I have just read, for perhaps the 10th time, Tolkien’s perfect story from 1949. I thought about “perfect” and decided to go ahead and use the word. Really, how could Farmer Giles of Ham be bettered? The union of story and diction, and of illustration by Pauline Baynes, is completely satisfactory.1
Farmer Giles might casually be described as a mock epic or burlesque fairy tale. But these expressions would mislead someone who hasn’t read it. There’s satire aplenty in Farmer Giles, but it is not aimed at the genre of chivalric romance. It is aimed at perennial human foibles such as pomposity, shirking, fickleness, cunning, dishonesty, naïveté, boasting, conceit, etc. The frequent moments of satirical humor are handled in a mild and genial way, though, completely without spite and gall. The king is a target of satire, but Tolkien has no notion that kings as such are ridiculous, as perhaps, say, Mark Twain might have assumed. Tolkien doesn’t see the Middle Ages, knights, crowns, tournaments, etc. as inherently absurd. Tolkien’s story is free of the common attitude of unearned and often ignorant superiority towards the past. I predict that, if (may it never be so) a TV movie or film is made of this book, the adapters will get this wrong. They may just assume that the medieval elements are quaint and silly. They will miss the point. Tolkien’s mockery is understood aright when we feel it’s as much about people like ourselves as about people of long ago. Likewise, the storytelling has fun with scholarship, but it shows a real scholar having warmhearted fun about his life’s vocation of philologist.…