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Once
upon a time there was a balrog called Ballyhocks who got lost in the
woods. After a long, tiring walk he came to a clearing among the trees,
and in the clearing there was a cute house which belonged to three
hobbits. The hobbits were out picking mushrooms, so Ballyhocks went into
the empty house On the kitchen table, he found three bowls of porridge:
one big, one of medium size and one small. First he tasted the porridge in
the big bowl, but it was too hot. Then he tasted the porridge in the
medium-sized bowl, but it was too cold. Then he tasted the porridge in the
little bowl, and it was just right, though that circumstance is a bit of a
thermodynamic riddle since it should have been even colder than the
porridge in the medium-sized bowl. Anyway, afterwards the balrog went
upstairs, pulled together the three hobbit beds and fell asleep on them.
When the three hobbits came home, they heard the balrog snoring
upstairs, so they went right up and killed it with a blunderbuss. A
blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs,
though the hobbits' blunderbuss had a wide mouth that opened like a horn,
and they did not fill it with balls or slugs but with old nails and bits
of wire, pieces of broken pot, bones and stones and other rubbish. And
then they aimed it at the balrog and fired.
Since the balrog had eaten most of their porridge, they decided to
boil
him and have him for supper instead. But when they had boiled the balrog,
they couldn't eat him because his carcass was full of hard, lumpy things
from the blunderbuss. So they decided to mash him to make him softer and
more edible. However, the balrog mash was still full of hard, lumpy
things, so then they stuck him in a stew. They called the stew pot ā
feu, and since, as everybody knows, dishes with French names are
supposed to be full of strange, inedible things, they ate it all with the
greatest relish until all three hobbits burst from having eaten too much.
Then a fox came upon the scene. He stopped several minutes and
sniffed. "Hobbits!" he thought. "Well, what next?"
Then the fox ate the three burst hobbits, and afterwards he set fire to
the house and sowed potatoes in the ashes. For the fox was a firm believer
in "slash and burn" subsistence farming.
~
Öjevind Lång
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