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  “Do you like what you doth see . . . ?” said the voluptuous elf-maiden as she provocatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded, shadowy glories within. Frito’s throat was dry, though his head reeled with desire and ale.

  She slipped off the flimsy garment and strode toward the fascinated boggie unashamed of her nakedness. She ran a perfect hand along his hairy toes, and he helplessly watched them curl with the fierce insistent wanting of her.

  “Let me make thee more comfortable,” she whispered hoarsely, fiddling with the clasps of his jerkin, loosening his sword belt with a laugh. “Touch me, oh touch me,” she crooned.

  Frito’s hand, as though of its own will, reached out and traced the delicate swelling of her elf-breast, while the other slowly crept around her tiny, flawless waist, crushing her to his barrel chest.

  “Toes, I love hairy toes,” she moaned, forcing him down on the silvered carpet. Her tiny, pink toes caressed the luxuriant fur of his instep while Frito’s nose sought out the warmth of her precious elf-navel.

  “But I’m so small and hairy, and . . . and you’re so beautiful,” Frito whimpered, slipping clumsily out of his crossed garters.

  The elf-maiden said nothing, but only sighed deep in her throat and held him more firmly to her faunlike body. “There is one thing you must do for me first,” she whispered into one tufted ear.

  “Anything,” sobbed Frito, growing frantic with his need. “Anything!”

  She closed her eyes and then opened them to the ceiling. “The Ring,” she said. “I must have your Ring.”

  Frito’s whole body tensed. “Oh no,” he cried, “not that! Anything but . . . that.”

  “I must have it,” she said both tenderly and fiercely. “I must have the Ring!”

  Frito’s eyes blurred with tears and confusion. “I can’t,” he said. “I mustn’t!”

  But he knew resolve was no longer strong in him. Slowly, the elf-maiden’s hand inched toward the chain in his vest pocket, closer and closer it came to the Ring Frito had guarded so faithfully . . .

  CONTENTS

  Boreword

  Foreword

  Prologue—Concerning Boggies

  I: It’s My Party and I’ll Snub Who I Want To

  II: Three’s Company, Four’s a Bore

  III: Indigestion at the Sign of the Goode Eats

  IV: Finders Keepers, Finders Weepers

  V: Some Monsters

  VI: The Riders of Roi-Tan

  VII: Serutan Spelled Backwards Is Mud

  VIII:S chlob’s Lair and Other Mountain Resorts

  IX: Minas Troney in the Soup

  X: Be It Ever So Horrid

  BOREWORD

  Forty-odd years ago (and some of those years were very odd indeed), when Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney approached me with a proposal to recount the tale of my misadventures with that stupid ring, my first reaction was, Who would give a rodent’s hindquarters about the doings and undoings of a bunch of made-up misfits in a two-bit fantasyland like Lower Middle Earth? And as I sit here four decades later, it’s still hard to believe that the colossal turkey they produced ended up selling more than a million copies, and even harder to believe that they actually lived up to their promise to fork over a healthy cut of the proceeds.

  Now, I really wouldn’t even have noticed the sort-of-fortieth anniversary of the book’s publication (which anniversary is that anyway—the Corduroy Anniversary? Formica? Aluminum?) if I hadn’t gotten a note from my agent telling me there was going to be a quasiquadragennial edition of Bored of the Rings and asking for a brief preface bringing everyone up to date on the whereabouts and whatabouts and howabouts of the whole motley crew of fellow shipwreck survivors.

