Farmer Giles of Ham

J.R.R. Tolkien – 1949

Tolkien’s lesser-known novella Farmer Giles of Ham is easily missed next to his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), which was being written at the time this story was published.  Thought it does not take place in Middle-Earth, it is very similar in tone and structure to Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937); what with giants, dwarfs, willful swords, and a simple rustic being maneuvered into a confrontation with a chatty dragon.  Giles is not so different from Bilbo Baggins, a complacent and somewhat lazy hero who needs to be pushed out the door and whose victories come from a combination of deviousness and luck.  Told as a simple fable, Tolkien’s style is spare and unaffected save only for the joy he takes in relaying long names of Norse and/or Latin origins, which the narrator regretfully has to translate into the “vulgar” tongue for us.  (Giles’ proper name, for example, is Ægidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo.)  After chasing off a giant using bravado and a primitive type of gun called a blunderbuss, Giles is rewarded by the king of the land with an ancient sword called Caudimordax, or “Tailbiter,” which jumps free of its sheath whenever dragons are near.  When a dragon named Chrysophylax Dives comes round one day, Giles – on the basis of his recent meager show of heroism – is sent to contend with him.  But the quest in this case isn’t as important as the result, which is that the vanity and lack of original thought among the royal court allow Giles, a man of extremely modest ambition, to bully and bluff his way into becoming the de facto king of his village and neighboring ones.  Tolkien was a famous philologist and the story contains many linguistic puns and jokes, including a suggestion that the River Thames was named for the “tamed” dragon Chrysophylax who once lived near it, and therefore the extraneous “h” in the name was never justified or appropriate.  The tone is generally more satirical than The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien apparently was parodying traditional tales of brave knights as dragon slayers.  I was interested throughout in the fact that Tolkien, one of the greatest of all English authors, bears a style that is so direct and without flamboyance; a sort of equivalent to the confident simplicity of other types of masters like Matisse or Yasujiro Ozu late in their lives.