PROLOGUE--
CONCERNING BOGGIES
This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets, and who grow up to be muggers, dog thieves and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of Prof. Tolkien's interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting the kind of scorchmarks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers, we have collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by placing Prof. Tolkien's books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells account of Dildo Bugger's earlier adventures, called by him
Travels with Gollum in Search of Lower Middle Earth, but wisely renamed by the publisher
Valley of the Trolls.
Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of pastoral squalor. They don't like machines more complicated than a garrote, a blackjack, or a luger, and they have always been shy of the "Big Folk" or "Biggers", as they call us. As a rule they now avoid us, except on rare occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or hunter. They are a little people, smaller than dwarves, who consider them puny, sly, and inscrutable and often refer to them as the "boggie peril". They seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering creatures half their size when they get the drop on them. As for the boggies of the Sty, with whom we are chiefly concerned, they are unusually drab, dressing in shiny gray suits with narrow lapels, alpine hats, and string ties. They wear no shoes, and they walk on a pair of hairy blunt instruments which can only be called feet because of the position they occupy at the end of their legs. Their faces have a pimply malevolence that suggests a deep-seated fondness for making obscene telephone calls, and when they smile there is something in the way they wag their foot-long tongues that makes Komodo dragons gulp with disbelief.
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Originally Posted by Jonathan Kwiat
I think I wasn't quite old enough to be a good hippie at the time. I was raised by an odd couple named Sonny and Cher, no really! My father was a very principled conservative while my mother was a hippie who was 16 years younger than him. I like the whole free love thing, but drugs are bad. Mmkay?
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