The basic genre of Farmer Giles of Ham is the mock epic or mock heroic. J. R. R. Tolkien uses his scholarly knowledge of medieval heroic legends to parody them, to compare small with great as if both were equal, and to render farcical the typical episodic motif of such stories. There are even hints of the great Old English epic poem Beowulf (c. 1000), as Giles battles both giant and monster. The mock genre is also heightened by Tolkien’s apparently scholarly introduction to the story, with its claim that the story has been translated from Latin.

The humor of the book arises directly from this approach. Everything is miniaturized, in the way that Jonathan Swift does in Gulliver’s Travels (1726-1727), to create irony. The kingdom is very small, no bigger than a county. The king’s power is just as small in the beginning, with an idle lot of courtiers and officials, and even smaller when challenged by anything—be it giant, dragon, or Farmer Giles himself. The damage done by the giant and the dragon amounts to no more than a few squashed cows and knocked-down houses, with only one priest eaten. As with Swift, the insignificance of the aristocracy exposes their petty weaknesses and vainglory, rendering them laughable rather than perilously incompetent. No danger is ever really posed.

This vainglory is humorously reproduced in Giles’s own behavior after his presentation with Tailbiter. While there is peace, he proudly displays the sword and rehearses his so-called act of bravery, an act that has as much to do with defending property against a trespasser as anything. When renewed danger threatens, however, Giles hides it away in a cupboard. He is given a rival, too—the miller—just as the knights quarrel among themselves over precedence. The low-life comedy of the miller’s jealousy and the blacksmith’s pessimism (never so happy as when his gloomy predictions are coming to pass) works well, as do Giles’s down-to-earth comments, especially to Garm.

The talking animals provide humor also, especially Giles’s boastful and cowardly dog and Chrysophylax, who in his way is as reluctant to fight as Giles. Their battles are only quite accidentally feats of arms; they are mainly verbal duels, trying to outwit each other. The possession of Tailbiter reveals the dragon to be as cowardly as Giles would be if he did not have the sword. Giles’s horse turns out to be the bravest creature around; she does not talk. The humor of these encounters is found in the very ordinary meeting the very extraordinary, both sides behaving as if it were all quite normal. The anachronisms—for example, of gunpowder in an age of knights and giants—are a more subdued source of humor.

Out of the farce, however, several serious themes typical of Tolkien emerge. Despite the trappings of hierarchy, these themes are strongly democratic. The main theme is that even ordinary people can have something of the heroic in them, if they are the right people for the right time. Without his being aware of it, Giles’s resourcefulness and ability to drive a bargain are actually forms of bravery. When pushed, he is willing to operate against unknown dangers. Ignorance is bliss, but what he has unknowingly done is return his people and himself to a more ancient, less “civilized” heroism.

The converse theme centers on the degeneracy of kings and knights. They have reached positions of power through inheritance from forebears who in their time were brave, but peace has made them soft, their gentility mere pettiness. They deserve to be swept away and the cycle of knighthood by merit begun again.

The book is illustrated charmingly by Pauline Baynes, who was to go on to illustrate the Narnia stories of Tolkien’s colleague and friend, C. S. Lewis.