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Deor's Lament

“Deor’s Lament“, one of the precious gems of Anglo-Saxon literature is found to employ a refrain and stanza pattern quite artistically. It was found in the Exeter Book which has been dated to around 960-990 AD. The poem might, of course, be older than the book itself, as many ancient poems were passed down orally.

Many critics and scholars have found it difficult to put “Deor” in a specific genre. Some call it a lament, an elegy, or even a “begging poem”, meaning that it was written by an itinerant begging poet without an official place in a court. There are, however, some similarities between “Deor” and two of the other poems in Exeter Book, “The Seafarer” and “The Wanderer”.

It is a moving elegy of forty two lines which gives voice to the suffering of a minstrel or a scop who has been replaced by a rival after years of service to his Lord. The speaker’s self consolation takes a meditative form as he looks back upon five instances of suffering inflicted upon Germanic heroes. The characters employed here are all from historical or mythical figures.

In the first stanza, the narrator emphasizes Weyland’s physical suffering. King Nithuthr enslaved him for fashioning beautiful golden rings. Being escaped Weland took revenge by killing Nithuthr’s two sons and getting his daughter Beadohild pregnant. The second stanza focuses on Beadohild’s spiritual and cognitive pang. After being raped by the killer of his brothers she found herself pregnant. At first she was completely broken down but afterward she managed to overcome her situation. In the third stanza, the narrator mentions the brief and ambiguous affair between the unfamiliar lovers Geat and Maethild. Losing Maethild, Geat has no hope to survive in the world, but somehow gets over it. The fourth stanza is all about the tyrannical rule of Theoderic over Maeringaburg for thirty years. Then he was alienated from people. He had been suffering powerlessness. Eventually he got over his misery. The fifth stanza highlights the relationship between Ermanaric, the king of Ostrogoths and his warriors. In fact he suffered misfortune being separated from his people. His black days also passed away.

In the concluding stanza, Deor, by comparing his present state of mind to the legendary figures confirms a moral message. No matter how deep and grim a man’s sorrow is, it will surely pass one day. Deor lost everything that was dear to him – his lord, his position- and now he is experiencing woe. However, he knows that his pain will pass.

The dream of the rood

Dream of the rood is one of the few surviving Christian poems in the corpus of old English Literature, and an example of the genre of dream poetry. The book is preserved in 10th century Vercelli Book and it is considered one of the oldest work of Old English Literature.

The Poem may be as old as the 8th century Ruthwell Cross which was an 18 feet and the tree standing Anglo-Saxon cross that was perhaps called as conversion tool. As each side of the cross there is an excerption that was written in runes along with the scenes from the Gospels, lives of saints, images of Jesus healing the blind, the story of Egypt etc. The book (Dream of the Rood) describes the blended culture , moral code religions values of that contemporary solicty. In this poem the narrator recalls a vision which he received in his dream where he saw a rood on which Christ was crufied that also describes the both pagan and chritian culture. That implies subordinate relationship with Christ as that of a lord and thane. The contradictyr conept of Christ as a self sacrificing victim and fearless warrior king with the references to pagan and christian culture described the clash between newly emerging society of ecclesiastical ethics and pagan tradition of heroism.

In this poem the narrator had a dream on which he is speaking to the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The poem is divided up in to three sections.

In the 1st section the narrator had a vision of the cross and when he saw the cross , he noticed that it was covered with gems. He observed that how glorious the tree is. But suddenly he saw amidst the beautiful stones it is stained with blood. In the section two the cross describes the moment of Jesus's death. The story begun when the enemy came and cut down the tree and carried it away. The tree realised that it was not be the bearer of a criminal but a holy person who is crucified . It was honoured above all trees just as Jesus is honoured above all men. And his In Section three, the author gave his refrection aboiut his vision when the vision ends the author left with his thoughls. He proaised the god what he has seen is his vision. And he wanted ot once again to be near the glor cross.

The Dream of the Rood is regarded as one of the great religious poems in the history of English Literature. Some critics assume that the poem was written in the late seven or early eight century. In the eight century the poem was first discovered on a Ruthwell cross or runic The word Rood translated from old English to English as crucifix or cross.

The entire poem has been translated from old English to English by Charles kennedy According to same scholars, In this poem Pegan elements were included to entice the Anglo saxon pagans to convert to Christianity.

The poem is written three parts and considered as first dream poem in the English Literature Dreamer sees a beautiful tree in the sky. With jewels and gold. But he noticed it bleeds from the right side and he became fearful and throubled when he came ot know on this cross Jesus was crucified.

The tree as borne on men’s shoulders up to a his and he realized he was to bear the body of the lord of men. The son of god, along with the rood Acted with courage and great bravery. The cross also suffered wound with the Christ But when the Jessus went to Heaven, the cross was thrown in a ditch. Later Christians found the Cross and reveres the cross and covered it with silver and gold. Man now prays to the cross. In this poem the dreamer almighty of god who do not know or do not believe on God.

Beowulf

King Hrothgar of Denmark, a descendant of the great king Shield Sheafson, enjoys a prosperous and successful reign. He builds a great mead-hall, called Heorot, where his warriors can gather to drink, receive gifts from their lord, and listen to stories sung by the scops, or bards. But the jubilant noise from Heorot angers Grendel, a horrible demon who lives in the swamplands of Hrothgar’s kingdom. Grendel terrorizes the Danes every night, killing them and defeating their efforts to fight back. The Danes suffer many years of fear, danger, and death at the hands of Grendel. Eventually, however, a young Geatish warrior named Beowulf hears of Hrothgar’s plight. Inspired by the challenge, Beowulf sails to Denmark with a small company of men, determined to defeat Grendel.

Hrothgar, who had once done a great favor for Beowulf’s father Ecgtheow, accepts Beowulf’s offer to fight Grendel and holds a feast in the hero’s honor. During the feast, an envious Dane named Unferth taunts Beowulf and accuses him of being unworthy of his reputation. Beowulf responds with a boastful description of some of his past accomplishments. His confidence cheers the Danish warriors, and the feast lasts merrily into the night. At last, however, Grendel arrives. Beowulf fights him unarmed, proving himself stronger than the demon, who is terrified. As Grendel struggles to escape, Beowulf tears the monster’s arm off. Mortally wounded, Grendel slinks back into the swamp to die. The severed arm is hung high in the mead-hall as a trophy of victory.

Overjoyed, Hrothgar showers Beowulf with gifts and treasure at a feast in his honor. Songs are sung in praise of Beowulf, and the celebration lasts late into the night. But another threat is approaching. Grendel’s mother, a swamp-hag who lives in a desolate lake, comes to Heorot seeking revenge for her son’s death. She murders Aeschere, one of Hrothgar’s most trusted advisers, before slinking away. To avenge Aeschere’s death, the company travels to the murky swamp, where Beowulf dives into the water and fights Grendel’s mother in her underwater lair. He kills her with a sword forged for a giant, then, finding Grendel’s corpse, decapitates it and brings the head as a prize to Hrothgar. The Danish countryside is now purged of its treacherous monsters.

The Danes are again overjoyed, and Beowulf’s fame spreads across the kingdom. Beowulf departs after a sorrowful goodbye to Hrothgar, who has treated him like a son. He returns to Geatland, where he and his men are reunited with their king and queen, Hygelac and Hygd, to whom Beowulf recounts his adventures in Denmark. Beowulf then hands over most of his treasure to Hygelac, who, in turn, rewards him.

In time, Hygelac is killed in a war against the Shyflings, and, after Hygelac’s son dies, Beowulf ascends to the throne of the Geats. He rules wisely for fifty years, bringing prosperity to Geatland. When Beowulf is an old man, however, a thief disturbs a barrow, or mound, where a great dragon lies guarding a horde of treasure. Enraged, the dragon emerges from the barrow and begins unleashing fiery destruction upon the Geats. Sensing his own death approaching, Beowulf goes to fight the dragon. With the aid of Wiglaf, he succeeds in killing the beast, but at a heavy cost. The dragon bites Beowulf in the neck, and its fiery venom kills him moments after their encounter. The Geats fear that their enemies will attack them now that Beowulf is dead. According to Beowulf’s wishes, they burn their departed king’s body on a huge funeral pyre and then bury him with a massive treasure in a barrow overlooking the sea.

The central conflict of Beowulf arises as Beowulf, who embodies the ancient Northern European warrior code, comes up against the limitations of that code. He encounters these limitations during a series of combats. The first is with Grendel, a creature who “nurse[s] a hard grievance” (l.87) against the successful warrior-king Hrothgar and his men. The nature of Grendel’s grievance is never fully explained, but because Grendel is first encountered “haunting the marches” (l.103—a “march” is a border), many readers have seen Grendel as the embodiment of the people exiled and displaced by Hrothgar’s military conquests, conquests which are celebrated under the warrior code. Grendel is not killed outright, but forced to flee to his “desolate lair” (l.820). Although Beowulf defeats Grendel, the poem switches to the defeated monster’s point of view to show us that Beowulf’s heroism has only caused further pain and suffering.

Beowulf’s second combat is with Grendel’s mother. The story of Hildeburh (ll.1070-1158) shows us how Grendel’s mother embodies a limitation of the warrior code. Hildeburh is a princess who loses all her male relatives because her husband’s family is feuding with her brother’s family. However, as a woman, she cannot participate in the feud herself. All she can do is grieve. Grendel’s mother is a female “avenger” (l.1258), and many readers have seen her as the embodiment of all the women left powerless and grieving by the blood-vengeance required under the warrior code. After Grendel’s mother attacks, Beowulf forcefully restates this aspect of the code: “It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning” (ll.1384-5). Beowulf’s thirst for vengeance against Grendel’s mother, who is herself avenging a killing perpetrated by Beowulf, underlines that the heroic code entails an unending cycle of bloodshed.

Finally, Beowulf must face his ultimate fate, the dragon. The dragon represents at least two major limitations of the heroic code. First, the question of whether Beowulf should fight the dragon catches him between two conflicting rules: the rule that requires a warrior to show unyielding courage and seek fame, and the rule that requires a king to remain alive so he can protect his people. After Beowulf’s death, Wiglaf says that he chose wrongly: “when one man follows his own will / many are hurt” (ll.3077-8). A more significant limitation arises from the fact that even an exemplary warrior, like Beowulf, must eventually meet a foe he cannot overcome (even if it’s just old age, as in Hrothgar’s case). Beowulf’s death is the perfect warrior’s death: before he succumbs, he manages to slay a mighty opponent and secure a huge hoard of treasure for his people. Nevertheless his death is a disaster. At his funeral, his people foresee “enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement” (ll. 3154-5). We are left with a sense that even if there is much to admire about the warrior code, ultimately it is tragically misguided.

