So, let's start with the question of what I read. This is one of five (!) different copies of The Canterbury Tales that I have, three of which are in Penguin Classics. Because I'm me, and wanted to do the proper reading, I went with the unabridged, glossed-text version. This led to a couple of discoveries. First: Middle English isn't actually that hard to read once you wrap your mind around the verb tenses and the ways that spelling has changed. Second: There is a very good reason that most translations and adaptations skip over two specific parts of the book. But more on that later.
This is one of the earliest works of literature that exists in recognizable English, and is largely written in verse, with rhyming lines and a remarkably deft ability to modify the voice and tone of the writing to suggest different voices. This is useful, given the frame narrative that shapes the whole work. At the outermost level, The Canterbury Tales is about a group of travelers, brought together by chance, having a storytelling contest on their pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral at the suggestion of an innkeeper who decides to join the group, with the promise of a free meal when the entourage returns to his inn at the end of the journey. We don't ever actually find out who wins; the prologue suggests that the intention was originally for all 30 of the pilgrims to tell four stories each, but instead we only have 24 tales, three of them incomplete, two tales attributed to Chaucer himself (positioned in-text as one of the pilgrims), and one belonging to a character who joins the pilgrimage after it began, so eight stories are missing just from the first round of tales. This can at least partly be explained by the fact that Chaucer died while working on the Tales, though two of the unfinished tales have their incomplete nature at least explained within the text as the narrators being interrupted, suggesting that Chaucer himself felt justified in stopping where he did.
The tales themselves cover a wide range of subjects, with the highest chivalry immediately followed by the lowest of sex farces. At the same time, the narrators span a similar range of backgrounds, forming a cross-section of the entire population of pre-Tudor England. More than anything else, this gives a general idea of what kinds of thoughts were on the minds of everyone in the era when they looked for entertainment, while simultaneously tempering the levity with religious morals and the wisdom of past philosophers.
That last part, though, brings up the biggest issue I ran into, and what largely caused my reading to take as long as it did: the two prose sections. There are two of them, both in the second half of the book, and neither has a tendency toward appearing in translations of the work into modern English. In fact, of the five various versions of the Tales that I have, "The Tale of Melibee" and "The Parson's Tale" only exist in two, this original-spelling version and Burton Raffel's 2008 unabridged translation for the Modern Library. Raffel acknowledges in his introduction that English prose was a rather young art form when Chaucer was writing, and that he struggled to avoid "improving" the quality of the writing. This... is definitely an issue in this case, because those two sections are anything but 'good'. My suspicion is that The Canterbury Tales is a classic more in spite of the prose than anything else. Chaucer's verse is spectacular (with the exception of "Sir Thopas", one of the aforementioned 'incomplete' tales, which is outright stated in the text to be horrible, though its rhyming scheme ), but... Raffel's description of these two tales as "not entirely readable" is perhaps generous. I got stalled out for over a week on "Melibee", just trying to make it through the incredibly dense prose, which really felt more like Chaucer showing the reader how well-read he was than anything else, and it took having it pointed out to me that the important part is making the effort, not actually finishing every page, especially in the case of a collection like this.
So, what of the ending? Well... what ending? "The Parson's Tale" is the last "story" in the book, and it does have a prologue that suggests its intention is to be the final of the first 'round' of tales, with the Host telling the Parson that everyone else has told a tale and now it's his turn, and the Parson turning around and basically saying 'Meh, tales are bad for you, I'm gonna give you a sermon instead' and spending 80 pages talking about penitance, the seven deadly sins, and salvation. This is followed up by the final section of the text, but rather than being anything of the framing narrative, instead we get Chaucer saying 'Oh, by the way, I'd like to take this opportunity to retract anything sinful I may have said in any of my works, including the one you just read.' We don't find out who won the contest, and indeed, it seems to have been entirely forgotten. Instead, we get the sense that this is Chaucer making a brief confession of his sins, as this is very likely the last thing he wrote.
The children's version is kind of an interesting piece. To start with, it only includes 13 of the original 24 tales, and the order they're placed in has been largely changed. That said, what I found most remarkable was that McCaughrean chose to keep the original format in place; while they have little resemblance to what Chaucer wrote, this version does maintain the framing narrative of travelers gathering on a pilgrimage and having a storytelling competition. That said, Chaucer never has the Summoner beating on the door of a closed inn and bellowing, "OPEN THE DOOR OR I'LL EXCOMMUNICATE YOU, YOU HEATHEN SON OF A BENIGHTED INNKEEPER!" That's some interesting language to find in a book intended for kids, but there you go. In the end, a winner isn't declared in this version, either; instead, the travelers can't pick a best story, and decide that they'll have a second round on the way back after the pilgrimage. Perhaps that indicates just how well-established in the English literary canon The Canterbury Tales is; even adaptations that aim to give the same kind of experience in reading, and leave in the same position, with no clear winner to the competition. Instead, it's the storytelling itself that is the important part.
