8. Miller's Tale

Middle English
Our textbook editors have chosen to present Chaucer as he really is, in royal Middle English--a great challenge for most college students. Other medieval authors in the anthology have been translated or modernized, but not Chaucer. Chaucer is easier than many of the others. Compared to the rural Gawain poet, Chaucer's Middle English is more similar to modern English, not because Chaucer was more skilled with words but because he happened to write in the London dialect that was the official tongue of the government bureaucracy, the language that soon would be reduced to print and spread by books.

This is not to say that Chaucer's English is easy. A few sessions are needed to become accustomed to it.

Reading out loud helps. Speech is the intended medium. Chaucer read or recited his works to courtiers and other groups for their entertainment. The selections from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales on our audio CD provide a guide to the sound of Chaucer’s verse. Many other audio guides are available. One good CD is Chaucer: Life and Times (Primary Sources Media, [1995]). It provides a full text (from the Riverside edition) with pull-down glosses and notes; more important, the entire text is also in audio form, pronounced with accurate Middle English and (in some tales) considerable drama.

The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue
Chaucer's literary fame started within a decade or so of his death, with the production of luxurious copies like the famous Ellesmere manuscript. Already Chaucer was being remembered as a “great writer” and packaged for consumption of an elite audience. Contemporary authors pitched in by imitating aspects of Chaucer’s style, notably John Lydgate writing under the patronage of King Henry V. By the seventeenth century, when the first histories of English literature were being written, Chaucer had became known as "the father of English literature," an icon for royalty, democracy, protestant reform, even (in his skeptical and humorous vein) the Enlightenment. One after another, social and intellectual communities of all persuasions claimed him as their own.

Chaucer has more virtuosity than any other English writer with the exception of Shakespeare and Dickens. The astounding variety of The Canterbury Tales includes almost every known medieval literary genre from sermon and allegory to romance and lai to beast fable and comic fabliau, among others. Chaucer understands that the literary forms can inter-relate by echoing one another. For instance, the Miller parodies the Knight's romance of courtly love. The plan of the tales seems to have been to explore these connections.

The narrative story of the pilgrims attempting to entertain one another from host Harry Bailey's tavern to the martyr's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral is focused by Harry's insistence on the importance of pleasure in literature. He will judge the winner of the story-telling competition to be the pilgrim who tells “tales of most sentence and best solas.” Chaucer understands his role as a middle class entertainer for an aristocratic audience seeking diversion from its problems. His satiric presentation of the church and his generally comic presentation of the laboring class appeal to courtly stereotypes of those who pray and those who work.

The Miller's Tale
The General Prologue’s portrait of the Miller as a teller of “harlotries” (dirty stories) is confirmed by his tale, and its reference to the Wife of Bath’s boldness and deafness is dramatized and explained by her own prologue (to be read in the next lesson). Chaucer's commoners are often presented as apes of courtly fashions, characters who unsuccessfully imitate the airs of their "betters."

Example: at line 179 Nicholas has just grabbed Alison by the crotch and she, for the moment, is having none of it: “Do way youre handes, for your curteisye!” This is a comic high point in the tale’s extended parody of the verbal conventions of courtly love. How do we read it? Is it simply a funny inversion of romance (courtesy=courtly manners), or is it part of the Miller’s broader attack on the values of the aristocratic class who were the cultural consumers of courtly love? Chaucer's personal opinions are well disguised, as he chooses to present himself as a teller of other people's stories and as the most simple-minded of the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.

The Miller’s tale is a fabliau, with its typical plot of sexual competition and cuckoldry (and what genteel critics used to call “the nether kiss”), and its punning on terms like “queinte,” “hende,” and “privee.” He thus uses a genre of the bourgeois—and “quits” the class and worldview of the knight. If however the genre is seen as an aristocratic property, the audience can react with condescension toward the churls therein depicted. The narrator’s ambivalence about even repeating the tale (turn the page if you don't want to hear this) reflects some of this potential instability of reception.

