Reception and Adaptation Studies

The year 2013 marked the rise of The Hobbit to a general public attention that had previously been reserved for The Lord of the Rings. This was, of course, due to the release at the end of 2012 of the first of MGM’s three films based on the book. Not surprisingly, two parodies of The Hobbit have been released in anticipation of a public that will buy anything related to the films; both are titled The Wobbit. The writers of the Harvard Lampoon have a brand-name advantage here, as that publication still owns the gold standard of Tolkien parody, Bored of the Rings (1969). The jokes in their The Wobbit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013) are often clever, wide ranging in their references, and “original,” that is, funny in themselves rather than funny merely as take-offs of Tolkien. Examples include Thorin as a cliché-spouting spoof of Aaron Sorkin, the Trolls as Internet trolls, the Great Goblin as Tony from The Sopranos (does he die?), and a very funny grimness duel between Bard and Dain. But when the jokes go flat, they go very flat indeed—for instance, Jewish dialect jokes replace the famous riddles, the Elven King is a stoned Elvisking in Graceland, an obscure and dated Nixon rules over Raketown—and the result is anything but fluid. Some susceptible Tolkien scholars may be amused by a few erudite references (Gollum courteously guides Bilbo out, there is a quote from letter 211 [Letters 277–84], etc.), and there are a few clever swipes at Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films.

One seldom gets (or wants) a chance to compare two such parodies, but Paul Erickson has self-published his The Wobbit (Middletown, DE: Erickson, 2011), showing that there is more than one way to write such a book, if not to title it. Erickson gives his story a consistent thematic structure, with the Dwarves as a banking firm intent on recovering their lost corporate headquarters. “Bulbo” is a disgruntled ex-employee of the bank who is taken on as a consultant. The overall tone is a cynical appreciation of modern-day life as antithetical to the naïve heroism of Tolkien’s story. The characters always voice realistic appraisals of the situations: Bulbo hates the dwarves and betrays them several times, they all regard Pantsoff the wizard as useless, everyone recognizes the impossibility of killing the dragon or transporting the dragon treasure, and so on. Although many of the pop-culture jokes are quite clever, the book sticks too closely to The Hobbit, as if the author felt obliged to make fun of every sentence in every chapter.

A third humorous approach to Tolkien this season is actually a kind of self-parody. Adam Roberts has previously published a Hobbit parody (The Soddit, 2003), and his new book I, Soddit (London: Gollancz, 2013) keeps the salable “Soddit” in its title, but it is not a parody of a Tolkien book. It is rather a satire of the whole Tolkien phenomenon, a mélange of insanely complex jokes, puns, and cross-references to the legend-arium, associated fantasy pop culture, and contemporary English life. The Soddit hero, Bingo Grabbins, and his ghost writer and lover (an actual ghost) are trying to write his autobiography, but an awkward series of murders puts Bingo under suspicion; by the end, an English murder mystery collides with an apocalyptic war between the plants and the animals. Hilarity does not exactly ensue, and the general sense is that the author is pleased with himself even if no one else is. There is something of Lewis Carroll in the absurdity of some of the situations, but not in so controlled or clever a style.

The question raised by Roberts, of what happens when a parodist falls in love with his parody and invents a new story to give himself a place to keep fooling around, is thankfully a rare one. But this being an excellent time to return any Tolkien parody to the bookstores, Bored of the Rings has been reissued (New York: Touchstone, 2012). In a new “Boreword,” one...