Themes:

The Importance of Establishing Identity: As Beowulf is essentially a record of heroic deeds, the concept of identity—of which the two principal components are ancestral heritage and individual reputation—is clearly central to the poem. The opening passages introduce the reader to a world in which every male figure is known as his father’s son. Characters in the poem are unable to talk about their identity or even introduce themselves without referring to family lineage. This concern with family history is so prominent because of the poem’s emphasis on kinship bonds. Characters take pride in ancestors who have acted valiantly, and they attempt to live up to the same standards as those ancestors.

The Difference Between a Good Warrior and a Good King: Over the course of the poem, Beowulf matures from a valiant combatant into a wise leader. His transition demonstrates that a differing set of values accompanies each of his two roles. The difference between these two sets of values manifests itself early on in the outlooks of Beowulf and King Hrothgar. Whereas the youthful Beowulf, having nothing to lose, desires personal glory, the aged Hrothgar, having much to lose, seeks protection for his people. Though these two outlooks are somewhat oppositional, each character acts as society dictates he should given his particular role in society.

Evil: Many readers have seen Beowulf’s monsters as embodiments of evil, representing the idea that evil is a mysterious, inhuman force. All three monsters emerge from darkness, inflicting fear and suffering on the poem’s human characters. Grendel, in particular, is closely allied with the forces of evil. He is a “fiend out of hell” (l.100) and a descendant of the cursed sinner Cain. However, none of the monsters acts out of sheer evil alone. Grendel’s mother is legitimately seeking vengeance for her son’s death. Even Grendel nurses “a hard grievance” (l.87), and we understand that even if his deeds are evil, Grendel acts out of isolation, envy, and fear. By giving the monsters comprehensible, human motives and at moments even showing us their points of view, Beowulf humanizes evil, suggesting that evil is both an unspeakable threat from the darkness and at the same time an ordinary part of human life. When we hear the poem’s stories of war between humans, of Beowulf and Hygelac emerging from the sea to slaughter their enemies, we might begin to wonder if there’s anything inhuman at all about Grendel or his mother.

Treasure: Although “glory” (l.1388), is what motivates Beowulf and the other heroic warriors of the poem, they measure their glory in treasure. The gloriousness of Beowulf’s achievement in killing Grendel is measured by the amount of treasure Hrothgar gives him as a reward. At the same time, Hrothgar’s gloriousness as a king can be measured by his generosity with his treasure. When Beowulf gives the lion’s share of his reward to Hygelac, it shows us in quantifiable terms how loyal Beowulf is to his king, and therefore how well he upholds the warrior code, while also indicating how excellent a king Hygelac is. However, Beowulf is deeply skeptical about the value of treasure. The poem’s biggest hoard of treasure belongs to the monstrous dragon, and it does him no good. When Wiglaf enters the barrow to examine the hoard, he finds it already “tarnished and corroding” (ll.2761-2). Many readers have found Beowulf’s dying wish to see the treasure he has won disquieting. To the poem’s original Christian audience, it may have been even more disquieting: it’s a reminder that, in his final moments, Beowulf’s mind is on temporary, worldly things instead of God and eternal life.

Mortality: On one level, Beowulf is from beginning to end a poem about confronting death. It begins with a funeral, and proceeds to the story of a murderous monster. Beowulf enters the story as a hero who has chosen to risk death in order to achieve fame. As Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother at the bottom of the mere, even his close friends believe he has died. Some readers have seen his journey to the bottom of the mere as a symbolic death, drawing on the Christian story of the “Harrowing of Hell,” in which Jesus, after dying on the Cross, descends to Hell in order to divide the saved from the damned. The final third of the poem is devoted to Beowulf’s death and funeral. Some readers have argued that the poem presents pagan mortality as tragic: Beowulf and the other heroes lead frightening, death-filled lives, and die without any hope of salvation. However, other readers have found Beowulf all the more heroic because he accomplishes his deeds in the shadow of certain death, without hope of resurrection. For these readers, Beowulf suggests that a good, brave life is worth living at any cost.

Symbols:

The Golden Torque: The collar or necklace that Wealhtheow gives Beowulf is a symbol of the bond of loyalty between her people and Beowulf—and, by extension, the Geats. Its status as a symbolic object is renewed when we learn that Hygelac died in battle wearing it, furthering the ideas of kinship and continuity.

The Banquet: The great banquet at Heorot after the defeat of Grendel represents the restoration of order and harmony to the Danish people. The preparation involves the rebuilding of the damaged mead-hall, which, in conjunction with the banquet itself, symbolizes the rebirth of the community. The speeches and giving of gifts, essential components of this society’s interactions, contribute as well to the sense of wholeness renewed.

Motifs:

Monsters: In Christian medieval culture, monster was the word that referred to birth defects, which were always understood as an ominous sign from God—a sign of transgression or of bad things to come. In keeping with this idea, the monsters that Beowulf must fight in this Old English poem shape the poem’s plot and seem to represent an inhuman or alien presence in society that must be exorcised for the society’s safety. They are all outsiders, existing beyond the boundaries of human realms. Grendel’s and his mother’s encroachment upon human society—they wreak havoc in Heorot—forces Beowulf to kill the two beasts for order to be restored. To many readers, the three monsters that Beowulf slays all seem to have a symbolic or allegorical meaning. For instance, since Grendel is descended from the biblical figure Cain, who slew his own brother, Grendel often has been understood to represent the evil in Scandinavian society of marauding and killing others. A traditional figure of medieval folklore and a common Christian symbol of sin, the dragon may represent an external malice that must be conquered to prove a hero’s goodness. Because Beowulf’s encounter with the dragon ends in mutual destruction, the dragon may also be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the inevitable encounter with death itself.

The Oral Tradition: Intimately connected to the theme of the importance of establishing one’s identity is the oral tradition, which preserves the lessons and lineages of the past, and helps to spread reputations. Indeed, in a culture that has little interaction with writing, only the spoken word can allow individuals to learn about others and make their own stories known. This emphasis on oral communication explains the prevalence of bards’ tales (such as the Heorot scop’s relating of the Finnsburg episode) and warriors’ boastings (such as Beowulf’s telling of the Breca story). From a broader perspective, Beowulf itself contributes to the tradition of oral celebration of cultural heroes. Like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf was passed on orally over many generations before being written down.

The Mead-Hall: The poem contains two examples of mead-halls: Hrothgar’s great hall of Heorot, in Denmark, and Hygelac’s hall in Geatland. Both function as important cultural institutions that provide light and warmth, food and drink, and singing and revelry. Historically, the mead-hall represented a safe haven for warriors returning from battle, a small zone of refuge within a dangerous and precarious external world that continuously offered the threat of attack by neighboring peoples. The mead-hall was also a place of community, where traditions were preserved, loyalty was rewarded, and, perhaps most important, stories were told and reputations were spread.

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The Middle English Period

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

During a New Year’s Eve feast at King Arthur’s court, a strange figure, referred to only as the Green Knight, pays the court an unexpected visit. He challenges the group’s leader or any other brave representative to a game. The Green Knight says that he will allow whomever accepts the challenge to strike him with his own axe, on the condition that the challenger find him in exactly one year to receive a blow in return.

Stunned, Arthur hesitates to respond, but when the Green Knight mocks Arthur’s silence, the king steps forward to take the challenge. As soon as Arthur grips the Green Knight’s axe, Sir Gawain leaps up and asks to take the challenge himself. He takes hold of the axe and, in one deadly blow, cuts off the knight’s head. To the amazement of the court, the now-headless Green Knight picks up his severed head. Before riding away, the head reiterates the terms of the pact, reminding the young Gawain to seek him in a year and a day at the Green Chapel. After the Green Knight leaves, the company goes back to its festival, but Gawain is uneasy.

Time passes, and autumn arrives. On the Day of All Saints, Gawain prepares to leave Camelot and find the Green Knight. He puts on his best armor, mounts his horse, Gringolet, and starts off toward North Wales, traveling through the wilderness of northwest Britain. Gawain encounters all sorts of beasts, suffers from hunger and cold, and grows more desperate as the days pass. On Christmas Day, he prays to find a place to hear Mass, then looks up to see a castle shimmering in the distance. The lord of the castle welcomes Gawain warmly, introducing him to his lady and to the old woman who sits beside her. For sport, the host (whose name is later revealed to be Bertilak) strikes a deal with Gawain: the host will go out hunting with his men every day, and when he returns in the evening, he will exchange his winnings for anything Gawain has managed to acquire by staying behind at the castle. Gawain happily agrees to the pact, and goes to bed.

The first day, the lord hunts a herd of does, while Gawain sleeps late in his bedchambers. On the morning of the first day, the lord’s wife sneaks into Gawain’s chambers and attempts to seduce him. Gawain puts her off, but before she leaves she steals one kiss from him. That evening, when the host gives Gawain the venison he has captured, Gawain kisses him, since he has won one kiss from the lady. The second day, the lord hunts a wild boar. The lady again enters Gawain’s chambers, and this time she kisses Gawain twice. That evening Gawain gives the host the two kisses in exchange for the boar’s head.

The third day, the lord hunts a fox, and the lady kisses Gawain three times. She also asks him for a love token, such as a ring or a glove. Gawain refuses to give her anything and refuses to take anything from her, until the lady mentions her girdle. The green silk girdle she wears around her waist is no ordinary piece of cloth, the lady claims, but possesses the magical ability to protect the person who wears it from death. Intrigued, Gawain accepts the cloth, but when it comes time to exchange his winnings with the host, Gawain gives the three kisses but does not mention the lady’s green girdle. The host gives Gawain the fox skin he won that day, and they all go to bed happy, but weighed down with the fact that Gawain must leave for the Green Chapel the following morning to find the Green Knight.

