Making Fun Of It

[The Saucepan Man]

Do intentional parodies of Tolkien's works count? I received The Soddit for Christmas, and I must say that it is, in parts, incredibly well-observed.

I love the following passage, which comprises part of the description of Soddits:

What else? That they are conservative, rural, bourgeouis, middle-class. That they speak with a slight Birmingham accent, oddly. And, also, despite their manifest disadvantages - their diminutive stature, their crippled elaphantistic feet, their small-mindedness, their disinclination to listen to strangers or change old ways, their addiction to tobacco and alcohol, their stagnant class-ridden 'respectability' - despite all this, they have developed the most modern semi-industrial culture in the whole world, with water-mills, steam-foundries, comfortable housing, pipes, pop-guns, spectacles, velvet clothes, charming little flintstone churches, books and fireworks, whilst the rest of Upper Middle Earth is languishing in the dark ages of swords, horses, and burying their dead under enormous mounds of earth. Funny that. But, you see, the ways of the world are strange and sometimes inexplicable.