“A berd! A berd!”: Chaucer’s Miller and the Poetics of the Pun

Puns exist in a world of linguistic intentions.

Matthew Marino¹

No pun intended.

English speakers

And that is myn entente.

Chaucer²

A vial [vile?] of pun is worth a bucket of philology.

Larry Benson³

Let us begin with the berd. For me, the berd is the pun that sets the rest on fire. Like the seemingly endless occupatio that both conjures and recoils from Arcite’s funeral in The Knight’s Tale, it is a device made strange, one that seems to reflect on its own nature as a device. Like the funeral occupatio, the “berd” pun highlights and defamiliarizes the relation between story and narrator.⁴ In doing so, it invites further reflection on how the Miller’s exuberant wordplay might participate in the evolving and competing poetic experiments of the First Fragment. So let us begin with the berd.

It comes at the tale’s comic high point: Alisoun sticks her “naked ers” out the window and Absolon kisses it “ful savourly” before realizing that something is not right: “For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd” (MilT, 3734–36). The swiftness of the narrative, as it moves from Absolon’s dawning horror to Alisoun’s “Tehee!” to Nicholas’s exultant “A berd! A berd!” makes it seem at first that Nicholas is laughing at the idea of the “beard” on Alisoun’s bum—the “beard” that is also a trick or joke, through a shortening of the phrase “to make one’s beard.”⁵ Nicholas’s delighted repetition of the word imitates perfectly the realization of a pun, making room for the kind of vocal emphasis or slight difference in pronunciation that would signal two different meanings in oral delivery. So at first this appears to be what we might call a “recipient pun,” one created by the listener (Nicholas) independently of the speaker’s intentions.⁶ But then we realize—doing our own double-take, savoring the beard differently as we become “war”—that Nicholas cannot have overheard Absolon’s thoughts, and therefore cannot intend the pun. The real recipient is the reader, knitting the two senses together: a berd, a beard! Yet whose intentions have brought the two speeches together for us to overhear? The outrageous device of putting Nicholas in Absolon’s head turns out to be the equally outrageous device of putting the reader in Chaucer’s: he “means it”; we “get it”; voilà, a pun. This momentary confusion over who is making the pun and who might have access to whose thoughts reminds us that every pun of this type depends on an improbable moment of mind-reading. This is what makes it such a marvelous little moment of rhetorical theory, pointing back to something that has been a key feature of the tale all along.

There was a time when critics denied that there were puns in Chaucer, but that time is long past. Over the decades many have gone pun-hunting in the tale, and words such as “berd,” “hende,” “queynt,” and “pryvetee” have become comic highlights for most readers.⁷ My project here is not to add to the catalogue but to ask why puns matter so much to this particular tale. For although it is now generally accepted that puns are part of the tale’s distinctive humor and rhetorical texture, few critics have seen them as indicative of anything besides the obvious: this is a dirty, funny, “jangling” story, and nothing suits dirty and funny like a pun. Puns are said to be the lowest form of humor—and this is The Miller’s Tale. When David Benson did his formative stylistic analysis of the Tales, arguing that Chaucer “turns himself into a new poet for each,” he recognized puns as part of the stylistic contrast between the Knight’s and Miller’s tales, but argued that they were not artistically central: “an incidental, if witty, aspect of the comedy of the first fabliau,” as he put it, not as thematically productive as in The Shipman’s Tale.⁸ Other critics...