Bored of The Rings - Overview

Overview

The parody generally follows the outline of The Lord of the Rings, including the preface, the prologue, poetry, and songs, while making light of what Tolkien made serious (e.g., "He would have finished him off then and there, but pity stayed his hand. It's a pity I've run out of bullets, he thought, as he went back up the tunnel..."). Names and words in the various languages are parodied with brand names which mimic their sounds (for example, Moxie and Pepsi replace Merry and Pippin). There are many topical references, including once-popular brand names. It has the distinction for a parody of having been continuously in print since it was first published.

Aside from the text itself, the book includes five elements that parody common features of mass-market books:

• A laudatory back cover review, written at Harvard, possibly by the authors themselves.
• Inside cover reviews which are entirely contrived, concluding with a quote by someone affiliated with the publication Our Loosely Enforced Libel Laws.
• A list of other books in the "series", none of which exist.
• 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.

The Signet first 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 60s, then famous, is now obscure. William S. Donnell drew the "parody map" of Lower Middle Earth.