New Year’s Day arrives, and Gawain dons his armor, including the girdle, then sets off with Gringolet to seek the Green Knight. A guide accompanies him out of the estate grounds. When they reach the border of the forest, the guide promises not to tell anyone if Gawain decides to give up the quest. Gawain refuses, determined to meet his fate head-on. Eventually, he comes to a kind of crevice in a rock, visible through the tall grasses. He hears the whirring of a grindstone, confirming his suspicion that this strange cavern is in fact the Green Chapel. Gawain calls out, and the Green Knight emerges to greet him. Intent on fulfilling the terms of the contract, Gawain presents his neck to the Green Knight, who proceeds to feign two blows. On the third feint, the Green Knight nicks Gawain’s neck, barely drawing blood. Angered, Gawain shouts that their contract has been met, but the Green Knight merely laughs.

The Green Knight reveals his name, Bertilak, and explains that he is the lord of the castle where Gawain recently stayed. Because Gawain did not honestly exchange all of his winnings on the third day, Bertilak drew blood on his third blow. Nevertheless, Gawain has proven himself a worthy knight, without equal in all the land. When Gawain questions Bertilak further, Bertilak explains that the old woman at the castle is really Morgan le Faye, Gawain’s aunt and King Arthur’s half sister. She sent the Green Knight on his original errand and used her magic to change Bertilak’s appearance. Relieved to be alive but extremely guilty about his sinful failure to tell the whole truth, Gawain wears the girdle on his arm as a reminder of his own failure. He returns to Arthur’s court, where all the knights join Gawain, wearing girdles on their arms to show their support.

Themes:

The Nature of Chivalry: The world of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is governed by well-defined codes of behavior. The code of chivalry, in particular, shapes the values and actions of Sir Gawain and other characters in the poem. The ideals of chivalry derive from the Christian concept of morality, and the proponents of chivalry seek to promote spiritual ideals in a spiritually fallen world.

The Letter of the Law: Though the Green Knight refers to his challenge as a “game,” he uses the language of the law to bind Gawain into an agreement with him. He repeatedly uses the word “covenant,” meaning a set of laws, a word that evokes the two covenants represented by the Old and the New Testaments. The Old Testament details the covenant made between God and the people of Israel through Abraham, but the New Testament replaces the old covenant with a new covenant between Christ and his followers. In 2 Corinthians 3:6, Paul writes that Christ has “a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The “letter” to which Paul refers here is the legal system of the Old Testament. From this statement comes the Christian belief that the literal enforcement of the law is less important than serving its spirit, a spirit tempered by mercy.

Symbols:

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.

Motifs:

The Seasons: At the beginning of Parts 2 and 4, the poet describes the changing of the seasons. The seasonal imagery in Part 2 precedes Gawain’s departure from Camelot, and in Part 4 his departure from the host’s castle. In both cases, the changing seasons correspond to Gawain’s changing psychological state, from cheerfulness (pleasant weather) to bleakness (the winter). But the five changing seasons also correspond to the five ages of man (birth/infancy, youth, adulthood, middle age, and old age/death), as well as to the cycles of fertility and decay that govern all creatures in the natural world. The emphasis on the cyclical nature of the seasons contrasts with and provides a different understanding of the passage of time from the more linear narrative of history that frames the poem.

Games: When the poem opens, Arthur’s court is engaged in feast-time customs, and Arthur almost seems to elicit the Green Knight’s entrance by requesting that someone tell him a tale. When the Green Knight first enters, the courtiers think that his appearance signals a game of some sort. The Green Knight’s challenge, the host’s later challenge, and the wordplay that takes place between Gawain and the lady are all presented as games. The relationship between games and tests is explored because games are forms of social behavior, while tests provide a measure of an individual’s inner worth.

Green Knight

The Green Knight is a mysterious, supernatural creature. He rides into Arthur’s court on New Year’s Eve almost as if summoned by the king’s request to hear a marvelous story. His supernatural characteristics, such as his ability to survive decapitation and his green complexion, immediately mark him as a foreboding figure. The Green Knight contrasts with Arthur’s court in many ways. The knight symbolizes the wildness, fertility, and death that characterize a primeval world, whereas the court symbolizes an enclave of civilization within the wilderness. But, like the court, the Green Knight strongly advocates the values of the law and justice. And though his long hair suggests an untamed, natural state, his hair is cut into the shape of a courtly garment, suggesting that part of his function is to establish a relationship between wilderness and civilization, past and present.

At Gawain’s scheduled beheading, the Green Knight reveals that he is also the host with whom Gawain stayed after his journeys through the wilderness, and that he is known as Bertilak de Hautdesert. As the host, we know Bertilak to be a courteous, jovial man who enjoys hunting for sport and playing games. A well-respected and middle-aged lord, the host contrasts with the beardless Arthur. In fact, his beard is “beaver-hued,” a feature which associates the host with the Green Knight. Other clues exist in the text to connect the host with the Green Knight. For instance, both the Green Knight and the host value the power of verbal contracts. Each makes a covenant with Gawain, and the two agreements overlap at the end of the poem.

Sir Gawain

Le Morte d'Arthur

Le Morte d'Arthur tells the story of King Arthur and his Knights at the Round Table. Arthur, who is son of King Uther Pendragon but was raised by another family, takes his rightful place as king when, as a boy, he is able to pull the sword called Excalibur from the stone. Although he rules wisely and is counseled by Merlin the magician, Arthur makes enemies of other kings and is often at war.

When Arthur marries Genevere, her father gives Arthur the Round Table, at which 150 men can sit. Genevere, who is often present at the convening of the Round Table, acts as a moral compass for the knights, rewarding knights who behave well and chastising those who choose poorly. Malory specifically relates the stories of Sir Gawain, Sir Tor, and Sir Pellanor as a means of introducing the concept of chivalry.

Arthur is nearly betrayed by his sister Morgan le Fay, but he is helped by Nineve, a sorceress who learned her magic powers from Merlin before killing him. Arthur then fights the Romans when Emperor Lucius of Rome demands that Arthur bow to him. Although the war requires several battles, Arthur and his knights win and return to Guinevere and the other wives. Soon after, Launcelot establishes himself as the greatest knight in all the world by his virtue, loyalty, and bravery. At the same time, Sir Gareth, Gawain's brother, proves valiant in his adventures.

Tristam (also known as Tristan), who is son of King Melyodas de Lyones and the sister of King Mark of Cornwall, is then introduced, and his adventures unfold. He kills Sir Marhault to free his uncle from a debt owed to King Angwyssh of Ireland, and then falls in love with Isode (also known as Isolde), Angwyssh's daughter. Isode marries Tristam's uncle Mark, but Tristam and Isode remain lovers. Tristam is exiled by Mark, which means he can no longer use his true identity; thus, he fights as The Knight with the Black Shield. Tristam duels and beats many of Arthur's knights, but is eventually thrown in prison and becomes ill. He escapes and eventually meets and fights Launcelot in a duel predicted by Merlin. They become the best of friends.

Launcelot, who is in love with and completely loyal to Guinevere, rides one day in search of adventure. He kills a dragon, sees the Grail, and is tricked into lying with Pellas' daughter Elayne, with whom he has a son, Galahad. Guinevere, upon hearing of the affair, has Launcelot banished from court; Launcelot then wanders from place to place in his grief. Elayne, through her father, heals Launcelot through the Grail, and he eventually returns joyously to Camelot and the Round Table.

Launcelot introduces his son, Galahad, to the court, and Galahad takes the Sege Perilous, the seat at the Round Table that no knight has been worthy enough to fill. Galahad also draws the sword from the floating stone, establishing him as the best knight in the world, but also accepting the sword's curse — that it will later cause a grievous wound.

Most of the knights then set out separately on Grail Quest. During the Quest, Launcelot, Percival, and Bors experience deep religious conversion, while Ector and Gawain are told by a hermit that they are not pure enough to achieve the Grail Quest. Galahad, Percival, and Bors meet up and continue the Grail Quest, but they are briefly parted. Launcelot and Galahad continue to the Grail at Castle Corbenic, where Launcelot is shown to be unworthy of the Quest. When Sir Evelake dies after his embrace with Galahad, Galahad is identified as the knight who will achieve the Grail Quest. Galahad is made a king who dies shortly thereafter, while Percival becomes a hermit. Bors returns to King Arthur's court.

Launcelot also returns to the court and continues his love for Guinevere. After a series of trials, Guinevere is convinced of Launcelot's love for her. Although Arthur knows of the affair and overlooks it, he is prompted by Aggravain and Mordred (Arthur's son by Lot's wife) to take action; Guinevere is sentenced to be burned at the stake. Launcelot rescues her and takes her to his castle, Joyous Gard, but in the battle, Launcelot kills Gareth and Gaheris, who are at the execution but are unarmed. Launcelot returns Guinevere to Arthur, but Launcelot is banished, along with his followers. Gawain swears vengeance for the death of his brothers and insists that Arthur attack Launcelot. Arthur agrees, but while Arthur and Gawain are away, Mordred makes himself King of England, claims Guinevere as his wife, and attacks Arthur's army. Gawain is mortally wounded and warns Arthur in a dream not to continue the battle. Through a misunderstanding, however, the battle continues; Arthur kills Mordred but is mortally wounded by him, as Merlin has prophesied.

Launcelot and Guinevere both die of illness soon after, and Constantine becomes king. The Round Table is disbursed.

Le Morte d'Arthur, completed in 1469 or 1470 and printed by Caxton in abridged form in 1485, is the first major work of prose fiction in English and remains today one of the greatest. It is the carefully constructed myth of the rise and fall of a powerful kingdom — a legendary kingdom, but perhaps also, obliquely, the real English kingdom which in Malory's day seemed as surely doomed by its own corruption as the ancient realm of King Arthur. Malory's myth explores the forces which bring kingdoms into being and the forces, internal and external, which destroy them. The power of the myth goes beyond whatever political implications it had in its day-set tip in, for instance, the parallels Malory introduced between Arthur's reign and the reign of Henry V (discussed below). Malory's grim vision has relevance for any kingdom or civilization: the very forces which make civilization necessary must in the end, if Malory is right, bring it to ruin.

