Celestial event may be behind Chaucer fidelity tale's high tide

A young wife is stuck between a rock and a hard place. <br><br>Her warrior husband's homecoming is blocked by rugged rocks off Brittany's coast. A suitor promises to clear the path in exchange

Tuesday, April 4th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

A young wife is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Her warrior husband's homecoming is blocked by rugged rocks off Brittany's coast. A suitor promises to clear the path in exchange for her love. Then the rocks vanish beneath the sea, and the husband returns.

It sounds as if the waters were moved by a miracle of love. But new research suggests it was the heavens that turned the tides.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the medieval poet, could have based one of his famous Canterbury Tales on a rare astronomical coincidence that occurred in A.D. 1340, three Texas researchers say. The sun, moon and Earth aligned that winter to cause an extraordinarily high tide, which could have submerged craggy rocks off the coast.

That event may be the basis for the central device in Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale," a classic dilemma of marital fidelity. When the sea submerges the rocks, the woman must choose between the love of her suitor and her loyalty to her husband.

Many Chaucer scholars have considered the plot an elaborate fiction or an exaggeration of a real high tide. But Don Olson, an astronomer at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, used a little scientific sleuthing to discover the high tide of 1340. It is the first time anyone has linked the franklin's tale plot to a specific astronomical event, Dr. Olson said.

Chaucer may even have learned of the extraordinary tide - which occurred around the year he was born - while researching his birth horoscope, Dr. Olson suggested.

Chaucer experts called the work intriguing but said it didn't address the true issues in the tale - questions about marriage, fidelity and the meaning of a promise.

Dr. Olson's study is "both fascinating and, in the way of all great scholarship, utterly irrelevant," said Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist at Southern Methodist University.
Still, she noted, "it's a hoot."

Dr. Olson has acquired a reputation for melding astronomy and literature - for example, finding possible references to a supernova in Hamlet and to a meteor shower in Abraham Lincoln's writings. He does this partly because his wife, Marilynn Olson, is an English professor at Southwest Texas State, and he goes to many English-department cocktail parties.

At such a party years ago, Dr. Olson was approached by Edgar Laird, who teaches Chaucer, about unraveling some intricate astronomy-related passages in the franklin's tale. The professors, with physics graduate student Thomas Lytle, describe their findings in the April issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

In Chaucer's story, a franklin, or landowner, is one of many pilgrims sharing tales on their way to Canterbury. The franklin tells of a young knight, Arveragus, who goes to war and leaves his wife, Dorigen, pining on the Brittany coast. Another man, Aurelius, tries to woo Dorigen, but she says she will be his only if he can make the dangerous offshore rocks disappear. "I say, when you have made the coast so clean/Of rocks that there is no stone seen/Then I will love you best of any man," Dorigen teases.

For two years, Aurelius prays for a tide "so great that by at least five fathoms it oversprings the highest rock in Brittany."

Finally he visits a scholar, the Clerk of Orleans, for help. The clerk charges Aurelius a huge sum of money but travels to the coast, where he seems to work magic and predict exactly when the rocks will disappear beneath the waves.

But far from any mystery, the clerk determines the tide through astronomical calculations, Chaucer writes.

For instance, part of one passage reads: "And by the eighth sphere in its working/He knew full well how far Alnath was shoved/From the head of that fixed Aries above/That in the ninth sphere considered is/Full subtly he calculated all this."

Medieval astronomers fabricated the "eighth and ninth spheres" to explain complex celestial motions in a world where the sun was thought to revolve around the Earth, Dr. Olson said. The distance between Alnath - either the single star Alpha Arietis or a group of stars in the constellation Aries - and "the head of that fixed Aries" would be needed to calculate the sun's location and thus the lunar phase.

Such details in the clerk's work constitute some of the most complex astronomical passages in all English literature, Dr. Olson said. But the complexity allowed his group to calculate what may have been the exact event mentioned by Chaucer.

The story tells of a high tide that occurred late in "the cold, frosty season of December." So the researchers started calculating times in winter when celestial coincidences combined for greater tides.

Tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon (and, to a lesser extent, the sun) on Earth. Every once in a while, the moon, sun and Earth can line up in such a way as to combine their tide-generating power. These alignments happen when the moon is new or full (twice a month); during "eclipse seasons," when both the sun and moon are positioned to make eclipses more likely (twice a year); when the moon is closest to the Earth (once a month); and when the Earth is closest to the sun (once a year).

Rarely, these four factors occur almost all at once, when each celestial body is as close to the Earth as possible. So Dr. Olson looked for a December in which this might have happened, around the time Chaucer lived.

Another tidal researcher, Fergus Wood of the National Ocean Service, had once written briefly of a rare tidal event of 1340. Dr. Olson found the same "killer alignment" of the Earth, moon and sun, and concluded it must have been described by Chaucer.

The alignment would have caused tides to be higher than normal for several weeks, Dr. Olson said. But they weren't necessarily the highest they've been in the past 660 years. To Chaucer, the astrological significance of the tide would have been just as important as the astronomical one.

"We're looking for the kind of events that would have interested Chaucer, not necessarily the same events that we would find interesting today," said Dr. Olson.

The alignment might have caught Chaucer's eye when he was researching his birth horoscope, which would have required looking up the positions of the sun, moon and Earth for that year, Dr. Olson said. Chaucer is thought to have been born sometime around 1340; he wrote the Canterbury Tales in the 1390s.

He also may have heard about the high tide from old-timers on the London wharves. At one point, Chaucer had a job with the customs office that involved shoring up walls and ditches against the greatest possible tide.

Either way, the high tide had the same fictional result. Dismayed by the disappearing rocks, Dorigen tells her husband, who has just returned, of her promise to Aurelius. But Aurelius, impressed by her love, gives up his suit. Husband and wife are reunited. And in the rush of happiness, the clerk waives his fee.

Classic updated on the Web

The Canterbury Tales, retold in modernized English, can be found online at academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury.