Lauderdale Tales

Everyone knows the basic premise of The Canterbury Tales: a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to a shrine in Canterbury pass the time by telling each other tales. It was one of the first books written in Middle English and is a foundational part of the English language canon.

Fewer people have actually read the Tales, and fewer still have encountered them in the original Middle English. During my time as a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, I had the privilege of knowing the director of the Variorum Chaucer, housed on the University’s campus. I recall well one night over dinner when he recited, in Middle English, the opening lines from “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” It was rather like watching TV in Holland: I could catch maybe every third word, not enough to make sense of the narrative but enough to get the rhythm and tone of the tale.

Between the telling of the tales, Chaucer shows the pilgrims interacting with one another. We meet such memorable characters as the Cook, the Miller, and the Wife of Bath, both through the tale each tells and through their words and deeds on the pilgrimage.

The tales themselves give insight into the culture and mores of England in the fourteenth century. Many of the tales are variations on those from other sources, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The tales often include mythical and folkloric elements that would have been familiar to people of the era but would be less so to modern readers.

An example of one such folklore is the “loathy lady.” This refers to a set of legends in which a knight makes a deal with a loathsome old woman, often a witch, in which he agrees to marry her in return for some boon. After marriage, the loathy lady transforms into a beautiful and obedient wife. This legend appears, for example, in the Wife of Bath’s tale, where there is a tension between the boon the witch delivers and her subsequent transformation to an obedient wife. Indeed, Chaucer favorably portrays Wife of Bath as the fourteenth century equivalent of a liberated and independent woman who believes she should have the same privileges as men..

The idea behind this collection is to take the bones of the first five Canterbury Tales, the basic plot elements, and recast them in the twenty-first century, with modern characters and symbols. “Buzz’s Tale,” for example, recasts knights as members of a motorcycle gang. The “Wife of Bath” becomes a man whose husband is named Allen Bath. The sixth tale is based on an incomplete tale in the original, "Sir Thopas' Tale."

Most of the resulting tales wind up, in one way or another, being about obsession and romance, appropriate for our age of anxiety. There’s no pretense that these are in any way great literature. Rather, they are intended as an amusing exercise in recasting the classic plots in ways that are hopefully amusing. Like the original tales, they also contain metaphorical comments on our times, if you care to look for them.