Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is an excerpt from "The Franklin's Tale," one of the verse narratives in Chaucer's 14th-century *Canterbury Tales*, written in Middle English in the courtly romance tradition. The tale opens with a knight, Arveragus, who wins the lady Dorigen through devoted service; their marriage is founded on an unusual compact in which he vows never to assert dominance or jealousy over her, keeping only the outward title of husband for social propriety, while she pledges faithful obedience — a arrangement the narrator frames as a philosophical argument that love dies under coercion and thrives only through patience and mutual liberty. When Arveragus departs for England to seek military honor, Dorigen falls into prolonged grief and becomes fixated, with near-theological anxiety, on the black coastal rocks she fears will wreck his returning ship, delivering a long lament questioning why God created such seemingly purposeless, destructive things. Her friends bring her to a garden party in May to lift her spirits, where a young squire named Aurelius — who has secretly loved her for two years — seizes the moment to declare his passion. Dorigen firmly refuses him but, half in jest, offers an impossible condition: she will love him if he removes every rock from the Breton coast. The tale's distinctive claim is that the ideal marriage is one of mutual sovereignty rather than male dominance, and the impossible-promise device sets up the ethical dilemma — about trouthe (pledged word) versus fidelity — that the rest of the tale will test.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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