  Well, here’s the rundown in a nutshell (which is where most of these nut jobs belong): Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt, the self-styled Glorious King of Twodor, quickly lived up to his sobriquet “Stomper” as he crushed opposition to his increasingly despotic rule underfoot, triggering a strong condemnation from the normally apathetic League of Mythical Nations for his decision to unleash the fiend-for-hire narcs, Karsh and Goulash, on pockets of peaceful resistance in the back streets of Minas Troney; Sorhed, the deposed dark lord of Fordor, made an effortless segue to Wall Street, where he started the hedge funds BlackHeart, the Finagle Group, and Maraud Foray Associates and the private equity firms Pillage Ravish Ransack and Barabbas Capital Management; Serutan decamped from his sorcerer’s digs at Isinglass and set up shop as a lobbyist on Washington’s K Street, where he and his shifty spokescreep, Wormcast, currently serve as political advisers and dirty-tricks plotters to a number of mogul-financed influential super PACs, including Raising Our Values, the Club for Wealth, Making Freedom Pay, Restore Our Future Now, and Citizens for Better Slogans; Goodgulf Grayteeth traded his wizard’s cloak for a guru’s robes and reinvented himself as Swami Goodvibe Greensneeze, patriarch of the Temple of Holistic Mystification in a strip mall in Tucson, where he produces glitzy misinfomercials promoting a whole line of Babe in the Woods brand potions, lotions, philters, and balms guaranteed to cure everything from ice cream headaches to those little white spots under your fingernails; Legolam the elf took off for Vegas, where he tapped his rockabanshee music roots to perform such all-time hits as “You Ain’t Nothing but a Balrog,” “All Spooked Up,” “A Ghoul Such as I,” and “Let Me Be Your Poltergeist” while dressed in gaudy sequin-studded enchanted-forest duds as part of a memorable over-the-top lounge act that spawned a host of Elvish imitators; the dwarf Gimlet, son of Groin, moved to Montana where he opened the first of the now more than one hundred outlets of Gnome Depot, the phenomenally successful chain of cave-improvement stores catering to off-the-grid survivalists and back-to-the-earth ground huggers; Tim Benzadrine and Hashberry opened a head shop in Santa Cruz which had a modest beginning offering tie-dyed dashikis, origami lava lamp shades, and psychedelic finger paint but eventually became California’s largest licensed seller of recently legalized dental marijuana; Goddam slithered off to Latvia, where he is rumored to be the sinister rogue programmer behind the shadowy internet portal Goblin.com and its malware-laden antisocial-media websites Lurker, Stalker, Skulker, Snoopon, Sneakypete, and Wikisnitch; Bromosel and Farahslax hit pay dirt on World Wrestling’s SmackDown, where as the ultimate bad-guy tag-team duo they pioneered the classic crowd-pleasing mat moves the Folding Chair Head Slam, the Water Bucket Helmet Stuff, and the Flying Referee; my fellow boggies-in-arms Moxie and Pepsi headed off to Hollywood, and after a brief stint performing in midget-themed X-rated movies like Pixie Lust, Wee Wi
llie Bonks Her, and A Troll in the Hay with Honey, they started Dingleberry’s of Beverly Hills, a million-dollar mail-order catalog business specializing in eco-friendly sustainably-sourced sex toys and gluten-free edible undergarments; and dotty old Dildo is passing his days at Ye Olde Fairyfolks’ Home, Orlon and Garfinkel’s assisted-drooling facility in Riv’n’dell, where he rambles on and on with long-winded stories about dragons and hidden treasures and walking trees and winged serpents and giant spiders.

  And yours truly? Well, if you somehow managed to slog through Bored of the Rings (in which case, please accept my sincere apologies), you may remember the hanky-dampening ending to the tale where I bolt the door against the twelve-foot-tall unicorn-riding scarlet-garbed wraith bearing the ID Bracelet of Doom summoning me to yet another dopey crusade, and resolve to lead a quiet life of delicious boredom pursuing some aimless pastime, like Scrabble. Actually, it turned out to be golf, and every day I set forth on the rugged linksland with my faithful caddie, Spam Gangree, engaged in a different sort of completely pointless quest filled with laughable hazards, goofy rituals, and totally fictitious accounts of improbable happenings.

  Lo and behold, here comes the Spamster now with my bag of sticks, a pocket full of juiced-up bandit balls, a handful of spring-loaded ball markers, and one of those nifty elastic gimme-putt measuring tapes. But who, you might ask, pays my hefty club dues and ponies up the spondulics for my whopping bar bill? Why you, of course, dear reader, and in this wondrous age of e-books, when you can make a piece of literary puppy poop like this pop up on the screen of a magic tablet at the press of a button, it seems more than ever as though there is at least one of you gentle, trusting souls born just about every darn minute.

  And to paraphrase Spock, my fellow fictional pointy-eared weirdo, may you live long so I may prosper!

  Frito Bugger

  Bug End

  Spring 2012

  FOREWORD

  Though we cannot with complete candor state, as does Professor T., that “the tale grew in the telling,” we can allow that this tale (or rather the necessity of hawking it at a bean a copy) grew in direct proportion to the ominous dwindling of our bank accounts at the Harvard Trust in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This loss of turgor in our already emaciated portfolio was not, in itself, cause for alarm (or “alarum” as Professor T. might aptly put it), but the resultant threats and cuffed ears received at the hands of creditors were. Thinking long on this, we retired to the reading lounge of our club to meditate on this vicissitude.

  The following autumn found us still in our leather chairs, plagued with bedsores and appreciably thinner, but still without a puppy biscuit for the lupine pest lolling around the front door. It was at this point that our palsied hands came to rest on a dog-eared nineteenth printing of kindly old Prof. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Dollar signs in our guileless eyes, we quickly ascertained that it was still selling like you know whats. Armed to the bicuspids with thesauri and reprints of international libel laws, we locked ourselves in the Lampoon squash court with enough Fritos and Dr Pepper to choke a horse. (Eventually the production of this turkey actually required the choking of a small horse, but that’s another story entirely.)

  Spring found us with decayed teeth and several pounds of foolscap covered with inky, illegible scrawls. A quick rereading proved it to be a surprisingly brilliant satire on Tolkien’s linguistic and mythic structures, filled with little takeoffs on his use of Norse tales and wicked phoneme fricatives. A cursory assessment of the manuscript’s sales appeal, however, convinced us that dollarwise the thing would be better employed as tinder for the library fireplace. The next day, handicapped by near-fatal hangovers and the loss of all our bodily hair (but that’s another story), we sat down at two supercharged, fuel-injected, 345-hp Smith-Coronas and knocked off the opus you’re about to read before tiffin. (And we take tiffin pretty durn early in these parts, buckaroo.) The result, as you are about to see for yourself, was a book as readable as Linear A and of about the same literary value as an autographed gatefold of St. Simon Stylites.