What holds the myth together is not only its undeviating philosophy of doom. In Le Morte d'Arthur, Malory created, or gave new personality to, some of the most striking characters to be found in all English literature: King Arthur himself, the tragic hero; Launcelot, the noblest knight in the world, torn by a conflict of loyalties which must result in his destruction of all he loves best; Sir Gawain, vengeful and treacherous but steadfast in loyalty to his king; Queen Guinevere, emblem of courtly courtesy, generous but also fierce in jealousy; and many more. Another force binding the legend together is Malory's fascination with deadly paradox — events which simultaneously support and undermine the kingdom. For instance, the murder of all children born on May Day, which Merlin arranges to help Arthur escape his predestined death at Mordred's hands, fails to kill Mordred but turns many powerful lords against Arthur — above all, King Lot and a part of his house, doomed themselves but established from the outset as the focus and central cause of Arthur's doom. The legend is also held together by atmosphere. Arthur's realm draws together the ancient days of Celtic magic and irrationality, the by-gone age of Christian miracles, and the fifteenth-century England Malory's readers knew — an England which, Malory suggests, is not as rational or divinely protected as it foolishly imagines.

Not that Malory's vision is wholly black. His legend has moments of great tenderness as well as comedy, and his characters' values are real and noble values; but they are values which mutually conflict and must in the end prove destructive. When the world collapses under Malory's heroes, they are robbed even of the "existential" satisfaction of such characters as Gide's Theseus, who says at the end of it all, "I have lived!" For Malory there is knowledge, but no satisfaction. Except in the case of saints like Galahad, there is only the pattern of human ambition, remorse, penance, and sorrowful death.

Pearl

What is the book the pearl about by John Steinbeck?

The Pearl, short story by John Steinbeck, published in 1947. It is a parable about a Mexican Indian pearl diver named Kino who finds a valuable pearl and is transformed by the evil it attracts. Kino sees the pearl as his opportunity for a better life.

What is the purpose of the pearl by John Steinbeck?

John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a parable; as such it is meant to teach a moral lesson. penetrate to the sources of human thought and behavior and present in the form of some objective correlative the archetypal and mythopoeic knowledge that lies deep in the mystery of human experience.

What is the summary of the story the pearl?

The story, first published in 1947, follows a pearl diver, Kino, and explores man’s purpose as well as greed, defiance of societal norms, and evil. Steinbeck’s inspiration was a Mexican folk tale from La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, which he had heard in a visit to the formerly pearl-rich region in 1940.

What is the main plot of the pearl?

The Pearl Plot Summary. Kino, a young pearl diver in La Paz, enjoys his simple life until the day his son, Coyotito, is stung by a scorpion. The wealthy town doctor will not treat the baby because Kino cannot pay the doctor’s fee, so Kino and his wife, Juana, are left only to hope their child is saved.

What is the main theme of The Pearl?

In ”The Pearl” by John Steinbeck, the theme of the destructive power of greed is explored as the characters navigate their personal desires, destiny, and racism. We will explore the devastating effect of Kino’s sudden change from being poor but happy, to possibly instantly wealthy.

What is the summary of the story The Pearl?

What is the main lesson of the pearl?

Lesson Summary The Pearl is a parable, a moral lesson, about gratitude and the dangers of greed. Because parables offer a moral lesson, being grateful for the things one already has serves as the theme.

What is the main theme in The Pearl?

Why should I read The Pearl?

I would recommend that someone read The Pearl to understand how an author can create complexity and ambiguity from a simple folk story. The Pearl was inspired by a Mexican folktale. The reader also sees this when Kino stubbornly holds onto the pearl even though he knows it will turn the town against his family.

What is the main theme of the pearl?

What is the plot of the Pearl by John Steinbeck?

Plot of “The Pearl” by John Steinbeck. Exposition. Readers are introduced to the setting: La Paz , Mexico, and the main characters: Kino, a pearl diver , his loyal and kind wife, Juana, and their infant son Coyotito. Kino and his family are poor, but they love each other and are somehwhat content.

What are facts about the Pearl the book by johnsteinbeck?

Full Title: The Pearl

When Written: 1944

Where Written: California

When Published: 1947

Literary Period: Modernist novel

Genre: Novella/Parable

Setting: La Paz,Baja California Sur

Climax: Kino’s beating of Juana and his killing of a man in protection of the pearl

What influenced John Steinbeck to write the Pearl?

John Steinbeck’s personal connection with the land, his early experience with Thomas Malory ‘s ” Morte d ‘Arthur,” and his interactions with migrant workers inspired his writing. The conflict between migrant workers and management over labor rights became an important theme in many of his works, according to the National Steinbeck Center.

What is the moral of the Pearl by Steinbeck?

The moral lesson of The Pearl is that the love of money is the root of evil . As the book opens, Kino, Juana, and their very young son, Coyotito, are content with their simples lives.

piers plowman

The poem is a theological allegory in which the speaker, Will, experiences ten dream-visions, including two dreams within dreams, on his quest for a good Christian life. The dream-vision was a common literary form at the time, employed by Chaucer and others. Langland combined it with other genres: the quest, social satire, beast fable, debate, and sermon. It is structured as a journey. Each chapter after the prologue is called a passus, which is Latin for step. In his first dream-vision, Will describes a ‘fair field full of folk,’ a wide variety of characters living in the everyday realm, which lies between heaven and hell, represented by a tower and a dungeon respectively. When the poem was first printed, it was divided into two sections: "The Vision of Piers the Plowman," and "The Life of Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best."

On his quest, Will is diverted wildly, as he encounters hundreds of characters from every walk of life: prostitutes, clergy, lawyers, pilgrims, drunkards, judges, thieves, vagabonds, bankers, sheriffs, wastrels, scholars, con-men, and judges, among many others. The text also reflects Christian prejudice against Jews and Muslims in the Medieval period. The scope of the poem is ambitious, rich, and often humorous. It explores the proper roles of various parts of secular and religious society, such as the government, the nobility, the peasantry, the papacy, and the clergy. In this, it addresses issues that are perennially urgent: relations amongst classes, nations, family members, the secular and religious worlds, and humans and nature. It touches on the topics of taxation, trade, war, criminal justice, finance, food supply, medicine, heredity, marriage, child-rearing, and education.

Piers Plowman is committed to Truth and divine justice. The poem rails against corruption passionately and angrily, and has contempt for hypocrisy. It grapples with the different levels of economic and political power among social actors including the traditional three estates of feudal society: the Church, the nobility, and the peasantry, and the new classes that arose in the late Middle Ages: traveling laborers, the urban mercantile class, and intellectuals such as the poet himself.

Many abstract qualities, such as Truth, Charity, and Conscience, morph into and out of personified form in the poem. As each quality carries many connotations, they intertwine to create rich, complex imagery. Piers Plowman is himself a complex allegorical character. He appears sporadically throughout the poem as an ideal peasant laborer, friend of Truth, founder of the Church, and embodiment of Christ.

The dreamer’s name, Will, is also allegorical, representing human will. Will desires to make things right with God through penance. He finds that the system doesn’t work the way that it’s supposed to—even though he seeks true penitence earnestly, he encounters false friars who grant easy absolution to get rich quickly. Corruption is endemic in the world of Piers Plowman; the effort of the poem represents hope for a cure. Will progresses from confusion to redemption and hopes for society to return to the Cardinal Virtues and to follow Christ’s commandments to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The poem ends in crisis, with the Church lost to the forces of the Antichrist. But there is a glimmer of hope, as Conscience sets out on a new pilgrimage to once again find Piers Plowman.

The speaker of the poem, Will, experiences a series of dream-visions on his quest to learn how to live a good Christian life. In his dreams, he meets allegorical characters who represent both his external and internal world: the fundamental teachings and protagonists and antagonists of Christian cosmology; the social classes and economic relationships of medieval England; and his own faculties and physical needs. These allegorical characters fight with each other about God, the Church, money, and how to live. One of the allegorical characters, Piers, a humble plowman, at times becomes both Jesus Christ and Peter, the apostle who founded the Church.

The Prologue and first seven "passus," or steps, make up the Viso, or Vision, portion of the poem, where Will seeks Truth. He dreams of the “fair field of folk” (a geographic allegory for medieval Christendom); the Parliament of Rats fable; the trial of Miss Money; and the confession of the Seven Deadly Sins. In the remainder of the poem, Will seeks Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best. He dreams, among other episodes, of Piers Plowman leading the folk to Truth through plowing a field; Patience’s dinner party with a false friar; the Tree of Charity; Christ’s Harrowing of Hell; and the Antichrist’s destruction of the Church of Unity. In the end, Will has progressed to become an active Christian, while the Church has been compromised by corruption. But it concludes on a hopeful note, as Conscience embarks on a quest to once again find Piers Plowman, who represents uncorrupted Christian values, and good work for the friars.

Will

Will is the speaker of the poem who has a series of dream-visions and undertakes a spiritual quest. As an allegorical character, he represents the human will which struggles and, through making the choice to do good works, ultimately achieves salvation.

At the beginning of the poem, he is a wandering hermit, searching for Truth, or God. He learns from Holy Church the central Christian teaching that God is love, but is unable to understand until he has more experience. Later, he pursues Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best and learns how to lead an actively Christian life. In his dream-visions, he encounters a series of allegorical figures who represent parts of himself. He witnesses the life of Christ, the establishment of the Church, and the battle with the Antichrist. In the end, by undergoing Contrition and Confession, Will is able to enter the Church of Unity.

Will is also a very human, emotional character: He worries about meeting his basic needs, dreams of indulgences of the flesh, and fears death. He lives in London with his wife and a daughter. He becomes infuriated by corruption and cries when called upon to repent. He ages throughout the poem, and at an accelerated rate when he encounters Old Age in Step XX, who instantly turns him bald, deaf, toothless, and impotent.

Will is often interpreted as an autobiographical character, representing William Langland. The line “For as long I’ve lived in this land as Long Will” has huge significance for scholars, because it’s a clue to the identity of the author. Peter Sutton notes that: “Long Will suggests both perseverance and a physical description. ‘Long’ combined with ‘land’ is probably a pun on ‘Langland,’ although ‘land’ may be a misreading of ‘London.’”

