zodiac19 Dec 2004

From the Tale of Good King Bumblemeat: The Death of King Bumblemeat --

'Harried and hunted by orc-soldiers to the very brink of Bum's Hole, as it was called by the men of the land, King Bumblemeat turned at bay and gathered his Bumlings for one last wild stand. "Fly, Bumlings!" he cried, "Fly to the flag of Bumlingnor!" And lo! The emblem of the Bumlings, three sausages on a field of brown, waved valourously over the fray, and the men of his house took heart. And King Bumblemeat, head swinging even as an enormous meaty club, entered into the thickest part of the orc-horde. Fell were the blows he dealt them! Fey was the gaze of his squinty eyes, and orcs innumerable fell before it. "Surely," spoke Prince Bumrod, his son, "Yea, verily the King's doings today shall be known in song for as long as men wear meat!" But the Prince's foretelling (for fortelling it was; the Prince was wearing the Sausagy Helm of Insufficient Prognostication) was premature. The orcs girt the King in, hacking and hewing at his proud meaty hat, till the luncheon meats lay piled and sliced among the orc-corpses. For the hat was of Men's making, and only a shadow of the great elven meat-helms of ages long carelessly mislaid. And at last, the power of his hamhocky helmet spent, the King lay on the stain'd turf and began to sing a death-lay, while for some reason they couldn't adequately explain, the orcs waited for him to finish. Maybe it was his surprisingly worthy voice, coming from a head so large and clubby. Or maybe it was that the words of the song, in the Bumling tongue and unintelligible to them, yet stirred some far-off recollection of bygone meats. We just don't know.

Anyway, this was the lay of King Bumblemeat:

'Whither the meatly hats of yesterlunch?
Whither the sausage helmets, the hammy porkpies, the berets
Shimm'ring in sunlight, so meatly,
All smelling sweetly
Of honey and jelly-glaze?

Whither King Bumfirst's hamhock, that bunched
So gloriously on his ears as he rode that day
Swinging his wet truncheon:
To luncheon! To luncheon!
With a sound so embarassingly gay?

Alas! No more the meat! Alas! No more those hats!
The ham-fedoras flapping their silly brims among the leaves
Of Bumwood! Lost completely
Are those bright helms, so meatly,
Collapsed with somewhat sickly splats
Onto the tops of our Wellingtons (Beeves)!'

And so speaking, he died."