Farmer Giles of Ham is a book that Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, apparently published right in between The Hobbit and LOTR.

While no reference is made to his Middle Earth world which is the fictional setting of the other two books I mentioned, many familiar concepts appear, right down to specific scenes such as the one where the parson (man of letters and mystic truths) decyphers the insignia of a sword, or the dangerous bantering with the powerful dragon and the trope of the oafish giant.

The story tells the life of a farmer who has comic encounters with a giant and later a dragon.

The book is for children, although at around 70 pages or so of an illustrated little book, adults can get through it, too, and have a good time.

That being said, the elements of the story are very predictable, which is obviously part of the fun:

Past heroicism, the common sense of country folk, simple, patriarcal social structures, vestiges of a mythical past when life was exciting and noble.

I liked the book overall and might even read it again because it is so short, and because the version I read was illustrated with drawings by Pauline Baynes.

You must read this story, just to savour the idea of the “twelve likely lads” the protagonist picked up at some bar to hold down his dragon!

The physical book I must have picked up at Foyles in London, sometime in the 80ies, when the carpeted storeys of that shop with its labyrinthine shelves still looked like they were out of a Harry Potter novel.

I do have to admit that when I riffle those pages to smell the paper, it does smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land, just like in Fahrenheit.