False Friars

False Friars are the prime antagonists in Piers Plowman. The poem points out repeatedly how corrupt friars are letting Christendom down through their selfish attention to financial gain. Both Miss Money and the Seven Deadly Sins corrupt friars quickly. When Will searches for Do-well, two friars try to fool him into believing that Do-well lives with them. In the dream where Will dines with Patience, one of the other dinner guests is the Doctor, a friar, whose inappropriate gluttony infuriates Will. When the Antichrist attacks the Christian community, some friars immediately support him. Other friars try to come to the rescue. But Conscience, who leads the defense, doesn’t trust them. Need defends the friars, claiming that they are poor and need patrons. Conscience has some sympathy for the friars, promising them a place in the Church of Unity if they live by moderation and their Rule. She offers Saints Francis and Dominic as models who renounced worldly possessions for love. Envy, in competition with Conscience, finances the friars to learn anti-Christian philosophy. The folk, sick with sin, request Friar Flatterer to heal them. He offers to dismiss and diminish sins in exchange for payment. In protest, Conscience leaves the Church of Unity, which is now full of sinners receiving easy absolution from the false friar. The ending implies that one of the solutions to corruption—the central threat to Christendom, according to the poem—is for friars to get reacquainted with their consciences.

Piers Plowman

Piers is a plowman. He has a wife named Work-while-you-may, a daughter named Do-right-or-do-get-a-beating, and a son named Suffer-your-seniors-to-be-right-without-grumbling-or-groaning-or-you-may-regret-it-Let-God-have-his-way-as-his-word-says-as-well.

Piers first appears in Step V of the poem. When the folk are lost on their quest for Truth (God), Piers gives them directions. As an allegorical character, Piers Plowman represents a model of Christian behavior, especially the importance of performing good works. When he offers to guide the folk, after they help him plow his field, he substitutes agricultural labor for the pilgrimage. Piers becomes an ideal ruler, dividing up labor between the estates, social classes, and sexes equitably in a perfect feudal system. After some idlers refuse to work, Piers calls Hunger to help motivate them, which is effective.

As a reward for his success, Truth sends Piers an absolute pardon, offering absolution from both punishment in purgatory and guilt from sin. A priest then examines the document and denies that it’s a pardon at all. Piers rips up the paper in anger and renounces his past life. The scene marks a turning point in the poem, away from the social, as Piers rejects the Active Life in favor of the Contemplative Life.

In Will’s fifth dream, Soul says that Charity can only be attained with the help of Piers the Plowman. Soul describes Charity as a tree grown for Piers. At the sound of Piers’ name, Will experiences another dream within a dream, in which Piers explains the meaning of the tree, an allegory for Christendom. When the devil steals the fruit from his tree, Piers steals it back, and then leaves it to Jesus to decide who it rightfully belongs to.

Soul names Piers Plowman explicitly as Christ, calling him “Piers the Plowman, Peter, that is, Christ.” According to Peter Sutton’s footnote, “Piers is a diminutive of Peter, Peter is the Rock, and the Rock is Christ: see Matthew xvi 18 and 1 Corinthians x 4.”

Will describes Christ as “a man like the Samaritan, reminding me of Piers.” Jesus has come to fight the devil in a jousting competition for the fruit of the tree of Piers Plowman, stolen in Step XV. It turns out that Jesus Christ is jousting as Piers Plowman: “This gentleman Jesus will joust in Piers’ arms, In his helmet and armor called human shape. He’ll appear in the coat of Piers the Plowman Lest the consummate deity of Christ be discovered.”

In Step XIX, Will falls asleep during Easter Mass and dreams of the Crucifixion. In his dream-vision, Jesus Christ, carrying his cross, and Piers the Plowman are one.

As Do-Best, Christ grants Piers Plowman the power of pardon to those who pay their debts (which harkens back to the scene in Step VII). The line “Piers then had power/To bind and unbind on earth and in heaven” alludes to the passage in the Bible, at Matthew 16:19, when Jesus tells Peter, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven.” At this moment, Piers the Plowman becomes Peter, whom Christ designated to found the Church.

The Holy Spirit, also called Grace, gives Piers Plowman gifts related to an analogy of the Church as a farm. The oxen represent the gospels and the horses represent the Fathers of the Western Church. The seeds Piers must plow symbolize the Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. The harrows represent the Old and New Testaments that will help cultivate these seeds. When Piers asks Grace for timber to build the Barn of Unity, she gives him Christ’s cross and Mercy, Passion, and Holy Writ as building materials.

In the end, after the Antichrist successfully attacks the Church, Conscience sets off on a quest to find Piers Plowman, implying that he can help establish a true Christian church, free from corruption.

The Folk

The folk who Will sees in the field in his first vision represent the whole of medieval society. The poem overall names over two hundred characters from all social classes. It describes the folk as either working hard and performing their social roles properly for the good of the whole Christian community, or choosing worldliness instead, by selfishly accumulating wealth. When Reason and Repentance preach to the folk they repent and embark on their own quest for Truth. But they get lost immediately and require Piers to guide them. They agree to work, to help Piers plow his field, but then become uselessly idle until Hunger threatens them. Later Conscience calls on the folk to “gather together in Unity for good,” to resist Pride, to fortify the Church, and to pay their debts before receiving communion. A series of characters then refuse to listen to Conscience, from every feudal estate. The poem is equally scathing to all classes, as they ignore their consciences and abandon the true work of Christianity for their own sinful self-interest. Even after they suffer disease and death in punishment for their sins, they appeal to the Antichrist for help. When offered salvation by a true doctor they reject his medicine of penance and debt payment, asking instead for a false friar who sells them easy absolution.

Holy Church

The Holy Church, personified as a lady, descends to the field from the castle on the hill, which represents Heaven. This means that the Church’s function is to act as God’s emissary to help guide people on earth. She represents the eternal, divine Church in its purest form, unpolluted by human corruption. She would have been a familiar character to medieval readers. Holy Church explains to Will that Truth, who is God, lives in the tower and that the devil, a wicked angel who fled from heaven, lives in the dungeon opposite. He asks her how to acquire Truth, and she replies through love. Will is metaphorically reborn in this part of the poem, behaving as if he were a naive child who has to learn everything anew. Holy Church instructs him in the fundamentals of Christian faith and behavior, illustrating with biblical stories the importance of moderation, wariness of bodily desires, and selflessness. She also emphasizes a cornerstone of the medieval Church: doing good works.

Miss Money

Step II explores Falseness through the allegorical character Miss Money. She is complex, representing both bribery and just reward. Her dual nature is represented by her parents: Her father is False and her mother is Amends. Some scholars read the speech given by Theology as asserting that Miss Money was intended to marry Truth. This would mean that God intends money to be used for holy purposes. Miss Money’s choice to marry False Fickle-Tongue instead suggests that earthly rewards tend toward corruption. Indeed, Miss Money quickly corrupts lawyers, courtiers, tradesmen, and friars. When Miss Money is brought to the King, he won’t consent to her marriage with False Fickle-Tongue. Nor does he force her to marry Truth. Instead, he gives her the option to marry his knight Conscience. In this, he is well-intentioned, wanting to reward only those who deserve it. But Conscience refuses, pointing out that the King won’t be able to control Miss Money. By blurring the distinction between right and wrong, Miss Money always has the ability to corrupt. In her debate with Conscience, Miss Money loses, as it is revealed that the benefits she brings come at the high price of the soul’s freedom. This implies that the complex nature of money can’t be fully reconciled with conscience. In the case of Peace vs. Wrong, the lawyers of Wrong, Wisdom and Wit try to persuade the King to let him buy his way out of serious crimes. This scheme is supported by Miss Money. Reason argues against it. The scene is an allegory for the medieval Church’s practice of distributing indulgences (absolution from sin in exchange for donations), a practice that was easy to corrupt, as the clergy saw them as a quick way to make a buck, and the wealthy as an easy out from punishment. The King points out the spiritual crisis this causes when he warns that if Wrong gets away with this, he won’t be remorseful for his sins.

Miss Money

Need

Need, personified as an allegorical character, meets Will in his waking life at the beginning of Step XX. Need insults Will, calling him a clod, and then scolds him for not taking advantage of situations to take care of his basic needs for food, clothing, and water. Need defends himself, and argues that he may ignore Conscience and the Cardinal Virtues, as long as he is temperate. He makes the case that bodily need is humbling, Christ-like, and brings people closer to God. Later in Step XX, during Will’s dream, Need reappears to defend friars, reminding Conscience that they are poor and need patrons. Need thus represents a certain realism in the poem, which argues with a purely spiritual judgement. The poem resolves this tension when Will expresses his anxiety about having enough food, clothing, and shelter to Nature, Nature assures Will: ““If you love sincerely, you won’t lack/For belongings or food as long as you live.”

Piers Plowman Themes:

Economics

Piers Plowman explores the relationship between the spiritual economy and the material economy. Throughout the poem the folk are offered pardons for their sins if they undergo penance and pay their debts. The connection between vocation, work, labor, and reward is tied to doing well and thus salvation. The economy at the time was changing due to the labor shortage caused by the Black Death, the plague that killed half of England's population. Surviving peasants realized that they could earn more on the open market in the money economy than as serfs tied to a lord. Landowners attempted to stop this practice through laws. The breakdown of traditional feudal systems was fraught. Miss Money is an allegorical character who embodies this new economy. She is not purely evil, but she causes those around her to become corrupt. Some of the main targets of the poem are false friars who, out of self-interest, disrupt the spiritual economy of penance in favor of the financial economy. Another target is urban merchants who make a living through buying and then selling at a marked-up price.

Truth (God, Love)

At the beginning of the poem, when Will asks Holy Church how to achieve salvation she directs him to Truth, and when he inquires how to acquire truth, she replies through love. This is the thesis of the poem, and although Will knows the answer at the beginning he must learn it over and over again through various experiences and teachers. For example, Piers Plowman offers to help the pilgrims find truth, which after the experience of plowing his field, turns out to be doing well, loving God, and loving your neighbor as yourself.

Work

Piers the plowman is the ideal worker. He appears in the poem when the folk, now pilgrims, have embarked on their quest to find Truth (God) but have lost their way. Piers agrees to guide them, but first they must help him plow his field, for which they will receive shares of the harvest. That work is a metaphor for one’s religious duty. The literal pilgrimage gets replaced by the figurative pilgrimage contained within doing work for the good of the community. Each estate, or class, in medieval England has its calling and duty, the poem argues. Knights must protect their communities. The clergy must pray. And farmers must plow. But the peasants revolt, and won’t work until threatened by Hunger. This reflects the economic reality of the time, when the feudal system was breaking down in the labor shortage in the wake of the Black Death. The poem reacts to newly created classes as well: intellectuals and merchants. The character Will is an example of the new intellectual class, and defends himself from the admonition of Reason and Conscience, who accuse him of slothfulness, demanding to know what work he is doing for the good of the community. He replies that he is unfit for physical labor, and must work in London according to his calling.

