The Comparison's Tale

        The individual tales that Chaucer included in The Canterbury Tales are remarkably diverse.  They range from the humble lives of the poor, to the fast lives of the rich and the low lives of the lower and middle classes.  Through these stories, and their diversity, Chaucer is able to teach us about medieval England on a much more personable level.  Despite all the differences, we learn from the similarities.  Carl Sagan pointed out that, despite all of the diversity we see in our species, and all of life on our planet, we are extremely similar.  Our similarities out weigh our differences by so much, that if we ever cam in contact with other life forms, they would see us as very similar to each other, as they have not had the chance over the past 4.6 billion years of evolution on this planet to see the differences between us.  In our species alone, every culture has songs, dances, beliefs, knowledge, customs, some sort of pancake, some sort of sandwich, and many other characteristics.  If we narrow this down to the next level towards medieval England, we come to the indo-european cultures, especially the main four in Europe: the Germans, the Slavs, the Romantics and the Celtics.  Each of these cultures believes in an over world that is connected to earth.  The Slavs, Germans and Celts thought this to be a giant tree, while the Romans thought this to be a mountain.  All of these cultures have the same pantheon, just with different names for their gods.  For example Wōden, Jupiter, Odin, Donar, Perun, and Dagda are all the same god, just with different names in different sub-cultures.   Besides gods, the mythologies of the customs have very similar stories, their languages are very similar, and their customs and rituals are very much a like (christianity was not mentioned, as it is by no means part of these cultures,  as it arose from the indo-iranian cultures).  Finally, down to the personal level that we see in the book, each of the medieval characters are alike.  All fall prey to wants and urges, which leads to much lust, gluttony, and others of the seven deadly sins to be seen in the stories.  Another thing Chaucer does throughout all the stories is that he pokes fun at each group.  For the rich people, especially with religious officials, Chaucer shows that they are not the great people that they make themselves out to be.  With the poor, Chaucer pokes fun at their lives and interests in making them talk about lewd topics, such as fornication, prostitution, fecal topics, and trickery.  With the middle classes, Chaucer pokes fun at how serious they are about work, that is not truly important in the long run.