A back-cover quite, credited to The Observer newspaper, notes that this “will surely become a vital crib for generations of students to come,” and this reader agrees entirely. Ackroyd’s lucid and fluid contemporary-language version is certainly the only way I would have gotten through this artifact; deciphering even just the chapter titles in the original Old-English is enough to tell me I’d never have made it.

As with many other ‘classics,’ one of the main values derived from reading Chaucer’s tales has been to glimpse inside the minds and thoughts of that earlier time.   What preoccupied the literate Londoner in the fourteenth century? Marriage, power, religion and the appetites for sex, food and drink, it seems, and in approximately that order.

Another obvious value of this volume is for its role in the early evolution of literature, acting as bridge between millennia of oral legends, folk tales, fables and religious parables, allegories and sermons and the later arrival of personal stories, those concerned with particular individuals who may be neither hero nor villain, maiden nor slut, but unique and messily-realistic combinations and contrasts of opposites. We see here a transitional stage between the archetypes within the tales (nearly every knight is appallingly-brave and virtuous, nearly every young woman is the most beautiful, chaste and compliant in her land) and the beginnings of dramatic characterization in the diverse and earthy travelers who tell them.

Even with Ackroyd as intermediary though, Chaucer is not an easy read. Many of the tales feel pointless, several redundant, and a couple seem to have been just cut off in mid-telling – leaving one to wonder whether some pages have been lost to history, or is that perhaps evidence of just how new and unself-conscious the infant art of fiction-writing was at the time (and prior to invention of that indispensable tool, the Editor). The religious paeans are also off-putting; tedious paragraphs and pages of dedication to the Holy Mother, or protestations of one’s faith, all the way down to Chaucer’s own ‘Retractions,’ which is not, as modern minds expect, a rescinding of what he has written earlier, but a ‘retraction’ in the sense of pulling away; taking his leave while beseeching the reader, ‘for the mercy of God, to pray for me…’ and so on. Pronouncing all that he has written, to be sinful and without merit, the author protests that despite having taken the pains to record and clearly enjoy these sinful tails, he is actually the most pious of men.

A remarkable piece of cultural history, presented in a generous and helpful manner by this modern retelling; truly the “crib” this reader need to ever become familiar with this oft-cited relic.