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The House of Fame
The House of Fame is a Middle English poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, probably written between 1374 and 1385, making it one of his earlier works. It was most likely written after The Book of the Duchess, but its chronological relation to Chaucer's other early poems is uncertain.
58 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1380
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About the author
Geoffrey Chaucer
941 books1,358 followersGeoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
September 1, 2018
Book 1:
Chaucer makes a small, but interesting connection between line 117, “To the corseynt Leonard” – St Leonard being the patron saint of prisoners – and Dido (in fact all women) in that she is a prisoner to circumstance and the male world of virtus as well as to Rumor. Because she is pregnant by Aeneas and her honor and love is tied up with him she is forced into a situation that eventually leads her to drive a knife through her heart, whereas he is free to continue his voyage to Italy.
Chaucer seems to be paying homage to the glory and beauty of the ancient writers and stories by placing them in this beautiful temple, a vision he cannot explain why he has received it when other people are not awarded such visions / dreams. But he also seems to be playing with the old stories in that he’s very interested in how poorly Dido, and so many other women, have been treated. He feels very modern when he writes that women should be aware of men who with sweet words can get their way and then leave a storm behind them for the women to endure, be it shame from gossip of an affair and / or an illegitimate child.
Moreover, he is playing with his favorite theme of authority vs experience. Aeneas is a hero in the epic sense, but not in the romantic, yet the great writers of antiquity are considered the authority on morality and are the basis of western civilization and are central in the canon. Since this is a poem about his desire to be famous – respected – like the ancient writers, he has to figure out how to reconcile an outdated worldview (virtus) with the more modern romantic worldview where men do not behave the way Aeneas does. In epic a woman is a barrier to fame, in romance it is integral to it and Chaucer is showing his audience that he knows the difference between the 2, a fact his audience was also smart enough to recognize.
And is Aeneas to blame for his actions? The gods have a mission for him and who is he to argue against that authority, even if in he sources he chose not to interpret the wedding as being legitimate? Chaucer has it both ways then by saying that both parties had their share of guilt and innocence. She too soon loved a stranger and threw her authority away and he led her on knowing he wasn’t supposed to be there.
Thus does the education gleaned from reading the ancients actually make a person moral? If we hold the ancients to such a high standard yet all we see is them behaving badly then why do we exemplify them such? Chaucer mentions St Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners, and so are we prisoner to the canon?
Book 2:
This eagle is funny because he’s basically an idiot Virgil. Unlike in Dante’s Divine Comedy when Virgil was a helpful guide for the poet, this eagle is more of a know-it-all that Chaucer finally has to say that he’s just no longer interested in learning anything new from him.
There is more to the joke, however. As the eagle explains how the House of Fame receives its news via broken air – speech and noise break the air and that travels up to the realm of the House of Fame – then speech and sound are not really differentiated. In fact what a person says vs. them farting would be of equal importance, thus speech is basically a fart.
And while this is typical Chaucer humor, it’s deeper than it seems because he’s also alluding to the possibility that prayer, at least as it is intoned, is also about as valuable as a fart. Private prayer, silent prayer – thus (hopefully) earnest prayer – is usually thought, but public proclamations of virtue and showy prayers hold the same importance as flatulence: shitty air / shitty wind.
Another observation is who is this god of love Chaucer is referring to? Does he mean Venus? Well, no because here the god is masculine. Does he mean Cupid? Or does he actually mean Jesus. God is, after all Love thus in the 13th century evoking Jesus would give the poet the moral authority he wants to write imaginatively about love.
Book 3:
The construction of the house of fame is quite remarkable and a work of creative genius. First of all it’s a perversion of Dante’s Paradise in that instead of a loving, benevolent God rewarding all the faithful with eternal life, the court at the House of Fame, rather than worshiping their God only beg for recognition and favor and in turn she is totally arbitrary in whom she meets out rewards. Earlier I noticed how Chaucer might be playing with the idea of showy, intoned prayer being no better than a fart and I think this is what he sees as the result. He seems to be explaining what happens to people who are to focused on being showy than on actually doing the hard work. This makes line 1100 funny because he doesn’t want to show off his craft / skill as a poet, he just wants to make one moral point, but he doesn’t know what that point is and so he needs Apollo’s help to guide him.
