A blog that is a modern day parody of characters and places connected with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, a story written over 700 years ago and one of the first pieces of literature published in English.
Matt’s Tale recounts stories about people Matt has met recently in retracing his travels from twenty years earlier – and from realising now that, in that first journey, he had followed in the footsteps of Geoffrey Chaucer and other pilgrims on the road to Canterbury when he first came to the UK in 1991, but then also discovering truths from roads taken by others much earlier than that of the pilgrimage to Canterbury.
Aspects of “The Miller’s Tale” ring true from the outset of the journey with a visit to the modern day version of The Tabard, an inn in Acton, London. Hints and connections with other tales creep in along the way, helping him to know he is on the right path of the hidden trail taken by Chaucer’s pilgrims – including some uncanny counters with people in modern day equivalent of the professions portrayed in The Tales but also sharing similar wisdom.
Matt also shows how the events that foreshadow the beginning and end of the journey, also scarily echo those occurring at the time when Chaucer was writing these stories – including debt crises, riots and a disillusionment of society despite new found freedoms. A chilling echo from those times, being something we perhaps need to be aware of right now, comes through at the tail end of the journey about The Tales – revealing potential for society to return back to feudal times when people were less free and able to be and do who and what they wanted to be and do.
The conclusion is the need for a recall of the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer to tell tales that help us to keep calm and carry on based on ways for sharing and caring for each other, using each and every man and woman’s tales as a guide to the truth within all of us – but also suggesting that there may well be more than this that we can perhaps call on for our succour and our sanity…..
mattstale 