Welcome!

So, what is this all about?

It's a long story, but in the beginning was Frodo Must Die. The idea was to write a critique of The Lord of The Rings, a book which both myself and Alex (my and sister) feel is vastly over-rated. The project as a whole never properly came to fruition, but this one part did: The Stunted Ring.

It's a spoof. Simple as that. But whereas most spoofs tend to send up the original and bear little relation, the idea behind The Stunted Ring was to paraphrase the novel. Everything that happens in The Stunted Ring also happens in The Lord of The Rings, and everything is in precisely the correct order. Alex, who did the paraphrasing, was extremely conscientious about that. Of course, as a spoof, The Stunted Ring can't be said to capture the spirit of the original, but it is much closer to the plot than, say, the Peter Jackson movies, excellent though they are.

The original idea came to us after reading the summaries of the three volumes on Book-A-Minute; for anyone who doesn't know these miniature works of art, here are the links:

• The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Two Towers
• The Return of the King

The aim of The Stunted Ring was to condense The Lord of the Rings into a 'Chapter-A-Minute', so to speak. Almost every chapter succeeds in that aim.

So if Alex paraphrased and condensed, what did I do? Well, my role was more that of a proof-reader and editor. I was also responsible for the titles—all of which are directly extracted from the text—and so any innuendo is entirely intentional and my fault (my favourite title is probably 'Scared and Legolas'). But the vast majority of the work is by Alex.

Now that The Stunted Ring is in a blog, I decided to use the post dates for the dates of the entries, rather than listing the dates separately. All of the dates given should be correct for the start of the relevant chapter. The only exception are a couple of the dates in very late February, as The Lord of the Rings uses a February with 30 days. The affected days were shunted either one day forwards or backwards, as seemed narratively appropriate.

What all this means is that, when reading The Stunted Ring, you can either follow the original order, starting with the menu items above and using the 'Next' link at the bottom of each entry, or you may select a month, and read the story as it unfolds in something closer to the actual chronology of the events.

The list of tags is actually intended to be pretty useless, and is itself a spoof of the indexes at the end of The Lord of The Rings—just in case you were wondering. Logically enough, 'ring' is at the top of the list with 20 hits; but 'singing' also has 20 hits, while 'trudging' has 18. That may or may not tell you a great deal ;-)

One final thing: if anyone finds any mistake in the text or in the links, or can think of any other tags which could be applied—that sort of thing—please feel free to leave a comment on the individual entry or to contact me.

Hope you find something in there to laugh at!
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