One has to wonder what had happened to Chaucer to cause him to write this poem. Line 1887 says he is looking for new material to set him apart from the old masters, and line 2129 describes a scene that could be straight out of his day job counting and verifying shipments of goodness knows what. Perhaps he was wondering if this is all his life would ever be knowing full well he had the talent to be a great poet yet felt stuck in a world that only recognized the unworthy, or at best arbitrarily handed out fortunes. Perhaps he had even been caught up in some slander (which translates here to scandal) and he bemoans when in the wicker rumor mill he sees truth and lies joined together in such a way as to make them indistinguishable?
Whatever his reasons, he does make some wonderful observations on the nature of fame and how petty gossip is and how the whole idea of fame is built upon an unsteady foundation. Even the material of the castle, beryl, is interesting in that while it magnifies, it also discolors so that one never gets a true representation of the thing being examined. He’s saying that the old masters whose pillars make up this castle, when you really look at them, are not what they seem to be and they even argue and bicker among each other.
Of course we can’t ignore the sexism latent in what he’s writing by turning Dante’s male God of Paradise into a fickle female. Yet when we consider how differently romance works compared to epic, in that in romance no man is complete without a lady (in epic the woman impedes the male hero), he is making fun of this trope too. He sees not just the flaws of epic, but also of romance and he’s not shy to make fun of it.
Chaucer makes a small, but interesting connection between line 117, “To the corseynt Leonard” – St Leonard being the patron saint of prisoners – and Dido (in fact all women) in that she is a prisoner to circumstance and the male world of virtus as well as to Rumor. Because she is pregnant by Aeneas and her honor and love is tied up with him she is forced into a situation that eventually leads her to drive a knife through her heart, whereas he is free to continue his voyage to Italy.
Chaucer seems to be paying homage to the glory and beauty of the ancient writers and stories by placing them in this beautiful temple, a vision he cannot explain why he has received it when other people are not awarded such visions / dreams. But he also seems to be playing with the old stories in that he’s very interested in how poorly Dido, and so many other women, have been treated. He feels very modern when he writes that women should be aware of men who with sweet words can get their way and then leave a storm behind them for the women to endure, be it shame from gossip of an affair and / or an illegitimate child.
Moreover, he is playing with his favorite theme of authority vs experience. Aeneas is a hero in the epic sense, but not in the romantic, yet the great writers of antiquity are considered the authority on morality and are the basis of western civilization and are central in the canon. Since this is a poem about his desire to be famous – respected – like the ancient writers, he has to figure out how to reconcile an outdated worldview (virtus) with the more modern romantic worldview where men do not behave the way Aeneas does. In epic a woman is a barrier to fame, in romance it is integral to it and Chaucer is showing his audience that he knows the difference between the 2, a fact his audience was also smart enough to recognize.
And is Aeneas to blame for his actions? The gods have a mission for him and who is he to argue against that authority, even if in he sources he chose not to interpret the wedding as being legitimate? Chaucer has it both ways then by saying that both parties had their share of guilt and innocence. She too soon loved a stranger and threw her authority away and he led her on knowing he wasn’t supposed to be there.
Thus does the education gleaned from reading the ancients actually make a person moral? If we hold the ancients to such a high standard yet all we see is them behaving badly then why do we exemplify them such? Chaucer mentions St Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners, and so are we prisoner to the canon?
Book 2:
This eagle is funny because he’s basically an idiot Virgil. Unlike in Dante’s Divine Comedy when Virgil was a helpful guide for the poet, this eagle is more of a know-it-all that Chaucer finally has to say that he’s just no longer interested in learning anything new from him.
There is more to the joke, however. As the eagle explains how the House of Fame receives its news via broken air – speech and noise break the air and that travels up to the realm of the House of Fame – then speech and sound are not really differentiated. In fact what a person says vs. them farting would be of equal importance, thus speech is basically a fart.
And while this is typical Chaucer humor, it’s deeper than it seems because he’s also alluding to the possibility that prayer, at least as it is intoned, is also about as valuable as a fart. Private prayer, silent prayer – thus (hopefully) earnest prayer – is usually thought, but public proclamations of virtue and showy prayers hold the same importance as flatulence: shitty air / shitty wind.
Another observation is who is this god of love Chaucer is referring to? Does he mean Venus? Well, no because here the god is masculine. Does he mean Cupid? Or does he actually mean Jesus. God is, after all Love thus in the 13th century evoking Jesus would give the poet the moral authority he wants to write imaginatively about love.
