The Miller’s Tale was published in the Chaucer most famous work The Canterbury Tales. In “The Miller’s Tale”, the poet Chaucer depicts the tale of a “hende” man and his attempt to tempt the “primerole” Alisoun to commit adultery and therefore render her husband, John a “cokewold”. The Miller’s Tale is just one story amongst a collection of greater works known collectively as “The Canterbury Tales”. The tale is a fabliau, a versified short story designed to make you laugh; concerned usually with sexual or excretory functions. The plot often involves members of the clergy, and is usually in the form of a practical joke carried out for love or revenge and fabliaux are often viewed as a lower class genre.

            Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" should be tragic, because a lot of horrible things happen to the characters. The carpenter's wife is disloyal to him, sleeping with others and making fun of him with Nicholas. Also, he is depicted as a fool. However, readers get a humorous feeling from the story, rather than feeling sorry for the carpenter's unfair life. Chaucer makes the whole story come across as comic rather than tragic. This humor is created by the Miller's narration, the use of irony, the cartoon-like characters, and the twists of plot. These elements combine to produce an emotional distance which enhances the comic effect. It seems a shame to do anything with the Miller's Tale except laugh heartily! To insert too much intellectual analysis may rob this, the best of “dirty” stories, of its charm. Nonetheless, it being the nature of the person, I shall insert a comment or two which I hope will enhance your enjoyment of this tale, and give a bit of insight into the concepts of medieval life that it presents so well.

            The Miller's Tale takes the form of a fabliau, a familiar medieval literary genre that concerned the bourgeois and vulgar classes. The traditional form of a fabliau concerns a bourgeois husband who is duped into aiding a clever young man receive sexual favors from his wife. The young sexual intruder is typically a student or cleric and thus belongs to no definable class. These tales were not simply a middle- and lower- class diversion; elite audiences of Chaucer's time appreciated the tales for painting condescending and vulgar portraits of the lower orders. The tale even acknowledges these class differences. The Miller remarks that Alison would be acceptable as a yeoman's wife, but she could also be the lowly mistress of a lord. The elite viewpoint also is reinforced by the character of Nicholas. He is the one educated character, and it is his intelligence and scholarship that gives him the advantage over the uneducated ruffian that is the carpenter.

           The Miller's Tale takes the traditional form of the fabliau, but it also approximates the structure of the Knight's Tale. The Miller's Tale is a gross parody of the Knight's moralistic story, bringing the tale down to lower orders and stripping it of the honor and chivalry that marked the Knight's story. Like the story that preceded it, the Miller's Tale concerns a romantic struggle that ends with each of the parties receiving what they deserve. However, the romantic protagonists in the Miller's tale are a foolish young man, a cunning student, and a cuckolded husband, not the interchangeable and indistinguishable knights.

            One main characteristic of the Miller's tale is the humanity with which its figures are depicted. John the carpenter's only crime is to have married a girl noticeably younger than himself. Unlike most such husbands, he is not suspicious or jealous; he sincerely loves his Alison. When Nicholas tells him that the world is going to be drowned, his first reaction is, 'Alas, my wife!' with no thought for himself. When Nicholas suggests hanging three tubs in the roof so that they can all float to safety in the flood, it is John who exhausts himself doing the work.

         The Miller's Tale is told with particular skill in a voice that has no relationship with that of the drunken Miller. We are told quite soon that Nicholas is known to be an expert at weather-forecasting; we do not at the time realize why this is a significant detail. The narrator keeps the audience uninformed about Nicholas's plan, as he shuts himself in his room then reluctantly tells John about the coming flood. Once the plan has worked, and John is sound asleep in his trough, the story focuses entirely on the three young people's adventures. When Nicholas, burned, shouts out "Water!" John awakes, thinks the flood has come, and cuts the rope. The readers are taken completely by surprise at the sudden linking of two quite different strands by that single word. The Miller's tale thus prizes the characters who are the shrewdest rather than those who hold more sentimental emotions or obey traditional standards of behavior.