Bored of the Rings
by Henry Beard, Harvard Lampoon, Douglas C. Kenney, Jean Little, Jim Meskimen · first published 1969
21% recommend71% neutral7% critical
This is a parody of "The Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkien. It is very brief, comparatively, and not to be taken seriously. It is meant to be amusing even if a bit vulgar.
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I'm a bit Lord-ed out. A Bored of the Rings[1] adaptation could be fun, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings
on “Amazon Wants to Turn Lord of the Rings into the Next Game of Thrones” ↗The inside front cover blurb for Bored of the Rings is quite entertaining and bears no resemblance to the contents in the slightest. By not reading the jacket, you'd miss this little gem. “Do you like what you doth see . . . ?” said the voluptuous elf-maiden…
on “The Case for Never Reading the Book Jacket” ↗I found his character a bit weird, in The Rings of Power. I suspect we'll be seeing more of him, if they ever get around to releasing another season. I enjoyed Tim Benzedrine, and Hashberry, from Bored of the Rings.
on “The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings” ↗…permission from the copyright holder. Star Wars is OK. Pern? Not so much. Oh, and sometimes you can both write and sell fanfic legally, no matter what the copyright holder thinks. For a famous example, Bored of the Rings is legal because it is marked as parody. Moving on to open source, you are even more squarely wrong. The definition of open source, as found at https://opensource.org/osd-annotated, in item #6 says…
on “Open Source is Not About You” ↗…the well-trimmed beard was recognizable through the helmet’s little round window. In his hand he carried an ancient and trusty weapon, called by the elves a Browning semiautomatic." - Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings
on “Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?” ↗That's pretty much what Harvard Lampoon did back in 1969: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings
on “How I Defeated the Tolkien Estate” ↗Anyone read Bored of the Rings?
on “Middle-earth according to Mordor - The Lord of the Rings retold” ↗…I had started work with an early release of Pascal from Professor Niklaus Wirth's ETH Labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a National Lampoon parody of the Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment.…
on “How to Get Fired Using Switch Statements and Statement Expressions” ↗It reads like "Bored of the Rings", but without the sly humor.
on “Bot Writes New Harry Potter Book” ↗…know if our modern press ever gets press kits like these, but it was not dumbed-down much at all, which was very nice to see. The Adventures of Samurai Cat, Mark Rogers : Silly fun. Kind of like if Bored of the Rings had been written by Jerry Bruckheimer and Spider Jerusalem. Into the cool, Sagan and Schnieder : about complexity and thermodynamics. Written for a layperson, I still learned a lot from it. Order out…
on “Ask HN: What are the best books you've read that few others have?” ↗Would we? You can do that now because parody is exempted from copyright, so there's not much preventing you from doing Zombie Lord of the Rings or whatever (Tolkien parody works already exist, eg Bored of the Rings).
on “Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done” ↗Worse, they were counterculture. "Bored of the Rings" came out in 1969. People also forget that fantasy tropes were "evil and satanic" up through about the 1980s.
on “Modern movies teach us awful lessons [video]” ↗See also Tim Benzedrine in Bored of the Rings[0] [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings
on “Who Is Tim Bombadil?” ↗…Any derivative ideas may not be retransmitted, reproduced, rebroadcast You are exaggerating. For example, there are any number of derivative work of Tolkien, including parodies like National Lampoon's "Bored of the Rings", or Pat Murphy's rewrite of "The Hobbit" as the space opera "There and Back Again". These neither infringe upon copyright nor are generally considered plagiarism. Copyright infringement and plagiarism…
on “A plagiarism scandal is unfolding in the crossword puzzle world” ↗You are if it's parody, cf 'Bored of the Rings'.
on “US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired” ↗