Book 3:
The construction of the house of fame is quite remarkable and a work of creative genius. First of all it’s a perversion of Dante’s Paradise in that instead of a loving, benevolent God rewarding all the faithful with eternal life, the court at the House of Fame, rather than worshiping their God only beg for recognition and favor and in turn she is totally arbitrary in whom she meets out rewards. Earlier I noticed how Chaucer might be playing with the idea of showy, intoned prayer being no better than a fart and I think this is what he sees as the result. He seems to be explaining what happens to people who are to focused on being showy than on actually doing the hard work. This makes line 1100 funny because he doesn’t want to show off his craft / skill as a poet, he just wants to make one moral point, but he doesn’t know what that point is and so he needs Apollo’s help to guide him.
One has to wonder what had happened to Chaucer to cause him to write this poem. Line 1887 says he is looking for new material to set him apart from the old masters, and line 2129 describes a scene that could be straight out of his day job counting and verifying shipments of goodness knows what. Perhaps he was wondering if this is all his life would ever be knowing full well he had the talent to be a great poet yet felt stuck in a world that only recognized the unworthy, or at best arbitrarily handed out fortunes. Perhaps he had even been caught up in some slander (which translates here to scandal) and he bemoans when in the wicker rumor mill he sees truth and lies joined together in such a way as to make them indistinguishable?
Whatever his reasons, he does make some wonderful observations on the nature of fame and how petty gossip is and how the whole idea of fame is built upon an unsteady foundation. Even the material of the castle, beryl, is interesting in that while it magnifies, it also discolors so that one never gets a true representation of the thing being examined. He’s saying that the old masters whose pillars make up this castle, when you really look at them, are not what they seem to be and they even argue and bicker among each other.
Of course we can’t ignore the sexism latent in what he’s writing by turning Dante’s male God of Paradise into a fickle female. Yet when we consider how differently romance works compared to epic, in that in romance no man is complete without a lady (in epic the woman impedes the male hero), he is making fun of this trope too. He sees not just the flaws of epic, but also of romance and he’s not shy to make fun of it.
October 20, 2018
another big day in the big chaucer house
January 20, 2026
Someone had cheese before bed! House Of Fame is everything good about Chaucer - weird, funny, full of references, and gives you a lot to think about. It's a shame it was never finished, and he can't even give the excuse of dying because he still had a good twenty years of life left in him. A medieval example of a fanfic writer abandoning the greatest piece of fiction you've ever read. It's some of the best Chaucer I've encountered so far and it really focuses on the nature of poetry, fame, and what it means to understand the world around you and express it in literature. Definetly recommend!
April 27, 2024
Chaucer ties poetry to rumor (multiple/everyday/popular) as much as fame (authority/epic/heroic). A clever use of Classical references and continental genres.
August 17, 2021
No idea what it is really about or how it is working - Nick Haverly seems to think it's a poem that muses upon issues such as poetic genres, oral culture, translation. I can more or less see that, but everything is a bit too messy for my tastes. Will probably come back to this, though--I'm very interested in Chaucer's self-representation as, and the idea more generally of, the medieval auctor.
November 24, 2025
Meh, if I didn't have to read for school I would not have read it. The middle english was too hard for me to get around and Chaucer talked about the same thing over and over again and it was so boring. The house of rumor was lowkey kind of interesting though. And the ending was when it was finally getting good but then he decides to stop writing. I want chaucer to come back alive so I can choke him.
September 23, 2024
Geoffrey is killing me. I will admit there’s some cool imagery though.
April 3, 2025
This Chaucer dude can kinda write!
November 2, 2017
even """"""minor""""" chaucer rockz my world & this has a giant eagle that picks chaucer up and then complains about how fat n heavy he is which is lol relatable
August 6, 2020
Why is it that the one Chaucer poem I actually like is unfinished??
