The capital of the Little Kingdom was evidently, as is ours, in its south-east corner, but its confines are vague. 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. 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. The partition under Locrin, Camber, and Albanac, was only the first of many shifting divisions. Since Brutus came to Britain many kings and realms have come and gone. The boundaries of the Little Kingdom, either in time or space, are not easy to determine from the scanty evidence. Some may find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves.

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.Īn 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. For him the events that he records lay already in a distant past but he seems, nonetheless, to have lived himself in the lands of the Little Kingdom. 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 for 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.

Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien