This selection contained about half of the tales along with some prologues. Although the tales themselves were fairly straightforward and often amusing and bawdy (lots of sex and bums and the like) the language was hard going. I think that although there was some translation in my version it wasn’t a full translation to modern English, so still required a lot of effort to read.
I’m sure that there was a lot of subtlety and so on that I missed, but even with that, I enjoyed the flow of the text. The rhyme worked very well and never intruded. It was a story told to rhyme rather than trying to pack as many images into as few words as poetry often feels like.
The Wikipedia summaries were rather handy too.
