Bored of the Rings

Boggie Frito Bugger is on a quest to destroy the evil Sorhed's One Ring featuring heavily altered, incompetent characters and constant, crude humor.

Frito Bugger - Frodo, Spam - Sam, Pepsi - Pippin, and Moxie - Merry and Pippin, Goodgulf the Wizard - Gandalf, Legolam - Legolas, and Gimlet - Gimli make up the fellowship.

The story moves through a satirical Lower Middle Earth, featuring locations like Riv'n'dell, a tourist gift shop, and Lalornadoon. It covers the main arc in a fraction of the time, packed with innuendo and 1960s pop-culture references.

The Harvard Lampoon's parody of "Lord of the Rings," though entertaining, is quite dated. Unlike LotR, which J.R.R. Tolkien deliberately wrote to evoke an older time, "Bored of the Rings" suffers from its dated humor and references. What's worse is some of the offensive and unfunny jokes. At one point, Frito (the stand-in for Frodo in this tale) dons blackface and performs a minstrel show to escape the story's version of the Ringwraiths. This scene, and several others, are neither funny nor do they advance the plot. Had they occurred in a modern book, I would have believed the authors were trying to earn some laughs through shock value. Perhaps most unfortunate of all is the manner in which the authors condense what took Tolkien nearly show more 1000 pages to write into the span of 160 pages. Approximately the first 100 pages are based on "The Fellowship of the Ring" with the other two volumes represented in the remaining 60 pages. A passionate fan of Tolkien's Middle Earth legendarium may gain some enjoyment from "Bored of the Rings," but most readers will find it tiresome and unoriginal. show less

According to Jane Ciabattari, writing for the BBC, sales of Tolkien’s Middle Earth books exploded in the mid-1960s because some of “the values articulated by Tolkien were ideally suited for the 1960s counterculture movements.” At the Harvard Lampoon, two clean-cut students observed the phenomenon with a jaundiced eye. They saw not the countercultural values they somewhat shared but a rather pompous, over-hyped work begging for the kind of parody they would soon make into a cultural phenomenon of its own. Henry Beard would go on to create The National Lampoon and have a long parodist career. Doug Kenney would go on from the National Lampoon to hit the big time as a screenwriter in Animal House and Caddyshack. He would die from a show more fall at 33.
The humor of Bored of the Rings is precisely the kind of sophomoric satire that readers of the Lampoon had come to expect. A couple of quotations should tell you what to expect:
It was late in the gray fall afternoon when the procession of sheepback riders rode into Riv’n‘dell, led by Garfinkel astride his magnificent wooly stallion, Anthrax.
And this:
The company stood rooted to the ground in terror. The creature was about fifty feet tall, with wide lapels, long dangling participles, and a pronounced gazetteer.
‘Aiyee!’ shouted Legolam. ‘A Thesaurus!’
‘Maim!’ roared the monster. ‘Mutilate, mangle, crush. See harm.’
Monty Python, eat your heart out. show less

This is an excellent example of satire by the Harvard Lampoon. They have come close to ruining Tolkien's works by showing the Ring's characters as well known buffoons, such as Strider as "the Lone Ranger" and Goldenberry as a stoned hippie, and Boromir as the man with pointy shoes. A bit dated from the 1960's but still causes me to laugh out loud while reading this tome.

Sometimes this book reminded me of Monty Python. If you're in the right mood, it's brilliantly funny. And it's got more than it's fair share of immature potty-mouth humor and sexual innuendoes. However, the real humor kept me laughing out loud. I really enjoyed learning all the new names—Spam, Goodgulf Greyteeth, Sorhead, Stomper, and ballhog were some of my favorites.

I felt a little bit like a heretic reading this parody, though. It is just sacrilegious to see such honorable and courageous characters be reduced to such mockery. But then again, it takes a true Lord of the Rings fan to be able to enjoy this book.

While I've seen the LOTR movies a few times and not yet read the books, some may say: the movies are no reference, so much is left out of the books, the books are better, etc... Yes, this may all be true and one day I WILL read them. Only not now. Anyway, after having read the dystopian stories Wool and Shift (both by Hugh Howey) - part 3, Dust, is due later this year (2013) - I was in dire need of something lighter, something funny, something I didn't have to take serious (by manner of speech) at all.

Back in April I bought the Cardboard Box Of The Rings, which also contains The Soddit and The Sellamillion, both of which I still have to read. But Bored Of The Rings was first, hence...

As the authors say, this is a parody, not the actual show more book(s). This is the LOTR trilogy compressed into roughly 230 pages, in which for obvious reasons a lot was left out. But the original story was also twisted and rewritten with a good lump of humour. Many of it being dry humour (in some places it's dryer and depending on the presentation/use or your mood, it works or it doesn't), but I very much like that.

The lads obviously also changed the names of Bilbo (Dildo), Sam (Spam), Frodo (Frito) and so on. They also nicely mixed contemporary elements with the setting of this well-known Fantasy story, from insurance salesmen over Republicans to certain board games and vegetables and even contracts. Hell, how the fellowship manages to eat diverse breakfasts, have all those different sorts of food and drinks with them... it must be magic. :-)

I would compare this book's humour to Monty Python meets Hot Shots meets Leslie Nielsen (The Naked Gun, Scary Movie 3, ...). Or in other words: very much recommended, even if you haven't read the original books (yet). show less

I believe that when I first encountered this book, it was about the time it was first published, in my mid-teens. At the time, I thought it was marvelously witty. Recently, I was given a copy as a gift on the occasion of the 68th birthday, and so had occasion to re-read it. Interestingly, I did not find it nearly as entertaining as I had remembered.

What I found is that the humor was crude and forced. I was also annoyed the same gags being constantly repeated. The names of places and characters from LOTR were parodied by long-defunct brand-names that sounded similar. The songs or poems from the original source material were especially laden with these, and the occasional bit of song or verse that Tolkien had rendered in one of his show more constructed languages (i.e., Quenya, Sindarin or the Black Speech of Mordor) were generally just strings of old brand-names. Example: "A Elbereth! Gilthoniel" in Bored of the Rings comes out as "A unicef clearasil". I thought this was quite overdone. It might have been amusing at first, but it went on for 160 pages.

Then there are the endless references to the meals that the adventurers make along the way. "After a hasty meal of frankincense and myrrh", "The company arose and, after a hurried breakfast of yaws and goiters", "an austere breakfast of eggs, waffles, bacon grapefruit, pancakes, hot oatmeal, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and goden cheese blintzes", "a frugal breakfast of loaves and fishes", "after a leisurely meal of apple cheeks and cauliflower ears", and more. It might have gotten a chuckle the first two or three times, but it went on throughout the book, and quickly became tiresome.

While I can't give high marks to this book on its own merits, I do find it interesting to see how my tastes in reading have changed over the years. Just to be clear, I can still appreciate a good parody, but I think that this book fails in that. show less