The Game of Chivalry

Something I noticed in Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale is an actual explanation of the supernatural element to the medieval romance story. Marie de France lived in a time where supernatural explanations were used for every type and size of phenonema. For any sort of natural disater, birth defects, or simply how the planet worked was explained by some sort of magic. Within Chaucer, we actually get hints of people understanding the planets, the moon, the tides, etc. They are still called "magic", but there is much less mystery to it.

The way that the "master" figures out how to create this grand illusion, of all the rocks being gone, is told by explaining that, "for his calulations he knew full well how far Alnath in the eighth sphere was pushed from the head of that fixed Aries above, which is calculated to be in the ninth sphere; cunningly he calculated by means of all this". Alnath and Aries are stars and the spheres seem to be the phases of the moon. In modern times we know that the moon controls the tides of the earth and some tides are low and some tides are high enough to cover a rock bed at the bottom of the cliff. This story takes limited knowledge of the world to apply it to a medieval time; a time that they may not have known even that much. It is interesting how different authors take on different perspectives of the same characteristics in a medieval romance story.

The medieval romance also includes the chivalric code and that holds a very large spot within The Franklin's Tale. The game that Aurelius is playing is one of honor and power and of the chivalric code. Each person is trying to uphold the code, but play a mind game at the same time. That is incredibly hard to do, as seen in the story when nothing comes of the situation in the end.