Penance

Piers Plowman is the story of Will, a Christian who wants to save his soul by leading a good life. This means that a main theme of the poem is penance: the need for the individual, and by extension all members of Christendom, to make things right with God. Will’s name is an allegory for the human will, or desire. So, when the character Conscience interrogates him, this is an allegory for an internal process. In the Catholic Church, the sacrament of penance has a ritual order: the preacher preaches to move the conscience of the sinner, who confesses. The confessor then directs the penitent to undergo a temporal punishment, such as a pilgrimage, and grants a pardon. This is the way to enter grace, or union with God. So it is a serious problem to a devout Christian if this process is disrupted. The central concern of Piers Plowman is that corruption disrupts the penitential process.

Justice

Piers Plowman is committed to divine justice, a Catholic concept of the constant and unchanging will of God to give everyone their due. In the poem God and Truth are synonymous. The poem explores the relationship between justice and mercy; what is owed to the community (love, compassion, kindness, labor, money); and the proper relationship among those with spiritual power (the first estate, the Church), worldly power (the second estate, the nobility, and the monarchy), and those who work (the third estate, the peasants, and also the new classes of intellectuals and merchants). It seeks a just society through truth-telling.

Prophecy

Piers Plowman is, as a whole, a dream-vision. Will, the dreamer, is a vehicle for the prophetic voice of the poem. A prophet, as described in the Old Testament of the Bible, is one who calls his people to repentance and the straight path. The poem identifies urgent problems in Christendom and foretells, in the corrupt behavior of the clergy, the advent of the Antichrist. Some readers in the 16th century—some 150 years after Piers Plowman was written—thought that the poem predicted the Protestant Reformation in their time. And some contemporary readers see in Piers Plowman’s prophecies truths about our time, such as the need for social justice and the defeat of corruption with truth.

Salvation and Good Works

Will’s first quest is in search of salvation. He learns pretty quickly from Holy Church that Love is the way to Truth, which is synonymous with God. So, the path to salvation is through loving. The poem then explores the complex questions raised by this: how to love and who to love. Is it enough to love one’s neighbor, friends and enemies alike? In Step XI, Will learns that the emperor Trajan was saved through his love and leading a good life, even though he was unbaptized. The poem constantly emphasizes the importance of good works, represented by the character Do-well. Working for the good of the community is a critical part of the process of penance. This is why the poem is so critical of friars who grant of indulgences for a price: it eliminates the need for action. The plowing of a field is an essential metaphor for doing good works. The fact that the poem is named after Piers Plowman shows the central importance of this symbol.

The cantenbury tales

General Prologue

The narrator opens the General Prologue with a description of the return of spring. He describes the April rains, the burgeoning flowers and leaves, and the chirping birds. Around this time of year, the narrator says, people begin to feel the desire to go on a pilgrimage. Many devout English pilgrims set off to visit shrines in distant holy lands, but even more choose to travel to Canterbury to visit the relics of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where they thank the martyr for having helped them when they were in need.

The narrator tells us that as he prepared to go on such a pilgrimage, staying at a tavern in Southwark called the Tabard Inn, a great company of twenty-nine travelers entered. The travelers were a diverse group who, like the narrator, were on their way to Canterbury. They happily agreed to let him join them. That night, the group slept at the Tabard, and woke up early the next morning to set off on their journey. Before continuing the tale, the narrator declares his intent to list and describe each of the members of the group.

Analysis

The invocation of spring with which the General Prologue begins is lengthy and formal compared to the language of the rest of the Prologue. The first lines situate the story in a particular time and place, but the speaker does this in cosmic and cyclical terms, celebrating the vitality and richness of spring. This approach gives the opening lines a dreamy, timeless, unfocused quality, and it is therefore surprising when the narrator reveals that he’s going to describe a pilgrimage that he himself took rather than telling a love story.

A pilgrimage is a religious journey undertaken for penance and grace. As pilgrimages went, Canterbury was not a very difficult destination for an English person to reach. It was, therefore, very popular in fourteenth-century England, as the narrator mentions. Pilgrims traveled to visit the remains of Saint Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in 1170 by knights of King Henry II. Soon after his death, he became the most popular saint in England. The pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales should not be thought of as an entirely solemn occasion, because it also offered the pilgrims an opportunity to abandon work and take a vacation.

In line 20, the narrator abandons his unfocused, all-knowing point of view, identifying himself as an actual person for the first time by inserting the first person—“I”—as he relates how he met the group of pilgrims while staying at the Tabard Inn. He emphasizes that this group, which he encountered by accident, was itself formed quite by chance (25–26). He then shifts into the first-person plural, referring to the pilgrims as “we” beginning in line 29, asserting his status as a member of the group.

The narrator ends the introductory portion of his prologue by noting that he has “tyme and space” to tell his narrative. His comments underscore the fact that he is writing some time after the events of his story, and that he is describing the characters from memory. He has spoken and met with these people, but he has waited a certain length of time before sitting down and describing them. His intention to describe each pilgrim as he or she seemed to him is also important, for it emphasizes that his descriptions are not only subject to his memory but are also shaped by his individual perceptions and opinions regarding each of the characters. He positions himself as a mediator between two groups: the group of pilgrims, of which he was a member, and us, the audience, whom the narrator explicitly addresses as “you” in lines 34 and 38.

On the other hand, the narrator’s declaration that he will tell us about the “condicioun,” “degree,” and “array” (dress) of each of the pilgrims suggests that his portraits will be based on objective facts as well as his own opinions. He spends considerable time characterizing the group members according to their social positions. The pilgrims represent a diverse cross section of fourteenth-century English society. Medieval social theory divided society into three broad classes, called “estates”: the military, the clergy, and the laity. (The nobility, not represented in the General Prologue, traditionally derives its title and privileges from military duties and service, so it is considered part of the military estate.)

In the portraits that we will see in the rest of the General Prologue, the Knight and Squire represent the military estate. The clergy is represented by the Prioress (and her nun and three priests), the Monk, the Friar, and the Parson. The other characters, from the wealthy Franklin to the poor Plowman, are the members of the laity. These lay characters can be further subdivided into landowners (the Franklin), professionals (the Clerk, the Man of Law, the Guildsmen, the Physician, and the Shipman), laborers (the Cook and the Plowman), stewards (the Miller, the Manciple, and the Reeve), and church officers (the Summoner and the Pardoner). As we will see, Chaucer’s descriptions of the various characters and their social roles reveal the influence of the medieval genre of estates satire.

The wife of baths

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

The Wife of Bath begins the Prologue to her tale by establishing herself as an authority on marriage, due to her extensive personal experience with the institution. Since her first marriage at the tender age of twelve, she has had five husbands. She says that many people have criticized her for her numerous marriages, most of them on the basis that Christ went only once to a wedding, at Cana in Galilee. The Wife of Bath has her own views of Scripture and God’s plan. She says that men can only guess and interpret what Jesus meant when he told a Samaritan woman that her fifth husband was not her husband. With or without this bit of Scripture, no man has ever been able to give her an exact reply when she asks to know how many husbands a woman may have in her lifetime. God bade us to wax fruitful and multiply, she says, and that is the text that she wholeheartedly endorses.

After all, great Old Testament figures, like Abraham, Jacob, and Solomon, enjoyed multiple wives at once. She admits that many great Fathers of the Church have proclaimed the importance of virginity, such as the Apostle Paul. But, she reasons, even if virginity is important, someone must be procreating so that virgins can be created. Leave virginity to the perfect, she says, and let the rest of us use our gifts as best we may—and her gift, doubtless, is her sexual power. She uses this power as an “instrument” to control her husbands.

At this point, the Pardoner interrupts. He is planning to marry soon and worries that his wife will control his body, as the Wife of Bath describes. The Wife of Bath tells him to have patience and to listen to the whole tale to see if it reveals the truth about marriage. Of her five husbands, three have been “good” and two have been “bad.” The first three were good, she admits, mostly because they were rich, old, and submissive. She laughs to recall the torments that she put these men through and recounts a typical conversation that she had with her older husbands.

She would accuse her husband of having an affair, launching into a tirade in which she would charge him with a bewildering array of accusations. If one of her husbands got drunk, she would claim he said that every wife is out to destroy her husband. He would then feel guilty and give her what she wanted. All of this, the Wife of Bath tells the rest of the pilgrims, was a pack of lies—her husbands never held these opinions, but she made these claims to give them grief. Worse, she would tease her husbands in bed, refusing to give them full satisfaction until they promised her money. She admits proudly to using her verbal and sexual power to bring her husbands to total submission.

Analysis

In her lengthy Prologue, the Wife of Bath recites her autobiography, announcing in her very first word that “experience” will be her guide. Yet, despite her claim that experience is her sole authority, the Wife of Bath apparently feels the need to establish her authority in a more scholarly way. She imitates the ways of churchmen and scholars by backing up her claims with quotations from Scripture and works of antiquity. The Wife carelessly flings around references as textual evidence to buttress her argument, most of which don’t really correspond to her points. Her reference to Ptolemy’s Almageste, for instance, is completely erroneous—the phrase she attributes to that book appears nowhere in the work. Although her many errors display her lack of real scholarship, they also convey Chaucer’s mockery of the churchmen present, who often misused Scripture to justify their devious actions.

The text of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is based in the medieval genre of allegorical “confession.” In a morality play, a personified vice such as Gluttony or Lust “confesses” his or her sins to the audience in a life story. The Wife is exactly what the medieval Church saw as a “wicked woman,” and she is proud of it—from the very beginning, her speech has undertones of conflict with her patriarchal society. Because the statements that the Wife of Bath attributes to her husbands were taken from a number of satires published in Chaucer’s time, which half-comically portrayed women as unfaithful, superficial, evil creatures, always out to undermine their husbands, feminist critics have often tried to portray the Wife as one of the first feminist characters in literature.

This interpretation is weakened by the fact that the Wife of Bath herself conforms to a number of these misogynist and misogamist (antimarriage) stereotypes. For example, she describes herself as sexually voracious but at the same time as someone who only has sex to get money, thereby combining two contradictory stereotypes. She also describes how she dominated her husband, playing on a fear that was common to men, as the Pardoner’s nervous interjection reveals. Despite their contradictions, all of these ideas about women were used by men to support a hierarchy in which men dominated women.

