Question

explanation of Canterbury tales lines
​

Answer 1

Answer:

The Canterbury Tales is written in the type of English that most ordinary people used in Chaucer's day. Chaucer was one of the first authors (writers) who wrote stories in English. Before, stories were written in Latin or French. Some other writers of Chaucer's time also wrote in English. Some of these writers were John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet.

Chaucer planned the stories before he wrote them but he did not finish his plan. He planned that each character would tell four stories: two while going to Canterbury and two while returning to London. If Chaucer had finished, he would have written 120 stories. He only actually wrote 24. Chaucer began to write the stories in the 1380s. He stopped writing them in the 1390s. Some think that he deliberately did not write the total 120 stories.

Chaucer was an important person in the royal court. Some people think that, in the stories, Chaucer was saying things about court politics. Some people think that Chaucer based his characters on people that he really knew and who were at the royal court.

Some people think that Chaucer copied ideas from others peoples’ writings because some of the stories in The Canterbury Tales are very similar to them. The characters, however, are very different. The characters have different occupations and personalities. They all tell different types of stories and they tell them in different ways.The big story is about many pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. They are riding horses and the trip takes several days. Chaucer does not say much about the big story and most of the writing is about the stories told by the pilgrims.

The two earliest manuscripts (hand-written copies) of The Canterbury Tales are the Hengwrt manuscript and the Ellesmere manuscript. There are also 84 manuscript and four printed copies of The Canterbury Tales that were made before 1500. There are quite a lot of differences in the different copies. Some experts on Chaucer have started The Canterbury Tales Project. The project is to read all these copies of The Canterbury Tales, find out the differences and write the most accurate copy.