Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
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I have just read, for perhaps the 10th time, this perfect story from 1949. I thought about "perfect" and decided to use the word. Really, how could it be bettered? The union of story, diction, and illustration by Pauline Baynes is completely satisfactory.
I may have seen it 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 of Ham, but it is aimed at perennial foibles such as pomposity, shirking, fickleness, cunning, dishonesty, naïveté, boasting, conceit (e.g. the blacksmith's fondness for assuring everyone that gloomy things will happen), etc. These frequent moments of humor are handled in a mild and genial way, though, completely without bitterness and spite. 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, chivalry, etc. as inherently absurd. His 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, as blockheads are apt to do, that the medieval elements are somehow inherently 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 is a real scholar having warmhearted fun about his vocation.
Incidentally, the book has a special place in my personal imaginative development. I grew up with a church background in which the Church Year was pretty minimal. There was Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter, and perhaps Pentecost, but little more than these. Farmer Giles of Ham was perhaps my first glimpse, when I was a boy, of the more full Church Year, with its enormous riches of music, art, story, etc. Here were references to Twelfth Night (evening of January 5) and Epiphany (January 6), and the feast days of Sts. Felix and Hilary (March 16), St. Matthias (May 14), and St. Michael (the Archangel and all holy angels, September 29). To say nothing of its devotional value, the Church Calendar was and is an intriguing way to mark the passage of time, one that permeated the lives of people for centuries; and I knew next to nothing about it. But at least, thanks to Farmer Giles of Ham, I got a greater sense that there was such a thing.
I may have seen it 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 of Ham, but it is aimed at perennial foibles such as pomposity, shirking, fickleness, cunning, dishonesty, naïveté, boasting, conceit (e.g. the blacksmith's fondness for assuring everyone that gloomy things will happen), etc. These frequent moments of humor are handled in a mild and genial way, though, completely without bitterness and spite. 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, chivalry, etc. as inherently absurd. His 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, as blockheads are apt to do, that the medieval elements are somehow inherently 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 is a real scholar having warmhearted fun about his vocation.
Incidentally, the book has a special place in my personal imaginative development. I grew up with a church background in which the Church Year was pretty minimal. There was Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter, and perhaps Pentecost, but little more than these. Farmer Giles of Ham was perhaps my first glimpse, when I was a boy, of the more full Church Year, with its enormous riches of music, art, story, etc. Here were references to Twelfth Night (evening of January 5) and Epiphany (January 6), and the feast days of Sts. Felix and Hilary (March 16), St. Matthias (May 14), and St. Michael (the Archangel and all holy angels, September 29). To say nothing of its devotional value, the Church Calendar was and is an intriguing way to mark the passage of time, one that permeated the lives of people for centuries; and I knew next to nothing about it. But at least, thanks to Farmer Giles of Ham, I got a greater sense that there was such a thing.
