of mind permeate the book and create additional semantic overtones. That was a new approach, which Mathew Arnold called “a human point of view”.

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