Abstract
One of the best-known descriptions in the General Prologue is that of the Miller as a “thikke knarre.” Since the first glossary of Chaucer in Thomas Speght's 1598 Workes, knarre has been related to a Dutch word and literally defined as a stump or thick piece of wood, here with the metaphorical sense of “rugged fellow.” This sense would be unique to the word in the Middle English record, and in fact derivation from the Dutch word has difficulties with semantics, phonology, and lexicography as well as with rhetorical appropriateness. This article proposes a different derivation from a Norse word meaning “freighter,” and more broadly argues that a great deal of secondary evidence can sustain a conclusion that actually has very little primary support. Sometimes history, whether linguistic or social, repeats itself precisely because historians, perhaps in part due to the thinness of the record, cause it to do so.
