The Squire's Tale

"The Squire's Tale" is a tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It is unfinished, perhaps deliberately, and comes first in group F, followed by the Franklin's interruption, prologue and tale. The Squire is the Knight's son, a novice warrior and lover with more enthusiasm than experience. His tale is an epic romance, which, if completed, would probably have been longer than rest of the Tales combined. It contains many literary allusions and a great deal of vivid description.

The original source of the tale remains unknown.

Genghis Khan ("Cambyuskan" in Chaucer's text), the king of Tartary, rules with two sons, Algarsyf and Cambalo, and a daughter, Canace. At the twentieth anniversary of his reign, he holds a feast, and a strange knight approaches him bearing gifts, a motif common in Arthurian legends. These are a brass steed with the power of teleportation, a mirror which can reveal the minds of the king's friends and enemies, a ring which confers understanding of the language of birds (as some legends say King Solomon owned), and a sword which deals deadly wounds that only its touch can heal again (both the spear of Achilles and the Holy Lance have these powers). After much learned discussion of the gifts, digressing into astrology, the first part of the tale ends.

A subplot of the tale deals with Canace and her ring. Eagerly rising the next morning, she goes on a walk and discovers a grieving falcon. The falcon tells Canace that she has been abandoned by her false lover, a tercelet (male hawk), who left her for a kite. (In medieval falconry, kites were birds of low status.) Canace heals the bird and builds a mew for it, painted blue for true faith within and green for falsity, with pictures of deceitful birds, outside. (This image is based on flower painted walls of the garden of the Romance of the Rose.)

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