Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

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

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This is "The Manciple's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* (late 14th century), a verse narrative in the tradition of the classical myth retelling and moral exemplum. It recounts how Phoebus Apollo, portrayed as a perfect knight, keeps a white crow that can speak and sing; the crow witnesses Phoebus's wife sleeping with a lover and reports it to him, whereupon Phoebus kills his wife in a rage, then bitterly regrets it and punishes the crow by stripping it of its white feathers, its song, and its speech — the origin of why crows are black and harsh-voiced. The tale's stated moral is a pointed warning against loose speech: do not tell a man his wife is unfaithful, because he will hate you for it. What makes the tale distinctive is its self-undermining irony: the narrator digresses into a long passage arguing that "flesh is naturally unfaithful" (using the caged bird, the cat, and the she-wolf as examples), then pivots to blame men rather than women for infidelity, and ultimately frames the crow's honest truth-telling as a punishable betrayal. The closing maternal sermon on keeping one's tongue — drawn from Solomon, David, and Seneca — is delivered at such repetitive length that it itself becomes an example of the very over-talking it warns against. The tale raises uncomfortable questions about whether truth-telling is ever safe or virtuous, making it one of Chaucer's more cynically comic pieces.

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

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