I’ve read it many times, and it always cracks my ass up. When I’m watching the movies and Gandalf tells Frodo how “pity stayed his hand,” I always lose it. I suspect millennials might not get the product name references and that would diminish it a bit for them. The rest of the humor seems pretty timeless, though.
We had a thread here many years ago where we tried to cast the movie version of BOTR. Might be time to try that again!
“As Goodgulf stepped onto the bridge the passage echoed with an ominous dribble, dribble, and a great crowd of narcs burst forth. In their midst was a towering dark shadow too terrible to describe. In its hand it held a huge black globe and on its chest was written in cruel runes, “Villanova.” “Aiyee,” shouted Legolam. “A ballhog!””
I think I had just finished the Hobbit in time for that. I feel like I read the Hobbit in September, maybe into October and was reading the LotR when The Hobbit aired. I also got into D&D right in the time period. I ripped through the Prydain Chronicles before Christmas also. My reading speed wasn’t all that fast back then, I had jumped from a below grade reader to 12th grade level in that school year. Thanks to Tolkien & Heinlein especially.
I read Prydain around the same time and The Dark is Rising series (I had to wait for the last one because it wasn’t published yet when I finished the next-to-last one) and the Narnia books, too, as well as a fair amount of Asimov, Anderson and Heinlein. Twas a good year.
I seem to recall the line “dribble, dribble…” was followed by “pass, missed basket, dribble…”
By coincidence I recently acquired a copy, having lost my original decades ago. The pop culture reference are, of course, extremely dated. The humor is, as others have noted, sophomoric. (Hey, I read it as a sophomore . ) But it’s amusing enough.
Lengthy discussion of the ballhog scene The One Ring Forums: Tolkien Topics: Reading Room: The Unofficial Bored of the Rings Discussion: Chapter V, "SOME MONSTERS" part III
I was actually at Villanova when I read it, and found that line hilarious just for how dated it was. At the time, the star of our team (Kerry Kittles) was remarkable for just how much of a team player he was, while the worst Balhog in the NCAA was at our archrival Georgetown (it turned out that they actually played better when Iverson was benched).
I remember reading it while working at a summer job in a paper mill somewhere around 1984. Someone had left it behind so I picked it up. I’d never read any Tolkien, though I was a little familiar with the lore, and I remember thinking it was hilarious. It probably had something to do with being eighteen years old and reading a book whose main character was named “Dildo”.
It was re-issued a few years ago.
My contributions from a thread almost lost in the mists of time.
“Hairy toes, I love hairy toes!”
“They melt in your brain, not in your hands!”
“Argle bargle morble whoosh.”
“O Dragonbreth! Gilthorpial!”
“A esso sysanon decca hi hawaya.” “O movado silvathin nytol nicetaseeya.”
“Fear not, I have come to make peas with you!”
Link to the thread, started in 2003, re-animated every so often.
The current edition has footnotes to explain (more or less) the references! :eek: I feel old! 
The audiobook is available on Hoopladigital, read by Jim Meskimen.
Sample from the foreword, about the Boggies:
I gotta have this!
I like it. And it was written decades before I was born.
A lot of the humor feels… I’m not really sure how to to word this. It reads like a bunch of college kids on a sugar-high stayed up until three in the morning shouting “Hey, I know! What if they rode sheep? Sheeeep!” As opposed a guy sitting at the computer, ticking off plot points and trying to think of the next part to tweak into something lolrandom.
Like, at one point I bought a book called “The Sillymarillion” because I thought that was the title of an actual BotR sequel. And it starts off in the first paragraph with that sort of manic energy, and then it kind of petered out. I mean, still kind of funny for the first few chapters, but it was a predictable kind of funny. Eventually it became basically “obligatory plot point, swap in something silly like making Huan a ferret, add a few running gags, next obligatory plot point”. There’s a certain method to BotR’s madness that’s hard to capture.
(To be fair, the Silmarillion is an entirely different sort of book than LotR, and the BotR-style of parody doesn’t work unless you make significant changes).
I think there’s a balrog in the woodpile here.
I made the error of virtually memorizing BOTR before I tried reading LOTR. Actually I tried to start with The Hobbit. I couldn’t get past the first chapter.
The knob! :smack:
Must dig my copy out and read again.
My grandson will probably like it.
Just reading this thread is making me giggle. I read it in 1970 and it’s alarming how much of it is still committed to memory. Whenever Villanova turns up in March Madness the phrase “cruel runes” pops into mind, followed by “aiyeee! A ballhog!”