Appreciating “Bored of the Rings”

Daniel Stride has dusted off an ancient copy of Bored of the Rings, a parody by the Harvard Lampoon. I think “Harvard Lampoon” means the authors were mostly Douglas Kenney and Henry Beard, bouncing ideas off a bunch of their old college buddies.  Spoiler: Dan thinks it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

To be fair, he’s too young to get most of the jokes. In fact, I’m too young to get most of the jokes, but at least when I read it ~1975 there were people around whom I could ask. (With one exception: anyone who knows what the verb “dry-gulch” means is requested to tell us in the comments.) I have occasionally thought that the most useless possible work of scholarship would be to compile a list of explanations of all the references in the text.¹ If anyone’s going to do that, they’d better hurry. The Baby Boomers they’ll need as sources are fewer every year.

I agree with Dan’s individual points. For example, it’s true that the authors kind of ratchet down after the story meets Orlon in Riv’n’dell. I can’t help noting that this contains a meta-joke that the authors couldn’t have made on purpose. Since the History of Middle-earth was published, we now know Tolkien himself thought there were only a few more chapters after Bingo & Co. got to Rivendell. Everyone thinks it’s a natural transition place.

Accept no substitutes.

Where I disagree with Dan is in the way of looking at Bored of the Rings. If we look at the Lampoon’s text as a parody of Tolkien’s text, we’re straying from the authors’ intent, and missing half the fun. Bored of the Rings should be seen as a physical object. A book, not a text. The authors are explicit about this in their Foreword — their purpose is to produce a thing they can sell to make money. If that requires words to be written, then so be it. But they’re not the main point of their creation. The authors’ real interest is in the book as an object. As evidence, the three laugh-out-loud-funny things I can remember, half a century later:

The green box on the back cover of the authorized paperback edition of LotR (which Dan mentions) ends with the line, “Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other.” The green box on the back of Bored ends with, “Those who approve of courtesy to a certain other living author will not touch this gobbler with a ten-foot battle lance.” That immortal line won’t work if it’s inside. It has to be on the back cover, to be read by people who have not yet purchased the book.

The second is from the Bored equivalent of “The Ring Goes South”:

“We cannot stay here, ” said Arrowroot.

“No,” agreed Bromosel, looking across the gray surface of the page to the thick half of the book still in the reader’s right hand. “We have a long way to go.”

This exchange takes place on page 80 of a 160-page book. Exactly half of the book was in my right hand.

The third is a masterpiece of typesetting: At the bottom of Page 143, Pepsi is worried about Sorhed’s imminent attack on Minas Troney. Goodgulf assures him the attack isn’t coming soon, and their reinforcements will arrive in plenty of time. The last line at the bottom of the right-hand page is, “Trust me,” said Goodgulf. “Wizards know many things.” Then you turn the page, and the top of Page 144 reads, “The surprise attack at dawn the next day caught everyone by surprise.”  This falls flat unless the text and the printer’s layout are in perfect harmony. Once again, the physical book is essential to the joke.

The later editions (such as the one featured on “A Phuulish Fellow”) don’t necessarily have all this right. It’s a miscarriage of humor, justifiable only by the fact that cashing in with the minimum possible effort is the stated purpose of the work.  In fact, cashing-in is more than a purpose. It rises to the status of Theme.  Because, after all, the real target of the parody isn’t Tolkien. It’s us. The tawdriness, the tackiness, the commercialization we see everywhere in Bored are a word to the wise about what awaits Middle-earth in the hands of people like us. When Burger King advertisements came out in 2001, offering cheap glass goblets as a promotion for the Peter Jackson films, I had to admit the Lampoon crew were prophets.

So that brings me to an interesting place. My disdain for the current state of copyright law is well known by everyone who’s had the misfortune to be in earshot, but in this case I can almost understand it. What force can stand against rampaging commercialization, but a pre-positioned commercial interest?

1. People have done this for P.D.Q. Bach! https://wikipdq.fandom.com/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach_Wiki