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The Canterbury Tales  By  cover art

The Canterbury Tales

By: Geoffrey Chaucer
Narrated by: Neville Coghill, Cecil Trouncer, Robert Ross
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Publisher's summary

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

What listeners say about The Canterbury Tales

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Understand What This Is

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.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars

can't understand the dude

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

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Terrible Recording Quality

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

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4 people found this helpful

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Not a quality product

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".

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2 people found this helpful