Summary: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

The Wife of Bath begins her description of her two “bad” husbands. Her fourth husband, whom she married when still young, was a reveler, and he had a “paramour,” or mistress (454). Remembering her wild youth, she becomes wistful as she describes the dancing and singing in which she and her fourth husband used to indulge. Her nostalgia reminds her of how old she has become, but she says that she pays her loss of beauty no mind. She will try to be merry, for, though she has lost her “flour,” she will try to sell the “bran” that remains. Realizing that she has digressed, she returns to the story of her fourth husband. She confesses that she was his purgatory on Earth, always trying to make him jealous. He died while she was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Of her fifth husband, she has much more to say. She loved him, even though he treated her horribly and beat her. He was coy and flattering in bed, and always won her back. Women, the Wife says, always desire what is forbidden them, and run away from whatever pursues or is forced upon them. This husband was also different from the other four because she married him for love, not money. He was a poor ex-student who boarded with the Wife’s friend and confidante. When she first met this fifth husband, Jankyn, she was still married to her fourth. While walking with him one day, she told him that she would marry him if she were widowed. She lied to him and told him he had enchanted her, and that she had dreamed that he would kill her as she slept, filling her bed with blood, which signifies gold. But, she confides to her listeners, all of this was false: she never had such a dream.

She loses her place in the story momentarily, then resumes with her fourth husband’s funeral. She made a big show of crying, although, she admits, she actually cried very little since she already had a new husband lined up. As she watched Jankyn carry her husband’s casket, she fell in love with him. He was only twenty and she forty, but she was always a lusty woman and thought she could handle his youth. But, she says, she came to regret the age difference, because he would not suffer her abuse like her past husbands and gave some of his own abuse in return. He had a “book of wicked wives” she recalls, called Valerie and Theofraste.

This book contained the stories of the most deceitful wives in history. It began with Eve, who brought all mankind into sin by first taking the apple in the Garden of Eden; from there, it chronicled Delilah’s betrayal of Samson, Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, and other famous stories. Jankyn would torment the Wife of Bath (whom we learn in line 804 is named Alisoun) by reading out of this book at night.

One evening, out of frustration, the Wife tears three pages out of the book and punches Jankyn in the face. Jankyn repays her by striking her on the head, which is the reason, she explains in line 636, that she is now deaf in one ear. She cries out that she wants to kiss him before she dies, but when he comes over, she hits him again. They finally manage a truce, in which he hands over all of his meager estate to her, and she acts kindly and loving. Her tale of her marriages finished, the Wife announces that she will tell her story, eliciting laughter from the Friar, who exclaims, “This is a long preamble of a tale!” (831). The Summoner tells him to shut up, and they exchange some angry words. The Host quiets everybody down and allows the Wife of Bath to begin her story.

Analysis

In her discussion of her fourth and fifth husbands, the Wife of Bath begins to let her true feelings show through her argumentative rhetoric. Her language becomes even less controlled, and she loses her place several times (at line 585, for instance), as she begins to react to her own story, allowing her words to affect her own train of thought. Her sensitivity about her age begins to show through, and, as she reveals psychological depth, she becomes a more realistic, sympathetic, and compelling character.

When the Wife of Bath describes how she fell in love with her fifth husband, despite her pragmatism, she reveals her softer side. She recognizes that he used the same tactics against her as she used against other men, but she cannot stop herself from desiring him. Jankyn even uses one of the satires against women to aggravate her, the kind of satire that the Wife mocked earlier in her Prologue. Despite all this, we can see that Jankyn, though the most aggravating of her husbands, is the only one that she admits she truly loved. Even as she brags about her shameless manipulation of her husbands and claims that her sexual powers can conquer anyone, she retains a deep fondness for the one man she could not control.

The Wife seems to enjoy the act of arguing more than the end of deriving an answer by logic. To explain why clerks (meaning church writers) treat wives so badly, for example, she employs three different arguments. First, she blames the entire religious establishment, claiming that church writings breed hostility toward wives because they were written by men (690–696). Then, she gives an astrological explanation, asserting that the children of Mercury (scholars) and of Venus (lovers) always contradict one another. A third reason she gives is that when clerks grow old, their impotence and decreased virility makes them hostile and slanderous toward wives (705–710).

Twice in her Prologue, the Wife calls attention to her habit of lying—“and al was fals,” she states (382, 582). These statements certainly highlight our awareness of the fact that she’s giving a performance, and they also put her entire life story in question. We are left wondering to what extent we should even believe the “experience” of the Wife of Bath, and whether she is not, in fact, a mean-spirited satire on Chaucer’s part, meant to represent the fickleness of women.

The Wife of Bath’s Tale

In the days of King Arthur, the Wife of Bath begins, the isle of Britain was full of fairies and elves. Now, those creatures are gone because their spots have been taken by the friars and other mendicants that seem to fill every nook and cranny of the isle. And though the friars rape women, just as the incubi did in the days of the fairies, the friars only cause women dishonor—the incubi always got them pregnant. In Arthur’s court, however, a young, lusty knight comes across a beautiful young maiden one day. Overcome by lust and his sense of his own power, he rapes her. The court is scandalized by the crime and decrees that the knight should be put to death by decapitation.

However, Arthur’s queen and other ladies of the court intercede on his behalf and ask the king to give him one chance to save his own life. Arthur, wisely obedient to wifely counsel, grants their request. The queen presents the knight with the following challenge: if, within one year, he can discover what women want most in the world and report his findings back to the court, he will keep his life. If he cannot find the answer to the queen’s question, or if his answer is wrong, he will lose his head.

The knight sets forth in sorrow. He roams throughout the country, posing the question to every woman he meets. To the knight’s dismay, nearly every one of them answers differently. Some claim that women love money best, some honor, some jolliness, some looks, some sex, some remarriage, some flattery, and some say that women most want to be free to do as they wish. Finally, says the Wife, some say that women most want to be considered discreet and secretive, although she argues that such an answer is clearly untrue, since no woman can keep a secret.

As proof, she retells Ovid’s story of Midas. Midas had two ass’s ears growing under his hair, which he concealed from everybody except his wife, whom he begged not to disclose his secret. She swore she would not, but the secret burned so much inside her that she ran down to a marsh and whispered her husband’s secret to the water. The Wife then says that if her listeners would like to hear how the tale ends, they should read Ovid.

She returns to her story of the knight. When his day of judgment draws near, the knight sorrowfully heads for home. As he rides near a forest, he sees a large group of women dancing and decides to approach them to ask his question. But as he approaches, the group vanishes, and all he can see is an ugly old woman. The woman asks if she can be of help, and the knight explains his predicament and promises to reward her if she can help him. The woman tells the knight that he must pledge himself to her in return for her help, and the knight, having no options left, gladly consents. She then guarantees that his life will be saved.

The knight and the old woman travel together to the court, where, in front of a large audience, the knight tells the queen the answer with which the old woman supplied him: what women most desire is to be in charge of their husbands and lovers. The women agree resoundingly that this is the answer, and the queen spares the knight’s life. The old hag comes forth and publicly asks the knight to marry her. The knight cries out in horror. He begs her to take his material possessions rather than his body, but she refuses to yield, and in the end he is forced to consent.

The two are married in a small, private wedding and go to bed together the same night. Throughout the entire ordeal, the knight remains miserable. While in bed, the loathsome hag asks the knight why he is so sad. He replies that he could hardly bear the shame of having such an ugly, lowborn wife. She does not take offense at the insult, but calmly asks him whether real “gentillesse,” or noble character, can be hereditary (1109). There have been sons of noble fathers, she argues, who were shameful and villainous, though they shared the same blood. Her family may be poor, but real poverty lies in covetousness, and real riches lie in having little and wanting nothing.

She offers the knight a choice: either he can have her be ugly but loyal and good, or he can have her young and fair but also coquettish and unfaithful. The knight ponders in silence. Finally, he replies that he would rather trust her judgment, and he asks her to choose whatever she thinks best. Because the knight’s answer gave the woman what she most desired, the authority to choose for herself, she becomes both beautiful and good. The two have a long, happy marriage, and the woman becomes completely obedient to her husband. The Wife of Bath concludes with a plea that Jesus Christ send all women husbands who are young, meek, and fresh in bed, and the grace to outlive their husbands.

Analysis

“Wommen desiren to have sovereyntee

As wel over hir housbond as hir love,

And for to been in maistrie hym above.”

The tale the Wife of Bath tells about the transformation of an old hag into a beautiful maid was quite well known in folk legend and poetry. One of Chaucer’s contemporaries, the poet John Gower, wrote a version of the same tale that was very popular in Chaucer’s time. But whereas the moral of the folk tale of the loathsome hag is that true beauty lies within, the Wife of Bath arrives at such a conclusion only incidentally. Her message is that, ugly or fair, women should be obeyed in all things by their husbands.

The old hag might be intended to represent the Wife of Bath herself, at least as she would like others to see her. Though the hag has aged, she is capable of displaying all of the vigor and inner beauty of her youth if the right man comes along, just as the Wife did with her fifth and favorite husband, the youthful Jankyn. Although the old hag becomes a beautiful young woman in response to the young knight’s well-timed response, it is unclear whether he truly had enough respect for the old woman that he allowed her to choose for herself, or whether he had simply learned how to supply her with the correct answer.

If we agree with the former, we may see the Wife as an idealistic character who believes that bad men can change. If we choose the latter, the Wife becomes a much more cynical character, inclined to mistrust all men. In the second interpretation, both transformations—the knight’s shallow change in behavior (but not in soul) and the hag’s transformation into the physical object of desires—are only skin deep. Perhaps she is giving him exactly what he deserves: superficiality.

The Wife begins her tale by depicting the golden age of King Arthur as one that was both more perilous and more full of opportunity for women. Every time a woman traveled alone, the Wife suggests, she was in danger of encountering an incubus, or an evil spirit who would seduce women (880). But the society is also highly matriarchal. After the knight commits a rape, the king hands him over to Arthur’s queen, who decides to send him on an educational quest. His education comes through women, and the queen’s challenge puts him in a situation where what is traditionally thought of as a shortcoming—a woman’s inability to keep a secret—is the only thing that can save him.

