Minor Works -- 1 - Farmer Giles of Ham

[Formendacil]

My desire to reply to this topic hasn't been delayed so much as my reading has! The anticipation of Progeny #2 somehow left less reading time than his appearance has, so I am now caught up on Farmer Giles. Two different things stood out to me between holding the infant and being fussed at by the small child.

1. The first is this sentence:

Originally Posted by Farmer Giles of Ham

Garm was both proud and afraid of Giles, who could bully and brag better than he could.

It's a somewhat filtered description: this is Garm's view of Giles more than being strictly the narrator's, but I'm not sure that it's discordant with Giles as we come to know him. I'm of two minds here: on the one hand, Giles is presented as very much a "people's hero": practical, down-to-earth, reluctant to face the dragon, and much more a haggler than anyone else. Is he really then a bully and a braggart?

I wonder a bit about how much is Garm and how much is "true," not least given that both "bully" and "braggart" are words that do not have a positive connotation--certainly not in 2021, but I don't think they were exactly the words to describe a hero in 1930. And while Giles' threatening words every time Garm turns up (though, notably, never doing anything) might suggest that he has a less-than-enlightened attitude toward animals, perhaps the point here isn't that Giles IS a bully or a braggart, but that a very foolish dog thinks he is. The counterpoint for any bullying is Giles relationship with the Old Grey Mare (and maybe even with Chrysophylax).


The other thing that occurred to me was less of a question mark topic than that--more of an observation. Tolkien is sometimes identified as being a rather idealistic dreamer who wanted to return to some medieval vision and who is therefore not quite "Modern" or up-to-date. Certainly, his own stated preference in the Letters for anarcho-monarchism and various statements of being generally conservative in his biases do play into this. However, his view of the kings and knights in this story should be weighed heavily before taking that as unthinking idealism.

While it is certainly included as part of the humour of the tale, I don't think that the money-focused king or the etiquette-driven driven knights are JUST humour. Tolkien is undercutting the fairytale/Arthurian romantic view of how things were as much as he is also drawing on it. In this sense, even in this smaller, comedic story there's a recognition of human nature, a Denethor to go with Giles's Aragorn (a Master of Laketown to go with Giles's Bard). It is idealistic, but more in the sense of being aspirational--i.e. of knowing that it's not the norm than of thinking it ever was.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

Certainly, his own stated preference in the Letters for anarcho-monarchism and various statements of being generally conservative in his biases do play into this. However, his view of the kings and knights in this story should be weighed heavily before taking that as unthinking idealism.

I've always read that as resignation on Tolkien's part that all systems are each failures in their own way and that anarcho-monarchism was, in his view, the least bad rather than being particularly good because no system meets the standard of being "good."

A point of view I am not unsympathetic toward...but, taking a grim view of the world is practically de rigueur for being a true diehard Tolkien fan.

Congratulations and commiserations on Progeny #2.