Chaucer reecites at the court of Richard II The miller also manages to parody the plot of the Knight’s Tale,. There, in a similar love triangle, two captive knights compete (finally in a tournament) for the attention of a young noblewoman whom initially they have not even met, and wait years for her favor. The Knight’s lady, Emelye, is almost entirely passive; her one expressed wish (spoken only in prayer) is to have neither man, and that wish is denied. The Miller’s squabbling suitors parallel this romantic competition nicely, yet they couldn’t be more different from the Knight’s lovers. Nicholas spouts a bit of courtly vocabulary (“For derne love of thee, lemman, I spille,” line 170) then grabs what he wants. Absalon’s aping of courtship is more elaborate, but deflated by his self-love and effeminacy.

Alison is the miller's most powerful answer to the Knight. Her description draws in vast areas of plant and animal life, both domesticated and wild, through metaphor and analogy, overwhelming the conventional lily-and-rose beauty of Emelye. She effectively handles Nicholas’ sexual approach, and sets up the conditions of any future sexual gift.

The church also comes in for the miller's scorn, and not only in the figure of Absalon. The situation of a young wife married to an old carpenter echoes the Nativity story, and Nicholas dupes old John with a tale of Noah’s flood repeating itself. With old John tucked up in the attic, awaiting a second flood, Nicholas and Alison make love "Til that the belle of Laudes gan to ringe, And freres in the chauncel gonne singe" (lines 547–48). Gullibility has been made possible through civic productions of biblical dramas such as Noah, the Nativity, or the play of Herod in which Absolon acts (line 276).

Is this tale criticizing the church? the Bible? Christianity? or is it just a funny story? Chaucer's own opinion seems very well hidden. He uses the drunken miller to speak with license, when a direct criticism of the nobles or the church would have earned him a whipping or worse. As all-around court entertainer, he at times played the fool.

The tale’s close is mayhem, as in the concluding battles of romance. John’s arm broken, Nicholas’s ass burnt, Absolon humiliated, Alison screwed. Their physicality limits them and makes them laughing stocks in the community.

Left: the portrait of the Canterbury pilgrim Chaucer from the Ellesmere manuscript.

In medieval England the variety of Englishes strengthened regionalism and localism of the barons and helped to limit national understanding.

Left: portrait of the Canterbury pilgrim Knight, from the Ellesmere manuscript. The knight tells the opening tale, a lengthy romance of courtly love.

Richard II would be overthrown in 1399 by Henry Bolingbrook, later Henry IV, a disgruntled rural duke who managed to tar the king as out of touch with the commons and the church.

The Ellesmere miller.

Left: in a medieval illumination Chaucer recites from his works at the court of Richard II. We can imagine him reading in the pretended voice of the miller, and the amusement that this little act would have caused among the aristocrats. Compare this image to that of the Anglo-Saxon scop reciting Beowulf or to Charles Dickens on a reading tour of Victorian cities.

Medieval comedy works primarily through inversion. The hero is an animal made into man (such as Beowulf the bear); so the comic anti-hero is the man made into animal, as here in "the Romance of Reynard the Fox."

OTHER RESOURCES & AMUSEMENTS

Chaucer Metapage at UNC.

Texts and materials on the "Miller's Tale" at Luminarium

Geoffrey Chaucer Website:
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/%7Echaucer/

Chaucer Metapage Audio Files (hear Middle English) http://academics.vmi.edu/english/audio/Audio_Index.html

Canterbury Tales in Middle English and Modern English
http://www.librarius.com/

Jane Zatta's Chaucer from UNC
http://www.unc.edu/depts/chaucer/zatta/Zatta_Index.html

Students are not examined on these "other resources and amusements." However, if you know of an excellent website that would wonderfully complement this lesson, please send it to Dr. G. If he adopts it in his list, extra course credit will be awarded.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON

The lesson includes both a quiz and a journal writing assignment to be submitted on the interactive course site at SUNY Learning Network. See General instructions on Journaling for this course. For a sample journal, see Dr. G's 2007 Brit Lit 1 Journal.

Journal

Write for an hour (or more if you have time). Summarize the readings. Some other journaling ideas for today include:

How is the Miller's tale a takeoff or spoof on aristocratic romance? Is Chaucer satirizing common people or aristocrats?

How is the story echoing the Bible? How does this use of Biblical story compare or contrast to the use of Biblical story in Beowulf? In Gawain and the Green Knight?

What makes this story funny?

What problems did Chaucer's Middle English present for you as a reader?