"J.R.R. Tolkien - Bored of the Rings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)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 Brylcreem 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 Papier-Mache Mountains. There are other records in the great libraries of Twodor 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 Oleodor is uncertain, though again their songs tell of a shadow that fell upon the land so that the potatoes grew no more. Before the crossing of the Papier-Mache Mountains, the boggies had become divided into three distinct breeds: Clubfoots, Stools, and Naugahydes. The Clubfoots, by far the most numerous, were swarthy, shifty-eyed, and short; their hands and feet were as deft as crowbars. They preferred to live in the hillsides where they could mug rabbits and small goats, and they supported themselves by hiring out as torpedoes for the local dwarf population. The Stools were larger and oilier than the Clubfoots, and they lived in the fetid lands at the mouth and other orifices of the Anacin River, where they raised yaws and goiters for the river trade. They had long, shiny, black hair, and they loved knives. Their closest relations were with men, for whom they handled occasional rubouts. Least numerous were the Naugahydes, who were taller and wispier than the other boggies and who lived in the forests, where they maintained a thriving trade in leather goods, sandals, and handicrafts. They did periodic interior-decorating work for the elves, but spent most of their time singing lurid folk songs and accosting squirrels. Once across the mountains, the boggies lost no time establishing themselves. They shortened their names and elbowed their way into all the country clubs, dropping their old language and customs like a live grenade. An unusual easterly migration of men and elves from Oleodor at this same time |
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