Title Bored of the Rings Series --- Author Harvard Lampoon Cover Art Michael K. Frith Publisher Signet - 1969 First Printing Signet - 1969 Category Humour Warnings Explicit sex and rude jokes Main Characters Fritto Main Elements Parody

A quest, a war, a ring that would be grounds for calling any wedding off, a king without a kingdom, and a little, furry "hero" named Frito, ready - or maybe just forced by the wizard of Goodgulf - to undertake the one mission which can save Lower Middle Earth from enslavement by the evil Sorhed...Luscious Elfmaidens, a roller-skating dragon, ugly plants that can soul-kiss the unwary to death - these are just some of the ingredients in the wildest, wackiest, most irreverent excursion into fantasy realms that anyone has ever dared to undertake.

Alright, so let me put this first, I love Lord of the Rings, sure it can be a little slow at times and a little dense, but the world building is the most incredible and I read anything written by Tolkien I can get my hands on, even things like his translation of Beowulf which has nothing to do with Middle-Earth. But I'm human, I'm curious, I wondered what this "Bored of the Rings" thing was, but I also don't like rude/dumb/offensive humour (I don't watch late night shows, Saturday Night Live, or other generally irritiating shows, not that they don't have some stuff that makes me laugh, but for the most part I just cringe), so I didn't go into this book thinking I would like it.

And I didn't. I got some of the jokes, and few were good. I mean, it's a parody, don't go into it holding LotR on a pedastle and then get angry that this book insults it from every possible angle, but hey, that Deux Ex Machina Airline (i.e. the eagle rescue at the end) was kind of right on the mark. Also, this was written in 1969, a while before I was born, so I didn't get all the jokes or references to things that were period specific, or even if I did, it maybe didn't seem as funny to me as it would have from someone of the time period? I had the same problem with Gaiman/Pratchett's Good Omens, I don't live in London so didn't get some of the location specific jokes. But yeah...I thought Scary Movie was stupid and so I thought Bored of the Rings was pretty dumb too, the one or two things that actually made me laugh didn't make up for the fact that it wasn't an intelligent parody but an excuse to make things as crude and debased as possible. If you enjoy that kind of humour, go for it, otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I wouldn't have if it didn't show up in a used bookstore really cheap right after I found out about the existence of the book. That used bookstore is going to be able to sell it again soon.

And somehow, I never did figure out what that toothbrush on the cover was...Isengard? The pigs on pig are the Nazgul, and instead of horses Rohan has sheep. Aragorn is the Lone Ranger (ok, now that I wrote that out it makes so much more sense), hmm a lot of that cover still confuses me, perhaps it was some LSD charged dream that went above and beyond even the contents of the book...or my mind blissfully has already wiped out certain sections!

The Harvard Lampoon also did Dune, I shudder at the thought of what they did with the phallic sandworms...