these days to find anyone who couldn't tell you all about the adventures of Lordo Ringfellow. With a combined box office of two billion dollars for the first two RingLord films, you'd probably be very surprised to meet someone these days who hadn't heard of it. Maybe you'd even be a little angry— thinking the person was lying about not having seen it, making you look like a damn fool.

Maybe you'd even hold the stupid asshole down in the parking lot outside the theater, grabbing him suddenly from behind with a Full Nelson and whispering "You like that, asshole? Agrabon RULES!" while your doughy RingLord-costumed friends throw a few fists into Mr. Living Under a Rock's big dumb stomach. Yeah. You like that, bitch? How was Something's Gotta Give, ladies? Did you cry a bunch of times? Bet you dabbed your eyes with your hand-knitted doilies! Or your vaginas! Yeah! Maybe next time you'll go see RingLord III instead!

Perhaps you wouldn't go that far. Perhaps you would have gone even further... to the very edges of sanity. But whatever your capacity for unnecessary rage, it would be hard to argue that RingLord is a genuine worldwide phenomenon. Even handsome men and actual women can now tell you the the brave story of Lordo Ringfellow, and his struggle to destroy the Only Ring To Rule All of Them.

They could speak at length about the surprise climax of RingLord I: Lordo Ringfellow & Friends, where Lordo completely fails to do so. They could talk knowingly of the long twenty minute opening to RingLord II: The Big Deuce, where the magician Galfgab scolds Lordo and gives the ring to Agrobon the Abrobonian instead. The dramatic scene where Lordo slips Agrobon some roofies and steals the ring back! The chase through Beesville by the Dread Cloak-Ghosts after Agrobon tips them off to Lordo's whereabouts! The valiant effort of Lordo's three Haffit friends Samgam, Pinnicks and Trustlethwimble to sell out Lordo to the Cloak-Ghosts in an effort to save themselves! There are simply too many scenes to mention here.

Fans have called the films "brilliant," "gripping," "long," "immensely long," and even "needlessly disorientingly long." The praise goes on almost as long as the original RingLord books themselves: a dense 40,000 pages, covering 12 phone book-sized volumes.

In fact, it's sometimes easy to forget that the entire RingLord epic — cave-midgets, faggot-rangers, tree mutants and all — originally came from the mind of just one man: a functionally illiterate teenager named Jeff Tolhouse, who penned the entire sprawling epic on the backs of some 40,000 binders over the course of two semesters at Brookfield Heights High School.

 

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1979, Jeff Tolhouse was an unexceptional child. Most teachers remember Tolhouse as "not gifted" and "boring, even for a child." But underneath that ungifted exterior lurked the mind of a creatively ungifted genius, who would single-handedly re-invent the fantasy genre, as well as the unhealthy lengths readers would escape into a work of fiction.

The genesis of RingLord is well known to any Tolhouse fan, but deserves repeating here. The year was 1997. Jeff. a senior at Brookfield Heights, worked nights at the Arby's restaurant off the Interstate outside of Hoboken, New Jersey, During his shift breaks Jeff would sneak out behind the Arby's dumpster and get immensely high, then annoy his co-workers with long, senseless tales of a midget named Lordo Ringfellow and his adventures in The Middle Times. (In an earlier version of the story, the Lordo character was called Hashgram Ropesmokington.)

"Jeff never shut up with these retarded stories of his," remembers Janet Knox, who worked nightshifts at Arby's with Tolhouse. "I think he did it just because he thought it was funny to watch us get annoyed. That should tell you something about what a total write-off Jeff was."

"We'd be mixing the nacho cheese in the back with the economy sized drums of cheese powder and a water hose, and Jeff would stumble in from one of his dumpster trips and just babble on and on about these short people trying to save a ring from a giant eye-creature halfway around the world, and they meet magicians and mutant trees or some stupid shit. And we'd just all be like, 'Dude, we. Don't. Care. Just shut the fuck up and help us mix the antifreeze and thickening agents into the nacho cheese.'"

But shutting the fuck up, it seemed, wasn't a phrase in Jeff's limited vocabulary. Eventually his Arby's co-workers dared the young creator to put his imagination to paper: "We told him he should write it all down. Mainly we just wanted him to stop telling us about it." Whatever their reasons, the strategy worked. The next day during Math class, Jeff began writing the first chapter of what would later become the RingLord books.

"What many fans forget is that Tolhouse wasn't an author," explains Professor Woodbridge of Oxford University, who has taught RingLord for several semesters in a writing workshop, mostly as a cautionary tale. "That he managed to make such a sprawling work without even the most rudimentary grammar or motor skills is nothing short of a miracle. Keep in mind that that he didn't know anything about story. He didn't know anything about characters. His favorite book of all time was the novelization of the movie Top Gun. He couldn't construct sentences. He couldn't spell. Even making correct change was a challenge, if his Arby's co-workers are to be believed."

What Tolhouse lacked in these and other areas, however, he made up with persistence. Jeff would often get as many as 100 binders into his book, then give up and start the story over from the beginning. "For whatever reason, though, he forgot to actually get rid of all the other  starts," explains Woodbridge. "Which is why the first half is just the same six scenes repeating over and over."

Noted Tolhouse apologist Geoff Lovelock marvels that the RingLord books were ever published. "A sixteen-year-old illiterate author with no professional training. A book written on thousands of hash-stained binders. No love interest. No ending. No publishing house in the world would touch that." Luckily for Tolhouse fans, Jeff's mother — a prominent book buyer at a publishing house — was desperate enough to get her son employed and out of her house that she was willing to eat the considerable loss most felt the RingLord books would be. An initial print run of only 500 copies hit bookshelves in 1998. And flew off them soon after.

"Nobody expected was that the books would be a hit," says Lovelock, who thinks the secret of the books' continued success lies in the huge scope of the epic. "The great thing about Tolhouse's books is that when you read them, you tend to race through them, because you know that with every new chapter, you're that much closer to the end of the book. That's rare in an author."

RingLord's publisher, Hooton Miffin, has their own theory. Says CEO Terry Wurther: "I guess it just goes to show you: people are morons. Every last one of them." He chuckles knowingly, shaking his head. "Stupid fucking  morons."