The Miller’s Tale

Summary

I. Heile van Beersele 267 (from Brussels, Royal Library, MS II.1171, “Thorpe MS”)

Many medieval stories have features in common with Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale about two young suitors to the young wife of a rich old carpenter. All but one of these stories, however, are either too late or too distant in narrative structure from The Miller’s Tale to have influenced it. That one is the anonymous fourteenth-century Middle Dutch tale known as Heile van Beersele. While we cannot be sure that this one was Chaucer’s actual source – that is, that he actually had this precise version of the story in his hands before he wrote the tale of John, Alisoun, Nicholas, and Absolon – I consider it the closest we have to Chaucer’s source. To use a terminology that is gaining sway, I consider it to be a “hard analogue with near-source status.” Because Heile van Beersele would have been available to Chaucer and bears striking resemblances to his work, and because all other known analogues are either later than or distant from The Miller’s Tale, I present in this chapter an edition and translation of only this one tale. I discuss, however, and give citations for the various other more distant analogues that have been identified.

The work of previous scholars

The existence of the Middle Dutch story of Heile was first pointed out in 1912 by Barnouw, who noted that in Heile van Beersele two different elements have been blended into one story: “(1) the jest of the man who let himself be scared by the prediction of a second flood, and (2) the story of the smith who, expecting to kiss his sweetheart’s mouth, was made to kiss his rival’s posteriors, on which he avenged himself with a red-hot iron from his smithy.” Barnouw, however, immediately dismissed the possibility that the Middle Dutch analogue was Chaucer’s source. Rather, he said, Chaucer’s source must have been a French fabliau, even though no French analogue to The Miller’s Tale had yet been located. Indeed, Barnouw posited two lost French versions, one that had the role of one of the woman’s suitors played by her husband, and a second story, without the husband, that had at one time been translated into the Middle Dutch story of Heile van Beersele.