Chaucer for Children : A Golden Key

by Geoffrey Chaucer

The narrative in early English poetry is almost always very simply and clearly expressed, with the same kind of repetition of facts and names which, as every mother knows, is what children most require in story-telling. The emphasis which the final E gives to many words is another thing which helps to impress the sentences on the memory, the sense being often shorter than the sound.

It seems but natural that every English child should know something of one who left so deep an impression on his age, and on the English tongue, that he has been called by Occleve “the finder of our fair language.” For in his day there was actually no national language, no national literature, English consisting of so many dialects, each having its own literature intelligible to comparatively few; and the Court and educated classes still adhering greatly to Norman-French for both speaking and writing. Chaucer, who wrote for the people, chose the best form of English, which was that spoken at Court, at a time when English was regaining supremacy over French; and the form he adopted laid the foundation of our present National Tongue.

Genres: School, Poetry, Fiction, Medieval, Classics, Childrens

360 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 28, 2010

About the author

Geoffrey 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.

Reviews

[Gina Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

AmblesideOnline year 7. I read this aloud with my 7th grade daughter, it was our 2nd foray into middle English and while it’s still difficult it was easier since we had prior experience. Even if you don’t have any previous experience though this is a good introduction to Chaucer because she has notes at the side telling words that you wouldn’t know and she also rewrote some of the poetry and I was very impressed with the skill with which this was accomplished. This also leaves out most (all?) of The morally questionable parts from The Canterbury Tales. Overall the stories were very good!

[Heather Tully · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never read Chaucer so I can’t speak to the translation ability to echo the author but I did find this delightful! I loved the glimpse into medieval life in the beginning with how the author sketched out the characters. And I appreciated the old English verse with updated verse, side by side. I found I was reading Chaucer’s prose better as the book went along!

Pre-read for 2023-2024 edu year.

[Denise Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book which was written in 1882, 500 years after Chaucer lived. The author gives wonderful explanations of the time and the language and of Chaucer’s place in all of it. The illustrations are a delight. Not just for children.

[Malory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this retelling of The Canterbury Tales. I thought it would be really difficult with portions in Old English, but once you got used to it, it was actually quite fun to read! There were a lot of connections I made such as The Clerks Tale with The Taming of the Shrew and the Pardoners Tale with the Tale of the Three Brothers from Harry Potter. I read this with my 6th grader for school. It would be good for upper elementary and up. And a good intro for adults before reading Chaucer's complete tales.

[chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that I keep having to read medieval lit for school when all I wanna do is read ya and spicy Sarah j Maas books pains me. This is my villain origin story. Still, this was a cool book LOL

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enticing introduction to Chaucer, not just for children! Beautifully republished by Yesterday’s Classics.