  “As for any inner meanings or ‘message,’” as Professor T. said in his foreword, there is none herein except that which you may read into it yourself. (Hint: What did P. T. Barnum say was “born every minute”?) Through this book, we hope, the reader may find deeper insights not only into the nature of literary piracy but into his own character as well. (Hint: What is missing from this famous quotation? “A ______ and his ______ soon are ______.” You have three minutes. Ready, set, go!)

  Bored of the Rings has been issued in this form as a parody. This is very important. It is an attempt to satirize the other books, not simply to be mistaken for them. Thus, we must strongly remind you that this is not the real thing! So if you’re about to purchase this copy thinking it’s about the Lord of the Rings, then you’d better put it right back onto that big pile of remainders where you found it. Oh, but you’ve already read this far, so that must mean that—that you’ve already bought . . . oh dear . . . oh my . . . (Tote up another one on the register, Jocko. “Ching!”)

  Lastly, we hope that those of you who have read Prof. Tolkien’s remarkable trilogy already will not be offended by our little spoof of it. All fooling aside, we consider ourselves honored to be able to make fun of such an impressive, truly masterful work of genius and imagination. After all, that is the most important service a book can render, the rendering of enjoyment, in this case, enjoyment through laughter. And don’t trouble yourself too much if you don’t laugh at what you are about to read, for if you perk up your pink little ears, you may hear the silvery tinkling of merriment in the air, far, far away. . . .

  It’s us, buster. Ching!

  PROLOGUE — CONCERNING BOGGIES

  This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets and who grow up to be muggers, dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of Prof. Tolkien’s interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting the kind of scorch marks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by placing Prof. Tolkien’s books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells account of Dildo Bugger’s earlier adventures, called by him Travels with Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth, but wisely renamed by the publisher Valley of the Trolls.1

  Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of pastoral squalor. They don’t like machines more complicated than a garrote, a blackjack, or a Luger, and they have always been shy of the “Big Folk” or “Biggers,” as they call us. As a rule they now avoid us, except on rare occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or hunter. They are a little people, smaller than dwarves, who consider them puny, sly, and inscrutable and often refer to them as the “boggie peril.” They seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering creatures half their size when they get the drop on them. As for the boggies of the Sty, with whom we are chiefly concerned, they are unusually drab, dressing in shiny gray suits with narrow lapels, alpine hats, and string ties. They wear no shoes, and they walk on a pair of hairy blunt instruments which can only be called feet because of the position they occupy at the end of their legs. Their faces have a pimply malevolence that suggests a deep-seated fondness for making obscene telephone calls, and wh
en they smile, there is something in the way they wag their foot-long tongues that makes Komodo dragons gulp with disbelief. They have long, clever fingers of the sort one normally associates with hands that spend a good deal of time around the necks of small, furry animals and in other people’s pockets, and they are very skillful at producing intricate and useful things, like loaded dice and booby traps. They love to eat and drink, play mumblety-peg with dim-witted quadrupeds, and tell off-color dwarf jokes. They give dull parties and cheap presents, and they enjoy the same general regard and esteem as a dead otter.

  It is plain that boggies are relatives of ours, standing somewhere along the evolutionary line that leads from rats to wolverines and eventually to Italians, but what our exact relationship is cannot be told. Their beginnings lie far back in the Good Old Days when the planet was populated with the kind of colorful creatures you have to drink a quart of Old Overcoat to see nowadays. The elves alone preserve any records of that time, and most of them are filled with elf-stuff, raunchy pictures of naked trolls and sordid accounts of “orc” orgies. But the boggies had clearly lived in Lower Middle Earth for a long time before the days of Frito and Dildo, when, like a very old salami that suddenly makes its presence known, they came to trouble the councils of the Small and the Silly.

  This was all in the Third, or Sheet-Metal, Age of Lower Middle Earth, and the lands of that age have long since dropped into the sea and their inhabitants into bell jars at the Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not Odditorium. Of their original home, the boggies of Frito’s time had lost all records, partly because their level of literacy and intellectual development could have been equaled by a young blowfish and partly because their fondness for genealogical studies made them dislike the notion that their elaborately forged family trees had roots about as steady as Birnham Wood. It is nevertheless clear from their heavy accents and their fondness for dishes cooked in Brylcreem2 that somewhere in their past they went west in steerage. Their legends and old songs, which deal mainly with oversexed elves and dragons in heat, make passing mention of the area around the Anacin River,3 between Plywood and the Papier-Mâché Mountains. There are other records in the great libraries of Twodor4 which lend credence to such a notion, old articles in the Police Gazette and the like. Why they decided to undertake the perilous crossing into Oleodor5 is uncertain, though again their songs tell of a shadow