Perhaps the greatest disservice that one can do to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is to see them just as an anthology. With the Prologue as a kind of annotated table of contents, few ever read the tales from first to last, and for educational purposes the poems do lend themselves to individual study. But Chaucer plainly did not envision them as disjointed, independent works. What critics have styled “headlinks” and “endlinks” clearly indicate the dramatic nature …showed first 75 words of 1683 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1683 total…thought positively that his adherence to the dictates of the elegant courtly love tradition would lead to success. The Miller tells this crude but hilarious story to remind the Host and all the other pilgrims that social pretense—the kind that led the Host to demand that the Miller yield place to a more socially acceptable speaker—was dangerous. The resulting laughter of the entourage! assures us that the lesson was well taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**