Geoffrey Chaucer's The Nun’s Priest Tale as Mock-Heroic poem or mock-epic

Famous Mock-Heroic “The Nun’s Priest Tale” is one of the 24 tales that can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. A Mock heroic poem or mock-epic is narrative poems which aim at mockery and laughter by using almost all the characteristic features of an epic but for a trivial subject.

“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is told in the form of a fable. The priest tells of a roster in charge of hens closely relating to his own authority over woman. The fable is a mock heroic, which is a story that relates to an epic, taking a trivial subject and blowing it out of proportion. 

To achieve this style, Chaucer uses allusions or references to people, places, or events in history that appeal to a reader. Chaucer uses references of the Trojan War, the story of Adam and Eve, and cries from Roman matrons to demonstrate the trivial problems of Chaunticleer and Pertelote, face in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. ↙ The subject in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a trivial subject because a cock and a fox can under no circumstances be regarded as having much importance or significance. But the style which Chaucer employs to deal with this subject that makes the Tale a Mock heroic poem. 

The Mock heroic tome is established at the very beginning, with the description of Chaunticleer. The author employs a series of superlatives. The diction used in this description has deliberate courtly overtones. In the dialogue also the Mock heroic tome prevails. 

The narrator heightens the Mock heroic effect of his story by a comic use of lofty similes. The best example is the three-fold simile in the lines which are a climax of the narrator’s last interruption between the fox’s seizing of Chaunticleer and the beginning of the chase the terrified hers produce a loud clamour as they see their master being carried off. This kind of inflation, or false exaggeration, is the secrete of the mock- heroic technique.