The Canterbury Tales Audiobook By Geoffrey Chaucer cover art

The Canterbury Tales

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The Canterbury Tales

By: Geoffrey Chaucer
Narrated by: Neville Coghill, Cecil Trouncer, Robert Ross
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Read in a mixture of Middle-English and modern English, The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century.

The tales are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

©2010 Saland Publishing (P)2010 Saland Publishing Classics
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This is better than a translation. It is read in the original Middle English, but with the vowels shifted to the modern pronunciation. Chaucer's English was different than ours, both sound and with even a few grammatic differences. We retain much of the vocabulary, but our versions of the words are often different as well.

Therefore, this takes a little time to understand, if you haven't studied middle English or older. But if you are patient or persistent, or just love language, learning, or a challenge, you WILL eventually understand it, and it will be worthwhile.

The other good news is the shifted vowels. Chaucer wrote this masterpiece 200 years before Shakespeare (who borrowed from this work, among others), in between the two writers, the way vowels in words were pronounced changed dramatically. The original pronunciation would be much more difficult than this.

Understand What This Is

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Hi very much like the readings, but the chapters aren't titled which makes it impossible or nearly impossible for me to find the section of the book so that I can read along while it is being recited.

This is a severe shortcoming in my opinion.

Why are the chapters not titled?

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this audiobook contains excerpts from The Canterbury Tales, first read in Middle English, and then in Modern English. The editing is jarring at times, with many chapters cut short and without indication of which particular tale I was listening to. there was also some background noise during the readings of the first few chapters.

chapter 1 is the first page or two of the prologue.

chapter 3 is The Nun's Priest's Tale.

chapter 4 is The Pardoner's Tale.

Other than that, the other chapters are various excerpts, the last in modern English.

I was able to follow along with the Bantam Books translation for most of it, but there were several sections that were either missing or added, probably due to differences in the translation.

I believe the readings to be mostly faithful, although no Middle English reading is perfect.

poor editing hindering an otherwise good reading

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i barely made it to chapter two. The narrator was very hard to understand. Needs to read without any accents.

can't understand the dude

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Sounds like an old 78 rpm record. Very uneven sound, complete with clicks, tape hiss, and wheezing.
In bad need of remastering!

Terrible Recording Quality

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The volume of the performances are not consistent. There is no documentation so you don't know what excerpt that you are listening to. If you try to read along, good luck. I would not buy this again. It was cheap, but it isn't helpful. There are 12 chapters called "Chapter 1..... Chapter 12".

Not a quality product

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