Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key is an adapted version of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, the prominent English author. The book contains some of the most famous Canterbury Tales in Middle English alongside the modern translation. Additionally, the text is completed with numerous footnotes, explaining the meaning of rare words and phenomena typical of Chaucer's time.
A Chaucer for Children may seem to some an impossible story-book, but it is one which I have been encouraged to put together by noticing how quickly my own little boy learned and understood fragments of early English poetry. I believe that if they had the chance, many other children would do the same. I think that much of the construction and pronunciation of old English which seems stiff and obscure to grown up people, appears easy to children, whose crude language is in many ways its counterpart. The narrative in early English poetry is almost always very simply and clearly expressed, with the same kind of repetition of facts and names which, as every mother knows, is what children most require in story-telling. The emphasis which the final E gives to many words is another thing which helps to impress the sentences on the memory, the sense being often shorter than the sound. It seems but natural that every English child should know something of one who left so deep an impression on his age, and on the English tongue, that he has been called by Occleve Òthe finder of our fair language.Ó For in his day there was actually no national language, no national literature, English consisting of so many dialects, each having its own literature intelligible to comparatively few; and the Court and educated classes still adhering greatly to Norman-French for both speaking and writing. Chaucer, who wrote for the people, chose the best form of English, which was that spoken at Court, at a time when English was regaining supremacy over French; and the form he adopted laid the foundation of our present National Tongue.Ê
Chaucer for Children : A Golden Key The narrative in early English poetry is almost always very simply and clearly expressed, with the same kind of repetition of facts and names which, as every mother knows, is what children most require in story-telling. The emphasis which the final E gives to many words is another thing which helps to impress the sentences on the memory, the sense being often shorter than the sound. It seems but natural that every English child should know something of one who left so deep an impression on his age, and on the English tongue, that he has been called by Occleve “the finder of our fair language.” For in his day there was actually no national language, no national literature, English consisting of so many dialects, each having its own literature intelligible to comparatively few; and the Court and educated classes still adhering greatly to Norman-French for both speaking and writing. Chaucer, who wrote for the people, chose the best form of English, which was that spoken at Court, at a time when English was regaining supremacy over French; and the form he adopted laid the foundation of our present National Tongue.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 - 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages. He was the first poet to be buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten-year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. He is best known today for The Canterbury Tales.
The author of numerous books on Geoffrey Chaucer, the nineteenth-century scholar, Mary Eliza Haweis, has been largely erased from general histories of Chaucer studies. In her critical biography, Mary Flowers Braswell traces Haweis’s career, bringing her out of obscurity and placing her contributions to Chaucer scholarship in the context of those of influential Chaucerians of the period such as Frederick James Furnivall, Walford Dakin Selby, and Walter Rye. Braswell draws on extensive archival research from a broad range of late-Victorian newspapers, journals, and society papers to weave a fascinating picture of Haweis’s own life and work, which in quantity and quality rivaled that of her contemporaries. Haweis, we discover, corrected assumptions related to the Chaucer seal and texts, bringing her findings to the attention of the public in works such as Chaucer for Schools, the first textbook on the poet. Braswell also sheds light on the ways in which fashion, society, culture, art, and leisure activities intermingled with scholarship, archival recovery, museum work, editing, writing, and publishing in the late-Victorian middle and upper classes. Concluding with a discussion of Haweis’s forgotten role as head of the Chaucer section for the National Home Reading Union, Braswell’s book makes a strong case both for Haweis’s influence as a Chaucer scholar and her importance as an educator in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.
