"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
passing mention of the area around the Anacin River, between Plywood and the
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