"J.R.R. Tolkien - Bored of the Rings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

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 scorchmarks 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_.
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 when 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