The Tales We Tell

In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a collection of narrative poems from the Middle Ages, characters entertain one another with stories on a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. Can such tales still connect with modern readers? Patience Agbabi, a contemporary British poet and Chaucer scholar, has remixed Chaucer’s work in Telling Tales. Jordan Ho ‘27 is comparing Chaucer, the “canon,” with this modern anthology, a task that is no tall tale.

Ho, who is pursuing a double major in philosophy and English, is focusing her analysis on Agbabi's adaptation of The Franklin’s Tale. Makar Frankie Lynn, the speaker of this tale, lives primarily on Pusher Street in Freetown Christiania. A tourist attraction today, Freetown Christiania is a failed utopian commune in Copenhagen, Denmark created by anarchists and artists on top of a former military base.

“I look at her evocation of Freetown Christiania, and also her usage of rhyme royal, feminine and masculine rhyme, and subverted iambic pentameter,” Ho explains. She argues that dominating structures, like police violence and the proliferation of Chaucer’s form, are inconsistent with utopian possibilities. Another aspect of her analysis is thinking about how this utopian possibility is built on a physical structure of masculine violence.

One of the challenges of analyzing “Makar (The Franklin's Tale)” is its Scottish speaking narrator. “I've done research into how people from Edinburgh would pronounce certain things, which changes my analysis of syllable structure,” Ho says. For example, the pronunciation of the main character’s name, Arild, affects the feminine rhyme. There’s also not a lot of scholarship on Agbabi and there’s no recorded audio of her performing the Makar’s Tale. “A lot of my interpretations of pronunciation, which speak directly to my research conclusion, are based on my interpretations of how the poem would be spoken.”

Agbabi’s subversion of rhyme royal—a stanza of seven 10-syllable lines popularized by Chaucer—points to the author’s interest in Fin ‘Amor rather than Chaucer’s interest in romantic overtones. “I argue that one of these utopian possibilities is the speaker's own story in her own voice, but they're filtered through Chaucer’s own form.”

Read the full story on CAS news.