Thank you for explaining the humour of the narrator taking from Ovid's tale of Ceyx and Alcyone that there is a God of Sleep. That's immediately a big insight into Chaucer's writerly persona; I suspect this will be used to good effect as a foil to the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. It's funny that a tale featuring Morpheus should send the narrator to sleep. It's also funny that the narrator should think that the God of Sleep would benefit from the gift of a feather bed - surely this God needs no help in that department.
I wonder whether the ending of Ovid's tale has been left off because consolation is not really a feature in the dream that follows (we hear of the death of this perfect woman and then the narrator wakes). If the narrator had read the consolatory ending, he might not then have dreamed a dream of love and grief. I wondered also whether the lovers being turned into birds would really offer much consolation anyway to people in a Christian world - would this not seem like quaint mythology to them? The more powerful aspect of Ovid's tale for the narrator would seem to be love and the powerful grief following death of a lover.
I think that you have something there with this reading. For Chaucer, the transformation into birds, in a Christian context, is simply fantasy rather than consolation. It denies the reality and persistence of grief.
This was a surprisingly do-able read! I hadn't anticipated that being a native Dutch speaker would help so much in deciphering this text.
Interesting! Of course, Dutch speakers are famous as prolific language learners.
Thank you for explaining the humour of the narrator taking from Ovid's tale of Ceyx and Alcyone that there is a God of Sleep. That's immediately a big insight into Chaucer's writerly persona; I suspect this will be used to good effect as a foil to the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. It's funny that a tale featuring Morpheus should send the narrator to sleep. It's also funny that the narrator should think that the God of Sleep would benefit from the gift of a feather bed - surely this God needs no help in that department.
I wonder whether the ending of Ovid's tale has been left off because consolation is not really a feature in the dream that follows (we hear of the death of this perfect woman and then the narrator wakes). If the narrator had read the consolatory ending, he might not then have dreamed a dream of love and grief. I wondered also whether the lovers being turned into birds would really offer much consolation anyway to people in a Christian world - would this not seem like quaint mythology to them? The more powerful aspect of Ovid's tale for the narrator would seem to be love and the powerful grief following death of a lover.
I think that you have something there with this reading. For Chaucer, the transformation into birds, in a Christian context, is simply fantasy rather than consolation. It denies the reality and persistence of grief.