Pilgrim dolls?

A friend recently asked me if I plan to make Canterbury Pilgrim dolls. The answer is a firm NO. Why so firm? It goes back to that astonishing epiphany, that moment of insight. As I've said, that moment changed my life! I can never see the characters Chaucer presents as one-dimensional travelers. They are all in disguise--as pilgrims.
     He presents an allegory--a story with a double meaning. His characters all have to have multiple personalities to be able to function on two (three?) levels at the same time. There is no way--that I've thought of--to portray these dual images as one entity. So, no, there will be no pilgrim dolls.
     In between working on The Merchant/Sagittarius, our next post, I have been making another doll. It's a fun thing to do, a different way of channeling your creative juices. This one is Bluebell.  He's tiny because that's all of the blue fabric I had.  I sent him off this morning to a special person.

I'll be back soon.

Groundwork for the payoff

Here's the groundwork I promised so you may see what I see. It's sort of an introduction to the game that tells about Chaucer's clues, the bits of information he has hidden in his individual descriptions. These clues inform us about the identity of the characters that travel disguised as pilgrims.
     The first thing Chaucer does is emphasize that the whole group arrives at sunset to stay for the night. Ask yourself what "group" arrives when the sun sets. Chaucer saw them--and so have you.
     Here are Chaucer's hints that tell us about the pilgrim most often--and most easily--recognized. It's the Miller. Refined, he is not.

The Miller is called a stout churl, big of brawn and bones.
He's short-shouldered, with a broad, thick, gnarled body.
His nostrils are wide and  black and
he could heave a door off its hinges by running into it with his head.

What picture does that put in your mind's eye? If it surprises you, that's OK. Let it.. If you're on the right track, you might even know the name of this traveler you can see at night.
     Let's assume you recognized "him." (If not yet, maybe a second pass will catch the trick.) Now, what is your guess as to who the two brothers are that journey together? And there are two other pilgrims who stay the night and are treated very cordially. One is a man dedicated to war. The other is a woman whose motto is "Love conquers all." Are you beginning to understand what "group" the poet has concealed in his pilgrims?
     The "puzzle" pieces are not all that obvious, but what you've seen is a good start. Chaucer's plan is a thrill to me every time I think about it. Next time I'll identify the pilgrims mentioned here and talk about a few more.

Pilgrims in disguise

You could content yourself with the surface story of the Canterbury Tales and let the idea of a hidden meaning just slide. Chaucer's surface story has been enjoyed for centuries--and will continue to be, but I couldn't do that. The poetry nagged me: "Why did he say that?" For example, only one of the pilgrims is said to wear spurs. No, not the Knight. It's one of the women. Why would Chaucer say that? I figured he must have had a reason.

While we're on the subject of pilgrims, in one of his earlier poems (Troilus and Criseyde), Chaucer says the hero "Like a pilgrim he disguised himself" so that he could make his way undetected into enemy territory to visit his ladylove. I didn't know about that disguise until after the episode I'm about to describe, but it shows that our poet already had that trick in mind.

The whole scheme of the Canterbury pilgrims distracted me. Chaucer's reputation was too well known, his skills too well recognized by his contemporaries for me to think that the group was a haphazard collection. So what was it that made this precise combination necessary? Why was there one pair of brothers, not from a religious order, but two men related by birth? Why not three brothers or no brothers? Why was there a wife--but no husband and wife? Why no children? Why so few women?
     When I raised the question of the make-up of this assortment of travelers, I was told, "That's just the way it was in the Middle Ages." End of discussion. But that never satisfied me. And it didn't stop the tape loop that had begun playing in my head. No matter what I was doing, in some little compartment of my brain, a never-ending succession of the images of the pilgrims was always on screen. I knew there had to be an answer to the selection of exactly this group. My need for the answer was obsessive, unrelenting. That ever-present pilgrim tape streamed past my mind's eye for more than a week--and then it happened.
     Picture this. What's going on in your mind is projected on a TV screen, and at the bottom of the screen there is a narrow tape running--rather like news headlines are displayed. That tape at the bottom ran on and on with the pictures of the pilgrims. And then--without any warning--my memory dredged up a second tape of images that began running just above the pilgrim tape, and in a few moments they meshed. They matched. The pilgrims were identified. The tapes stopped running, and I sat there overwhelmed, contemplating the matched identities. It was like checking your lottery ticket against the winning numbers printed in the newspaper-- and realizing you've won the jackpot. Eureka! I suddenly knew that Chaucer presents one group of characters described in terms of another group. The pilgrims are all disguised!