The Prologue To The Canterbury Tales Classic Reprint

Author : Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781333437954
Total Pages : 126 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (379 download)

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Download or read book The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer: The Text Collated With the Seven Oldest Mss;, And a Life of the Author, Introductory Notices, Grammar, Critical and Explanatory Notes, and Index to Obsolete and Difficult Words But Chaucer wrote with metre and rime, and all attempts to make him more intelligible by reducing his quaint archaic, English to 'the diction of the nineteenth century, end in obliterating the rhythm, which, whatever views one may hold as regards metre and rime, is essential to all forms of poetry. Indeed the adapters of Chaucer have mostly gone further, and being ignorant Of the grammatical value Of the several in ections, have, by confusing different tenses, numbers, and even parts of Speech, turned his wit to nonsense. The devotion with which the study of the childhood and youth of our mother tongue has within the last score years been taken up by a small band of earnest students, has not only brought to light several very Old mss., but has enabled us to examine them critically, because intelligently, and to make great progress towards the construction Of a text more correct than any Single one extant. The only way to understand Chaucer is to learn his language, and the little labour given to the study will be well repaid by the enjoy ment; by the discovery that his verse, instead of being the rude and halting doggerel which modernized texts present, is almost as finished and owing as that of Pope, and incomparably more natural and musical. It re ects the childhood, the springtide of our poetry; it is full of the Sights and sounds of the fields and woods, and of pictures of the life of merry England in the Olden days. In the determination of the text I have made use Of Mr. T. Wright's revision of the Harleian ms., and Dr. Morris' text which he has con structed by collation with the six texts edited by Mr. Furnivall, and I have myself compared it line by line with these, adopting whichever reading seemed to me to give the best sense and sound, and occasionally giving the more important variations if they seemed of equal merit or probability. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."