Bored of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

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  Bored of the Rings states its purpose in the foreword's opening sentence. "This book is predominantly concerned with making money," it reads, "and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and literary integrity of the authors. Of Boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing." Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney wrote this short novel for The Harvard Lampoon. Signet published it in 1969. The two men would go on to found National Lampoon. What they made is a systematic parody of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, working through the prologue, the map, and every major chapter of the original. Over fifty years later, the book has not gone out of print. It has been translated into at least twelve languages. For a confessed money-grab, it has proven surprisingly difficult to stop printing.

• 2. Brand Names and Boggies

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  The carbonated beverages Moxie and Pepsi replace two of Tolkien's most beloved characters, Merry and Pippin. This is the parody's central method: swap the mythic for the commercial, and let the gap do the work. Tom Bombadil, the ancient nature-spirit of the original, becomes "Tim Benzedrine," a stereotypical hippie. His wife is called "Hashberry," a name that alludes to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. That neighbourhood was nicknamed Hashbury at the time for its hippie counterculture. Saruman becomes Serutan, an actual laxative brand, who lives in a "mighty fortress" with "pastel pink-and-blue walls." A "pale-lavender moat crossed by a bright-green drawbridge" gives access to an amusement park for tourists beyond it.

  Bilbo and Frodo Baggins become Dildo Bugger and Frito Bugger of Bug End. Gollum is Goddam. Aragorn, son of Arathorn, is renamed Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt. Minas Tirith is called Minas Troney, designed by a character called Beltelephon the senile. The Hobbits are referred to throughout as Boggies. Novelist David Barnett, writing a retrospective for The Guardian, noted that the characters also break the fourth wall. Near the start, Frito rolls his eyes and observes that "it was going to be a long epic." The fifth chapter closes as the characters "set out with Frito along the rising gorge that led to the next chapter." These fourth-wall breaks signal that the book is mocking not just Tolkien's story, but the conventions of epic adventure itself. One chapter title alone delivers the book's broadest pun: "Serutan Spelled Backwards is Mud."

• 3. Monsters, Scallions, Eagles

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  In "Some Monsters," a parody of Tolkien's encounter with the Watcher in the Water, the creature announces itself in pure dictionary. "Maim!" it roars. "Mutilate, mangle, crush. See HARM." The Fellowship has encountered not an ancient horror but a Thesaurus. They press on into the dread Andrea Doria, the book's name for Moria, and fight the ballhog, which is the Balrog. At the bridge, Bromosel hacks away quoting Latin: "Dulce et decorum," he says.

  Birdseye, Lord of the Vee-Ates, is the book's jolly green giant, standing in for Tolkien's Treebeard. He makes vegetable puns throughout, including "lettuce go." His forces later bombard Serutan's fortress with giant suicide scallions and kamikaze kumquats. "The ramparts were littered with chopped parsley, diced onion, and grated carrots."

  Frito enters Schlob's lair carrying a sword called Tweezer. He slashes at the creature's "sharp red fingernails," managing only to "chip the enamel." Spam fights back by frantically schpritzing insect repellent into "Schlob's bottomless gullet."

  Goodgulf, the stand-in for Gandalf, arrives at the siege of Minas Troney wearing "an old deep-sea diver's suit of stoutest latex." His weapon is "an ancient and trusty weapon, called by the elves a Browning semi-automatic." The rescue at the climax is performed by the eagle Gwahno, who runs the operation like an airline crew. He demands seatbelts be fastened, snaps about the barf bags, and complains about falling behind schedule. Frito arrives home, sits by his fire, and muses upon "the years of delicious boredom that lay ahead." Perhaps, the closing chapter suggests, he will take up Scrabble.

• 4. Paratexts and Packaging

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  Michael K. Frith, who later became known as a designer of the Muppets, drew the Signet first-edition cover. The cover parodied the 1965 Ballantine paperback covers by Barbara Remington. Those Remington designs were widely recognised in the 1960s. By the time later editions appeared, they had become obscure. Douglas Carrel drew new artwork for those later printings because the original visual joke could no longer land for modern readers.

  Inside, William S. Donnell provided a double-page parody map of "Lower Middle Earth." Labels include "The Square Valley Between the Mounts," "The Intermittent Mountains," the lands of "Fordor" and "Gonad," "The Big Wide River," "The Legendary Drillingrigs," and the "Lumbar" region.

  The book also lists other titles in the fictitious "Matzoh series," among them The Matzoh of Casterbridge and Matzoh Dick. A note appended to the list reads: "Unfortunately all of these books have been completely sold out." The inside-cover reviews mimic literary and academic praise. One fragment reads: "This book... tremor... Manichean guilt... existential... pleonastic... redundancy," attributed to a Mr. Orlando di Biscuit in the publication Hobnob. Another review is attributed to a Professor Hawley Smoot, writing in a journal titled Our Loosely Enforced Libel Laws. The laudatory back-cover review was written at Harvard, and may have been composed by Beard and Kenney themselves.

• 5. Better Than They Knew

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  David Bratman, a Tolkien scholar writing in Mythlore, quotes a scene where Frito, Spam Gangree, and Goddam jostle at the edge of the "Black Hole," a tar pit. His verdict is that "those parodists wrought better than they knew." His specific argument is that Tolkien, across many drafts, came very close to accidentally producing the parody version of his own novel. In Bratman's view, Tolkien avoided that fate remarkably completely.

  Mike Sacks describes Bored of the Rings as one of the earliest parodies of "a modern, popular bestseller." He also notes that the book has inspired many pop culture writers, including those who worked on Saturday Night Live and The Onion.

  Leah Schnelbach, writing on the science fiction and fantasy site Tor.com, calls the book "a cutting satire of shallow consumerism and the good-old-fashioned American road trip." In her reading, the eagle Gwahno is "the encapsulation of everything wrong with air travel." After the picaresque journey through American kitsch, she writes, the characters "end firmly in the angry, efficiency-at-all-costs Jet Age." She concludes that "this ridiculous parody becomes a commentary on the perils of modernism, just like Lord of the Rings itself."

  In his 2011 retrospective, Barnett places the book "somewhere between the classic US parody magazine Mad and National Lampoon's signature movie Animal House." He describes it as "cruder than the former but not quite as rude as the latter" and argues that "Kenney and Beard's respect and affection for the source material shines through." His chosen illustration is Dildo Bugger's first meeting with Goddam: "He would have finished Goddam off then and there, but pity stayed his hand. It's a pity I've run out of bullets, he thought."

  Delta 4 released a text adventure game titled Bored of the Rings in 1985. The game was inspired by the book but not directly based on it. In 2013, Orion Audiobooks released an audio version narrated by Rupert Degas. The book also appears in the film A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which covers the history of Beard and Kenney's years at The Harvard Lampoon and National Lampoon.

  The Finnish edition of 1983 is titled Loru sorbusten herrasta, meaning "a rhyme about the lord of Sorbus." The German translation, also from 1983, became Der Herr der Augenringe, or "Lord of the Eye Rings." The Norwegian Bokmal edition, Ringenes darskap, meaning "The Folly of the Rings," appeared in 2004, thirty-five years after the original, and still found new readers.