Pardoner's Tale (Unit 2, Core-1, Odisha State Model Syllabus)

A study help video on Pardoner's Tale with Odia Explanations

THE PARDONER’S TALE

Prepared by Atmaprakash

The ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ which makes today’s discussion is a tale from Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. 'The Canterbury Tales' is a collection of 24 stories that runs over 17000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The Canterbury Tales is an unfinished work but it incorporates a wide sweep of English life by gathering a motley company together and letting each class of society tell his own favourite stories. In Chaucer, we find a strong adherence to realism. Mathew Arnold calls Chaucer the father of our splendid English poetry. In other words, we can say, The Canterbury Tales is a frame narrative in which the tales told by individual pilgrims are accommodated.    

The Pardoner’s Tale presents a thrilling tale of death and trickery. It is also an exemplum. Exempla are stories that illustrate a theme in preaching and they are usually found in collections. The present tale centers around the Biblical statement, ‘Radix Malorum est cupiditas.’ It means, ‘Greed is the root of all evils’. Although avarice is the focus, the pardoner, here, includes drunkenness, gluttony, swearing and gambling as other deadly sins.

Who is a Pardoner?

The function of a pardoner during Chaucer’s time was to collect money for charitable purposes and to be Pope’s special agent in dispensing or rewarding contributors with certain pardons as a remission for sins. However, the pardoner of Canterbury Tales is a hypocrite. The pardoner deceives pilgrims with false relics. The Pardoner is corrupt, physically repellant. His voice and beardlessness suggest that he is not a full man but something eunuch like. He leads a sinister life and is consumed with cupiditas. He is depicted as smooth, delicate, lady-like and honey-tongued, duplicitous in his supposedly holy dealings, extremely rich from his deceitful profession and as a man his very being is totally incongruous with his career as a servant of church.

The prologue to the tale is remarkable for being a shameless exposure of the Pardoner’s trickery and hypocrisy. The prologue clearly brings out how the pardoner sells fake reliquaries as good luck charms and miracle cures and doing so he bastardizes the Christian doctrines he preaches into a lucrative money-making machine. The prologue is a kind of literary confession and the hypocrisy of the Pardoner is outspokenly revealed here.   

Pardoner’s Tale is a story of three rioters whose recklessness and lack of faith even among themselves result in the death of all. It is a macabre and sterile tale as there is no woman character in the tale.

As three young men sit in a tavern, a coffin passes bearing the body of a man who they learn has been murdered by a thief called Death. The three decide to find death and kill him. They set out and meet an old man who says that Death waits under a nearby tree. They go there and find a stash of gold coins, which they decide to steal. While the youngest one is in the town getting supplies, the other two decide to kill him and share the gold. Meanwhile, the youngest plots to get rid of the other two by poisoning the wine. When the youngest one returns, his two accomplices kill him, drink the wine and die.

The bottom line is: Greed is the root of all evil. Radix Malorum est cupiditas. Out of greed, the young men kill each other.   

Scholars, critics, and readers, in general, consider The Pardoner's Tale to be one of the finest "short stories" ever written. Even though this is poetry, the narration fits all the qualifications of a perfect short story: brevity, a theme aptly illustrated, brief characterizations, the inclusion of the symbolic old man, rapid narration, and a quick twist of an ending. The entire tale is an exemplum, a story told to illustrate an intellectual point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_jbbYu_q7g&t=56s