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Farmer Giles of Ham
J.R.R. Tolkien
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Foreword
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OF the history of the Little Kingdom few fragments have
survived; but by chance an account of its origin has been
preserved: a legend, perhaps, rather than an account; f?r
it is evidently a late compilation, full of marvels,, derived
not from sober annals, but from the popular lays to which
its author frequently refers. For him the events that he
records lay already in a distant past; but he seems, none-
theless, to have lived himself in the lands of the Little
Kingdom. Such geographical knowledge as he shows (it is
not his strong point) is of that country, while of regions
outside it, north or west, he is plainly ignorant.
An excuse for presenting a translation of this curious
tale, out of its very insular Latin into the modern tongue
of the United Kingdom, may be found in the glimpse that
it affords of life in a dark period of the history of Britain,
not to mention the light that it throws on the origin of
some difficult place-names. Some may find the character
and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves.
The boundaries of the Little Kingdom, either in time or
space, are not easy to determine from the scanty evidence.
Since Brutus came to Britain many kings and realms have
come and gone. The partition under Locrin, Camber, and
Albanac, was only the first of many shifting divisions.
What with the love of petty independence on the one hand,
and on the other the greed of kings for wider realms, the
years were filled with swift alternations of war and peace,
of mirth and woe, as historians of the reign of Arthur tell
us: a time of unsettled frontiers, when men might rise or
fall suddenly, and songwriters had abundant material and
eager audiences. Somewhere in those long years, after the
days of King Coel maybe, but before Arthur or the Seven
Kingdoms of the English, we must place the events here
related; and their scene is the valley of the Thames, with
an excursion north-west to the walls of Wales.
The capital of the Little Kingdom was evidently, as is
ours, in its south-east corner, but its confines are vague. It
seems never to have reached far up the Thames into the
West, nor beyond Otmoor to the North; its eastern borders
