IMPORTANT AND CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT CHAUCER
A-Why is Chaucer considered the father of English literature?
He was called the father of English literature for several reasons:
1- First, he gave voice and expression to the new hopes of the people. He provided a social commentary of his age, satirizing the greed of the church, upsetting the social order, portraying the characters as representative of the English medieval world. He was learned and none of his contemporaries had his skills, his range and his knowledge of the human mind.
2- Second, he consolidated the use of English (now called Middle English) as language of instruction : he was one of the first poet who signed his works, he shaped a literary language blending Latin and French with old popular traditions and established rhyming couplets as the main narrative system in English; he gave respectability to the vernacular and established a tradition.
3- Third, Chaucer had humor, narrative skills and a gift for description. He was a master in portaying his characters, who are both individuals and types, they have universal traits but also something personal and Chaucer portrays them in a realistic and amazing way. One of his best strategy is irony as well as sympathy: he depicted the contradictions and ambiguity of morals and dishonesty using ironical devices (for example oxymorons, saying that a character is a ‘honest liar’)
B-Trivia about Chaucer
1- Chaucer died in 1400; the date on his tomb in Westminster Abbey reads 25 October. He became the first person to be buried in Poets’ Corner. It was bureaucratic service rather than poetic achievement which earned Chaucer his place in the Abbey, but he inspired the creation of Poets’ Corner in the 1550s.
2- In 1998, an original Caxton printing of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales sold at auction for $7.4 million. William Caxton printed The Canterbury Tales in 1477, just two years after printing his first book, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English
3- Geoffrey Chaucer's work The Canterbury Tales was originally meant to be 120 stories long. It was only completed to 24 stories
4- Chaucer had a part-time government job collecting scrap metal for reuse and also worked as a diplomat.
5- He has more than 2000 fans on Facebook!