Bored of the Rings is a parody of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. This short novel was written by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney, who later founded National Lampoon. It was published in 1969 by Signet for the Harvard Lampoon. In 2013, an audio version was produced by Orion Audiobooks, narrated by Rupert Degas.
Overview
The parody closely follows the outline of The Lord of the Rings, lampooning the prologue and map of Middle-earth; its main text is a short satirical summary of Tolkien's plot. The witty text combines slapstick humour and deliberately inappropriate use of brand names. For example, the carbonated beveragesMoxie and Pepsi replace Merry and Pippin. Tom Bombadil appears as "Tim Benzedrine", a stereotypical hippie married to "Hashberry", a reference to Haight-Ashbury, a district of San Francisco nicknamed Hashbury and at the time known for its hippie counterculture. Other characters include Dildo Bugger of Bug End and Frito Bugger, Goddam, and Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt. The book includes:
A laudatory back cover review, written at Harvard, possibly by the authors themselves.
Inside cover reviews which are entirely contrived, concluding with a quotation by someone affiliated with the publication Our Loosely Enforced Libel Laws.
A list of other books in the "series," none of which exists.
A double-page map which has almost nothing to do with the events in the text.
The first text a browsing reader is liable to see purports to be a salacious sample from the book, but the episode never happens in the main text, nor does anything else of that tone; the book has no explicit sexual content.
Reception
The Tolkien critic David Bratman, writing in Mythlore, quotes an extended passage from the book in which Frito, Spam Gangree, and Goddam jostle on the edge of the "Black Hole", commenting "Those parodists wrought better than they knew", explaining that Tolkien, in his many drafts, came very close to "inadvertently writing the parody version of his own novel". The author Mike Sacks, quoting the book's opening lines, writes that the book has had the distinction, rare for a parody, of being continuously in print for over 40 years, was one of the earliest parodies of "a modern, popular bestseller", and has inspired many pop culture writers including those who worked on Saturday Night Live and The Onion.
Artwork
The Signetfirst edition cover, a parody of the 1965 Ballantine paperback cover by Barbara Remington, was drawn by Muppets designer Michael K. Frith. Current publications have different artwork by Douglas Carrel, since the paperback cover art for Lord of the Rings prevalent in the 1960s, then famous, is now obscure. William S. Donnell drew the "parody map" of Lower Middle Earth.
Derivative works
Several role-playing games developed in the 1980s, such as Delta 4's Bored of the Rings for machines such as the ZX Spectrum, were parodies based on Bored of the Rings.
Translations
Estonian:Sõrmuste lisand, was translated by Janno Buschmann and published in 2002.
Finnish:Loru sorbusten herrasta was translated by Pekka Markkula and published in 1983. Following the release of the Peter Jacksonfilm trilogy, it was republished in 2002.
French:Lord of the Ringards was issued in 2002.
German:Der Herr der Augenringe, was translated by, who also did the 1969-70 translations for Lord of the Rings.
Hungarian:Gyűrűkúra. This version was published first in 1991.
Italian:Il signore dei tranelli was issued by Fanucci Editore in 2002. The cover was drawn by Piero Crida, the same person who designed the covers of the "Lord of the ring" translations issued by Rusconi Libri s.p.a. in 1977.
Polish:Nuda Pierścieni was translated by Zbigniew A. Królicki and issued by Zysk i S-ka in 1997 and republished in 2001.
Portuguese :O Fedor dos Anéis was published in 2004.
Russian: Published in 1993 as Тошнит от колец, and in 2002 published again with the translation credited to Andrey Khitrov; another translation by Sergey Ilyin entitled Пластилин Колец published in 2002.
Spanish:El Sopor de los Anillos was translated by Jordi Zamarreño Rodea and Salvador Tintoré Fernández and published in 2001.
Swedish:Härsken på ringen was translated by Lena Karlin and published in 2003.
