Also, Farmer Giles of Ham is a parody of the fantasy genre, just as a word of warning if you go looking for it. It’s the converse of LotR, written just after and containing many affectionate jabs at the genre (and one that pokes fun at his own specialty, linguistics) that would have been wholly inappropriate in the middle of the epic.
Perhaps he wrote it in order to show people why he disliked allegory so much?
Tim! Tim! Benzedrine!
Hash! Boo! Valvoline!
Clean! Clean! Clean for Gene!
First, second, neutral, park!
Hie thee hence you leafy narc!
BTW, that curse was directed at a certain carnivorous plant in “Bored of the Rings”
Sometimes life hands you the perfect straight line…
Heh! The only problem with Bored of the Rings (and pretty much any Harvard Lampoon publication) is that the humor tends to get very dated. “Clean for Gene”? Is there any average person under the age of 40 who actually remembers Eugene McCarthy, let alone remembers one of his weirder campaign slogans?
It is worth it for such classic lines as (Tim?) ‘Tom Benzedrine’s Old Lady’
Tim. He was almost certainly meant to represent Timothy Leary.
Her brothers can also attend.
It’s at the end of his arm…it must be a hand.
Kodak khaki no-doz!
Aieee! A Ballhog!
don’t get me started…
Do the part about the Thesaurus and the Faggot.
dribble, dribble, dribble, fake, dribble, fake, dribble, shoot, swish!
“Aieeeeee!” cried Legolam. “A Ballhog!”
What, am I here to perform tricks for you?
All I remember about the Thesaurus was that he had a pronounced gazeteer.
Somebody was brandishing a burning faggot. “You dieth, GI” cried the faggot.
What were the cruel runes on the Ballhog’s chest?
Wasn’t it “Villanova”?
And so we circle back to Balrogs…sort of.
I love this place.
Either that or “Kelvinator”.
“Villanova” is correct. “Kelvinator” was on Tim Benzedrine’s amulet.
This site has lots of BOTR excerpts!
http://www.baumannfamily.com/bored/
Possible, I suppose. I can’t figure out why my kid does things, let alone a writer from a different country who died when I was in high school. All the same, your theory seems unlikely. AFAICT, Leaf by Niggle is an allegory containing a lot of standard Roman Catholic doctrine. Tolkien was a devout RC, and I can’t imagine him deliberately sending up something he took very seriously. Maybe he just felt like trying out something new, to see how he could do in a non-congenial area.
Except that Leaf by Niggle is hardly Tolkien’s only allegory. Smith of Wooton Major is allegorical down to its ickle toesies, too. None of the Middle-Earth books, however, is. The feel is entirely different. You can tell quite easily that the events in M-E were intended to have actually happened, as opposed to being misty moral-in-a-box allegories like LbyN and SoWM.