Lord of the Rings, as Written By Everyone Else

sn0rt writes "A thread on Straight Dope asks what would happen if someone else had written the Lord of the Rings. Reader submissions include Ernest Hemingway, Douglas Adams, Mark Twain, HP Lovecraft, ee cumings, Milton, Mickey Spillane, Danielle Steele, Ayn Rand(!!), Ray Bradbury, Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Clancy. My favourite is Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One. You have a slim chance, but I have none. I will not take it on a boat, I will not take it across a moat. I cannot take it under Moria, that's one thing I can't do for ya. I would not bring it into Mordor, I would not make it to the border.'"

Comments

I don't see why this story is on /.

[Thaelon]

If anyone else had written Lord of the Rings it wouldn't be as good as it is. It may have been good but it wouldn't be Lord of the Rings.

This is just silly.

Go ahead and mark it flaimbait, but I just don't think this story is worthy of /. If they hadn't finally made LotR into good movies this certainly wouldn't make it to /. LotR had a more of a cult following before the movies, now everybody is down with the hobbits.

Re:it's a good thing it wasn't...

[Phroggy]

Except of course there is no construct for "To Be" in Klingon. The linguist who designed it was a bit of a purist. Needless to say he had to do a bit of interesting work with the dialog to translate Hamlet's speach for the Undiscovered Country. LOL

In case anyone is wondering, the reason for this is that in Klingon, all adjectives are really verbs. For example, "to be big" or "to be green" are each one verb, so "the ship is big" is two words, "the ship" and "is big". I don't remember how that line was translated; I think a new verb "to be" was created, which is never used except in Shakespeare.

More general information here.