The Wife’s digression about King Midas may also be slightly subversive. Instead of finishing the story, she directs the reader to Ovid. In Ovid’s version of the story, the only person who knows about Midas’s ass’s ears is not his wife but his barber. The wife could, therefore, be slyly trying to point out that men, too, are gossips.

Millers Tale

Summary: Prologue to the Miller’s Tale

The pilgrims applaud the Knight’s Tale, and the pleased Host asks the Monk to match it. Before the Monk can utter a word, however, the Miller interrupts. Drunk and belligerent, he promises that he has a “noble” tale that will repay the Knight’s (3126). The Host tries to persuade the Miller to let some “bettre” man tell the next tale (3130). When the Miller threatens to leave, however, the Host acquiesces. After the Miller reminds everyone that he is drunk and therefore shouldn’t be held accountable for anything he says, he introduces his tale as a legend and a life of a carpenter and of his wife, and of how a clerk made a fool of the carpenter, which everyone understands to mean that the clerk slept with the carpenter’s wife (3141–3143).

The Reeve shouts out his immediate objection to such ridicule, but the Miller insists on proceeding with his tale. He points out that he is married himself, but doesn’t worry whether some other man is sleeping with his wife, because it is none of his business. The narrator apologizes to us in advance for the tale’s bawdiness, and warns that those who are easily offended should skip to another tale.

Summary: The Miller’s Tale

The Miller begins his story: there was once an Oxford student named Nicholas, who studied astrology and was well acquainted with the art of love. Nicholas boarded with a wealthy but ignorant old carpenter named John, who was jealous and highly possessive of his sexy eighteen-year-old wife, Alisoun. One day, the carpenter leaves, and Nicholas and Alisoun begin flirting. Nicholas grabs Alisoun, and she threatens to cry for help. He then begins to cry, and after a few sweet words, she agrees to sleep with him when it is safe to do so. She is worried that John will find out, but Nicholas is confident he can outwit the carpenter. Nicholas is not alone in desiring Alisoun. A merry, vain parish clerk named Absolon also fancies Alisoun. He serenades her every night, buys her gifts, and gives her money, but to no avail—Alisoun loves Nicholas.

Nicholas devises a plan that will allow him and Alisoun to spend an entire night together. He has Alisoun tell John that Nicholas is ill. John sends a servant to check on his boarder, who arrives to find Nicholas immobile, staring at the ceiling. When the servant reports back to John, John is not surprised, saying that madness is what one gets for inquiring into “Goddes pryvetee,” which is what he believes Nicholas’s astronomy studies amount to. Nevertheless, he feels sorry for the student and goes to check on him. Nicholas tells John he has had a vision from God and offers to tell John about it. He explains that he has foreseen a terrible event. The next Monday, waters twice as great as Noah’s flood will cover the land, exterminating all life. The carpenter believes him and fears for his wife, just what Nicholas had hoped would occur. Nicholas instructs John to fasten three tubs, each loaded with provisions and an ax, to the roof of the barn. On Monday night, they will sleep in the tubs, so that when the flood comes, they can release the tubs, hack through the roof, and float until the water subsides. Nicholas also warns John that it is God’s commandment that they may do nothing but pray once they are in the tubs—no one is to speak a word.

Monday night arrives, and Nicholas, John, and Alisoun ascend by ladder into the hanging tubs. As soon as the carpenter begins to snore, Nicholas and Alisoun climb down, run back to the house, and sleep together in the carpenter’s bed. In the early dawn, Absolon passes by. Hoping to stop in for a kiss, or perhaps more, from Alisoun, Absalon sidles up to the window and calls to her. She harshly replies that she loves another. Absolon persists, and Alisoun offers him one quick kiss in the dark. Absolon leaps forward eagerly, offering a lingering kiss. But it is not her lips he finds at the window, but her “naked ers [arse]” (3734). She and Nicholas collapse with laughter, while Absolon blindly tries to wipe his mouth.

Determined to avenge Alisoun’s prank, Absolon hurries back into town to the blacksmith and obtains a red-hot iron poker. He returns with it to the window and knocks again, asking for a kiss and promising Alisoun a golden ring. This time, Nicholas, having gotten up to relieve himself anyway, sticks his rear out the window and farts thunderously in Absolon’s face. Absolon brands Nicholas’s buttocks with the poker. Nicholas leaps up and cries out, “Help! Water! Water!” (3815). John, still hanging from the roof, wakes up and assumes Nicholas’s cries mean that the flood has come. He grabs the ax, cuts free the tub, and comes crashing to the ground, breaking his arm. The noise and commotion attract many of the townspeople. The carpenter tells the story of the predicted flood, but Nicholas and Alisoun pretend ignorance, telling everyone that the carpenter is mad. The townspeople laugh that all have received their dues, and the Miller merrily asks that God save the company.

Analysis

Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,

For al his kepyng and his jalousye;

And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye;

And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.

In the Miller’s Prologue, we perceive tension between social classes for the first time in The Canterbury Tales. The Host clearly wants the Monk to tell the second tale, so that the storytelling proceeds according to social rank. By butting in, the Miller upsets the Host’s plan. Like the Knight’s Tale, which fits his honorable and virtuous personality, the Miller’s Tale is stereotypical of the Miller’s bawdy character and low station. However, nothing about the drunken, immoral, and brutal Miller could possibly prepare the reader for the Miller’s elegant verse and beautiful imagery. The Miller’s description of Alisoun draws on a completely different stock of images from the Knight’s depiction of Emelye, but it is no less effective. Whereas Emelye is compared to a rose, a lily, the spring, and an angel, Alisoun’s body is delicate and slender like a weasel, her apron is as white as morning milk, and her features are compared to plums and pear trees. The Miller’s imagery is less conventional and less elevated than the Knight’s, drawn instead from the details of village or farm life.

Although the narrator is unforgiving in his depiction of the drunk, rowdy Miller, whom he presents according to the stereotypes of the Miller’s class and profession, there are a few intriguing points of similarity between the narrator and the Miller. For instance, the Miller apologizes for the tale he is about to tell, and transfers all blame to the “ale of Southwerk”—in effect, to the Host himself (3140). Thirty lines later, the narrator himself makes a similar apology, and reminds his audience to blame the Miller if it finds the tale offensive. Also, the Miller begins his story by giving little portraits of each of his characters, just as the narrator begins his story of the pilgrimage by outlining each of its members.

The Host asks the Monk to “quite,” or repay, the Knight’s Tale (3119). But when the Miller interrupts and cries out that he can “quite the Knyghtes [Knight’s] tale,” he changes the word somewhat to mean “revenge” (3127). Indeed, the Miller does take “revenge” upon the Knight to an extent. Just as he transforms the meaning of the word “quite,” the Miller takes several of the themes from the Knight’s Tale and alters them. For instance, the Knight’s Tale suggested that human suffering is part of a divine plan that mortals cannot hope to know. In a completely different tone and context, the Miller, too, cautions against prying into “God’s pryvetee,” meaning God’s secrets (3164).

He first raises this idea in his Prologue, arguing that a man shouldn’t take it upon himself to assume that his wife is unfaithful. In the Miller’s Tale, John repeats the caution against prying into “God’s pryvetee.” Several times, John scolds Nicholas for trying to know “God’s pryvetee,” but when Nicholas actually offers to let John in on his secret, John jumps at the chance. John also jealously tries to control his young wife, reminding us that the Miller equated an attempt to know God’s “pryvetee” with a husband’s attempt to know about his wife’s “private parts.” The two round tubs that the foolish carpenter hangs from the roof of his barn, one on either side of a long trough, suggest an obscene visual pun on this vulgar meaning of “God’s pryvetee.

The Miller’s Tale also responds to the Knight’s by turning the Knight’s courtly love into a burlesque farce. The Miller places his lovers’ intrigues in a lower-class context, satirizing the pretensions of long-suffering courtly lovers by portraying Nicholas and Alisoun in a frank and sexually graphic manner—Nicholas seduces Alisoun by grabbing her by the pudendum, or “queynte” (3276). Absolon, the parish clerk, represents a parody of the conventional courtly lover. He stays awake at night, patiently woos his lady by means of go-betweens, sings and plays guitar, and aspires to be Alisoun’s page or servant. For his pains, all he gets is the chance to kiss Alisoun’s anus and to be farted on by Nicholas.

In addition to parodying tales of courtly love, the Miller’s Tale also plays with the medieval genres of fabliaux and of mystery plays. Fabliaux are bawdy, comic tales that build to a ridiculous and complex climax usually hinging on some joke or trick. Nicholas is parody of the traditional clever cleric in a fabliau. As the deviser of the scheme to trick John, he seems to be attempting to write his own fabliau, although Absolon foils his plan. Yet, John is still the big loser in the end. The moral of the play is that John should not have married someone so young: “Men sholde wedden after hire estaat [their estate], / For youthe and elde [old age] is often at debaat” (3229–3230). Justice is served in the Miller’s eyes when Alisoun commits adultery, because she revenges her husband “[f]or . . . his jalousye” (3851). Despite their differences, the two clerics ally at the story’s end to dupe the carpenter, and so nobody believes John’s story about Nicholas’s trick.

The Miller’s Tale also includes references to different scenes acted out in medieval mystery plays. Mystery plays, which typically enacted stories of God, Jesus, and the saints, were the main source of biblical education for lay folk in the Middle Ages. As John’s gullibility shows, his education through mystery plays means that he has only a slight understanding of the Bible. The Miller begins his biblical puns in his Prologue, when he says that he will speak in “[Pontius] Pilates” place. His statement that he will tell “a legende and a lyf / Bothe of a carpenter and of his wyf” is a reference to the story of Joseph and Mary. “Legends and lives” were written and told of the saints, and the story in which Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant (and the many jokes that could be made about Mary being unfaithful) was a common subject of mystery plays.

The stories of Noah’s flood, and of Noah’s wife, are also obviously twisted around by the Miller. These biblical puns work up to the climax of the tale. When he says that Nicholas’s fart was as great as a “thonder-dent,” the Miller aligns Nicholas—the creator of the action—with God (3807). Absolon, who cries out, “My soule bitake I unto Sathanas [Satan]” (3750), becomes a version of the devil, who damns God by sticking him with his red-hot poker. The result of Absolon’s actions is that John falls from the roof in a pun on the fall of humanity.

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