February 22, 2021
it's almost 1 am so i may or may not come back later and write something more coherent but this inspired some angsty poetry so it's a 10/10 in my book
July 2, 2023
Poor old Chaucer cannot figure out what dreams are. He then dreams that he's in the Temple of Venus, wherein he gets confused that the tale of Dido can be seen from both Aeneas and Dido's point of view. He stumbles out into a wilderness, where he's picked up by an eagle, which intelligent bird tells him that human talk is all so much hot air, as well as upbraiding the poet for being such a bore he works at accounting all day then reads all evening. Chaucer is taken to the House of Fame, with its size-shifting mistress who doles out completely arbitrary judgements, unaligned with what her victims want or deserve. Finally, Chaucer is shown the enormous House of Rumour, and yet again is confused to find that truth and lies cannot be easily separated. The poem ends here - some (like the editor/translator of this version) say that it's unfinished, but it might just as well be the proper ending, with Chaucer waking with a jolt from a dream, significantly at the presence of a figure of Authority. A great tangled web of a poem, very sceptical and modernist.
January 11, 2025
Chaucer, the man that he is, always writing things like "what more can I tell you" and "I cannot say more of this or I will write another Bible" and "I will say no more" (but keeps going anyway).
And imagine just getting picked up by an eagle and given a lecture of 500 lines by said bird and then dropped somewhere on an ice rock? Geoffrey was lucky it was a dream (yes he named the character after himself).
I loved the goddess Fame and how she handled the prayers, especially when the group of people who did nothing with their life wanted fame, which she granted (!), followed by another group that also did nothing getting scolded for nothing, cracked me up!
It also ended on a cliffhanger, because our man Chaucer didn't like finishing his work! I want to know who the man of great authority is... well we can only guess
And imagine just getting picked up by an eagle and given a lecture of 500 lines by said bird and then dropped somewhere on an ice rock? Geoffrey was lucky it was a dream (yes he named the character after himself).
I loved the goddess Fame and how she handled the prayers, especially when the group of people who did nothing with their life wanted fame, which she granted (!), followed by another group that also did nothing getting scolded for nothing, cracked me up!
It also ended on a cliffhanger, because our man Chaucer didn't like finishing his work! I want to know who the man of great authority is... well we can only guess
October 15, 2025
chaucer parodies dante, declines infinite celestial wisdom, dogs on men, gets picked up by an eagle who complains abt how fat he is, rambles about troy, spams occupatio, and didn't even finish the poem.. it is all very awesome
"For this shal every woman finde
That som man, of his pure kinde,
Wol shewen outward the faireste,
Til he have caught that what him leste"
"For this shal every woman finde
That som man, of his pure kinde,
Wol shewen outward the faireste,
Til he have caught that what him leste"
March 25, 2022
"Chaucer left the House of Fame unfinished" bitch, what the fuck?? Who is that man? How does Geoffrey wake? I like to think he awoke suddenly, hence the abruptness. But I want to know more about this dream!
October 16, 2024
every time I read Chaucer I remember that there's a good reason he's still super relevant to literature today... Which is a very on topic thought for me to have had given this one is the house of fame
August 8, 2018
I really love dream vision tales!
August 15, 2018
Loved Book I and III, not so keen on II. The description of the pillars of legendary poets was sooooo good :) kind of forgot it was all a dream by the end
October 18, 2019
trying to make sense of that middle english gave me all the nightmares from trying to read chaucer the first time years ago. thank god very much for modern translations available online.
September 25, 2021
hard hitting questions here
January 15, 2022
Very interesting combination of sources, especially so since it remains unfinished and therefore we don’t get any real closure on the dream.
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April 9, 2022my least favourite of the dream visions but i still like it a lot
April 22, 2022
Why is this my life
August 10, 2022
Chaucer walks past paintings of famous people, they talk to him, and then he wakes up. Typical don't sell your soul type warning. May have been abridged. Where the footnotes were placed disrupted the flow.
January 31, 2024
i cannot escape the aeneid in my studies. enjoyed reading this less than i enjoyed reading book of the duchess
January 5, 2025
I finished this ages ago in my second year and wrote about medieval dream visions. For some reason it wasn’t logged. Loved it.
February 21, 2025
it’s interesting but i think i definitely prefer other types of chaucer’s writing over his dream-vision poetry.
March 8, 2025
"Disesperat of alle blys,
Syth that Fortune hath mad amys
The fruit of al thyn hertys reste
Languisshe and eke in poynt to breste."
Syth that Fortune hath mad amys
The fruit of al thyn hertys reste
Languisshe and eke in poynt to breste."
November 6, 2025
Didn’t vibe with the narrator. He was quite insufferable.
January 11, 2026
here, the land of sound
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews