Tales of a Wayside Inn #1


 My reading of the prelude to Longfellow's narrative poem "Tales of a Wayside Inn" (1863). The format takes its inspiration from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with a group of travellers sharing stories to pass the time. It's a model I have plans to use myself once I find the time to write it - though whether it will find a willing publisher is a whole other question! The tellers of tales in this poem are the inn landlord, a student, a Jewish merchant, a Sicilian, the Norwegian musician, a theologian (who is a student at Harvard, referred to as Cambridge on the Charles in the poem), and a poet.

The town of Sudbury referred to is in Massachusetts and not the one a few miles up the road from me in Suffolk. Hopefully I will get the time to record the rest over the coming week. The copy of the book shown in the video is a 1921 reprint which once belonged to someone called R Fabian (from the handwritten inscription I would guess a teenager).



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