Squire’s Tale, The

   by Geoffrey Chaucer

(ca. 1390)

   The Squire, presented in the GENERAL PROLOGUE as the fashionable and charming son of the more sober Knight, presents what promises to be a chivalric ROMANCE of the sort then popular in France, with an interlaced structure involving several characters and plot threads. Thus The Squire’s Tale would have been more complex, more full of wonder and supernatural elements, than any other story in The CANTERBURY TALES. The tale breaks off after some 664 lines, though both Edmund Spenser and John Lane wrote continuations of the story later. Lane’s continuation runs to 7,000 lines, which may be the chief reason CHAUCER chose not to finish it—it would have been far too long to include in The Canterbury Tales as they were conceived. No direct sources for The Squire’s Tale have been found, though clearly Chaucer was inspired by contemporary French romances, themselves influenced by Oriental models that had come through Moorish Spain.Accordingly Chaucer uses Oriental-sounding names in the tale, including “Cambyuskan,” the Latinized form of “Genghis Khan.”

   In the first part of the tale, Cambyuskan, king of Tartary, has a great birthday feast. During the meal’s third course a knight rides in to deliver wondrous, magical gifts for Cambyuskan sent by the kings of Arabia and India. One is the brass steed on which the knight sits—the horse can bear its rider anywhere in the world within 24 hours. The second is a magic ring that grants its wearer the ability to understand the language of the birds. The third gift is a sword that is able to cure any wound that it makes. And the final gift is a magic mirror in which one can see coming dangers. The mirror and the ring, we are told, are gifts for Cambyuskan’s daughter, Canacee.

   In part 2 Canacee rises the next morning and goes for a walk. She finds a wounded falcon, crying piteously in a tree above her. Because her ring allows her to understand the falcon’s speech, Canacee learns that the falcon has been betrayed by her lover. Taking pity on the bird, Canacee brings the falcon home in order to nurse her back to health.

   As the second part of the tale ends and the third begins, the Squire narrator promises to tell about Cambyuskan’s wars, about the adventures of Cambyuskan’s sons Cambulus and Algarsif, and about how Cambalo fought against her brothers to win the love of Canacee. But the tale breaks off abruptly after the first two lines of the third part, and what follows is the Franklin’s enthusiastic response to the Squire’s tale, that leads into his own story.

   Critics have speculated about whether The Squire’s Tale is intended as a satire of the immaturity and excessive rhetoric of its teller. Others have argued that the tale was intended to be interrupted by the Franklin, who tactfully stops the Squire from running on indefinitely.

   Bibliography

   ■ DiMarco, Vincent. “The Dialogue of Science and Magic in Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale,’ ” in Dialogische Strukturen/Dialogic Structures: Festschrift fur Willi Erzgraber zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Thomas Kuhn and Ursula Schaefer. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr, 1996, 50–68.

   ■ Edwards, Robert R. “The Failure of Invention: Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale.’ ” In Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative, edited by Robert R. Edwards. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989, 131–145.

   ■ Goodman, Jennifer. “Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’ and the Rise of Chivalry,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 127–136.

   ■ Pearsall, Derek. The Canterbury Tales. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985.