TY - JOUR
AU - Jones, George Fenwick
AB -  ginning to serve the same purpose. Nor did passage of time drastically alter literary motifs, because, in view of medieval man’s respect for authority and faith in a static order, a fifteenth-century author may well have used an older source than that used by a fourteenth-century one. No direct connection is claimed between The Canterbury Tales and these foreign sources; it is merely emphasized that they were all rooted in a common Western European cultural tradition. It would be asking too much of chance to believe their similarities due purely to coincidence. Concerning Robyn, the miller of the Canterbury pilgrimage, Chaucer says, “His berd as any sowe or fox was reed” (C.T., A 552). It is unlikely that Chaucer chose this color after personally observing a particular miller, since red-headed millers were a literary commonplace. For example, a popular German song of a somewhat later period tells us : De moller hefft einen roden bart darto is he van boser art.6 The miller has a red beard, and he is also of a wicked nature. It is most improbable that the author of this song had made a careful study of millers’ beards, since medieval man tended to 
TI - Chaucer and the Medieval Miller
JF - Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History
DO - 10.1215/00267929-16-1-3
DA - 1955-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/duke-university-press/chaucer-and-the-medieval-miller-yECYjt1mgx
SP - 3
VL - 16
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -