📖 The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales were not a complete work at Chaucer's death. Some pilgrims do not tell stories, and the surviving stories are difficult to arrange. The collection was not finished: the host's original statement is that the pilgrims will tell two tales each, one on the way to Canterbury and another on the way back. The pilgrims only tell one tale, and some pilgrims, for example the ploughman and the yeoman, do not tell stories at all. Subsequently, the stories were made up into a collection, but it was not at all obvious to the compilers how this should be done, and different manuscripts have different arrangements. There is no indication that Chaucer left any instructions about how the stories were to be collected together. Some tales - for example, those of the knight, miller and reeve - obviously follow one another, but others are less easy to locate. This edition presents one possible arrangement; there are others.