
The Canterbury Tales
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Narrated by:
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Charlton Griffin
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By:
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Geoffrey Chaucer
About this listen
If you want to understand the daily life and psychology of the late Middle Ages, Ronald Ecker’s classic translation of The Canterbury Tales provides one of the very best means of doing so. Within its audio is to be found a broad range of society - high and low, male and female, rich and poor - who express their innermost beliefs and extravagant fantasies in a series of stories they tell as they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.
Politics, religion, commerce, philosophy, love, sex, honor, alchemy, and just about everything known at the time is discussed with gusto and sincerity by these lively pilgrims. From the pious tales of nuns to the bald ribaldry of common tradesmen, the full panoply of Medieval man is on display here. And it is done with a genius unmatched in any work of its time.
Chaucer, who was active in the second half of the 14th century, lived in a dynamic and epoch-changing period. He was a participant in the Hundred Years War and knew the great King Edward III personally. He was an eyewitness to events of the time, and his wry wit was put to brilliant use in service to his poetry, among the best ever written by an Englishman. Although we listen to Chaucer in translation today, his original hybrid language - part Saxon, part French - is the immediate predecessor to our own modern English. And even in translation, its magnificence shines through.
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Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is one of the most influential pieces of writing in the British literary cannon. It helped to establish English, rather than Latin or Norman French, as an acceptable language for literature. It was also one of the earliest pieces of work to have story linking - what had previously been just collected writings which the author deemed interesting.
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A joy
- By Tad Davis on 09-25-16
By: Geoffrey Chaucer
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Beowulf
- By: Seamus Heaney - translator
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath.
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Almost perfect
- By Tad Davis on 01-28-13
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Faust
- By: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Narrated by: Auriol Smith, Gunnar Cauthery, Stephen Critchlow, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Abridged
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Faust is one of the pillars of Western literature. This classic drama presents the story of the scholar Faust, tempted into a contract with the Devil in return for a life of sensuality and power. Enjoyment rules, until Faust’s emotions are stirred by a meeting with Gretchen, and the tragic outcome brings Part 1 to an end. Part 2, written much later in Goethe’s life, places his eponymous hero in a variety of unexpected circumstances, causing him to reflect on humanity and its attitudes to life and death.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Kyle on 12-04-11
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The Knight's Tale
- By: Geoffrey Chaucer
- Narrated by: Richard Bebb
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Knight's Tale of medieval wars and chivalry is the first tale told to the pilgrims as they set out to Canterbury. It concerns Theseus, returning from fighting at Thebes, and two brother knights Palamon and Arcite, imprisoned but yearning for their loves. But the real hero of this recording is Richard Bebb who, with the help of Professor Derek Brewer, the leading expert on Chaucerian pronunciation, make the original Middle English not only comprehensible to the modern ear, but exciting.
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Great recording
- By Kotzer on 06-25-19
By: Geoffrey Chaucer
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Don Quixote
- By: Miguel Cervantes
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 43 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Don Quixote is widely considered to be the first modern novel. As a classic of Western literature, it is regarded by scholars worldwide to be one of the finest works of fiction ever written, and a magnificent product of the Spanish Golden Age of literature. Cervantes’ influence on the Spanish language has been so great that his work is often called “la lengua de Cervantes.” The work was written in two separate volumes, both of which are contained in this production. It introduces the character of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a hero who carries his enthusiasm and self-deception to unintentional and comic ends.
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Classic story with excellent narration!
- By Invictuz on 11-21-23
By: Miguel Cervantes
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The Canterbury Tales II
- Modern English Verse Translation
- By: Geoffrey Chaucer
- Narrated by: Philip Madoc, Frances Jeater, John Rowe, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Four more delightful tales from one of the most entertaining storytellers of all time. Though writing in the thirteenth century, Chaucer’s wit and observation comes down undiminished through the ages, especially in this accessible modern verse translation. The stories vary considerably from the uproarious Wife of Bath’s Tale, promoting the power of women to the sober account of patient Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale.
By: Geoffrey Chaucer
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The Aeneid
- By: Virgil
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Aeneid represents one of the greatest cultural and artistic achievements of Western Civilization. Within the brooding and melancholy atmosphere of Virgil's pious masterpiece lies the mythic story of Aeneas and his flight from burning Troy, taking with him across the Mediterranean the survivors of the Greek onslaught. Aeneas, after many travails and adventures, including a love affair with Dido Queen of Carthage and a visit to the underworld to see his father, ends up in Italy.
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An epic in every sense of the word
- By James on 01-06-05
By: Virgil
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