"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.
Plot
leads the Mongol Empire 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 from India approaches him bearing gifts, a motif common in Arthurian legends. These are a brasshorse 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, and a sword which deals deadly wounds that only its touch can heal again. After much learned talk 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, who left her for a kite. 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. The second part ends with a promise of more to come involving Genghis Khan's sons and the quest of Cambalo to win Canace as his wife. However, it is extremely unlikely that Chaucer ever intended to finish the tale. Instead the Franklin breaks into the very beginning of the third section with elaborate praise of the Squire's gentility—the Franklin being something of a social climber—and proceeds to his own tale.
Criticism and continuations
Early critics were very admiring of the Squire's tale, and John Milton, for instance, was convinced that Chaucer had intended to conclude it. Many authors of the Elizabethan period, including Edmund Spenser, used characters from the tale in their own works, and some, like John Lane, even wrote complete continuations of it. In general, modern critics have not paid it much attention, and consider it Chaucer's way of poking gentle fun at the young Squire's love of romance literature, which frequently contains somewhat pretentious digressions, and his lack of narrative self-control. Compared to the tale told by his father, the Knight, which is formal, serious, and complete, the rambling and fantastical story shows the Squire's inexperience. Some critics see the gifts as symbolic of the powers of poetry, which the Squire is still learning to use. There is no clear source for the story; it is instead a collection of ideas and themes from many romances, as befits the Squire, a lover of such literature. The extravagant details on Eastern kingdoms come from the travel literature of the time, such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, Simon of St Quentin and John Mandeville. The episode of the falcon and the tercelet is similar to part of Anelida and Arcite, an early work of Chaucer's.
