Bankers, Bankers, Dragon Slayers

The financial crisis has already taken on a mythic quality, ripe for folklore and legend.

Paul Erickson – an ex-trainer of tellers and personal bankers at one of the crisis’ most infamous casualties, the failed Washington Mutual – has put his take on paper. Erickson is the author of a story about an enchanted land of dwarf bankers called The Wobbit: A Parody. Almost needless to say, it closely tracks the plot of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

“Dwarves, as Tolkien portrays them, are cranky, cheap and hierarchical guys - and everybody's related to somebody else,” Erickson told Reuters last month. “And I thought, ‘Well you know, that kind of sounds like banking.’ So it was really easy to write that way.”

A snarky Amazon reviewer of The Wobbit says Erickson hit the mark. His dwarves are “are inherently like real-life bankers, and love things like dull meetings, bad customer service and office politics.”

The e-book was the 65th most popular in Amazon’s e-reader parodies ranking as of Tuesday afternoon. Reuters reports that there are more than 6,000 copies in circulation.

The parody follows unemployed teller Bulbo Bunkins and thirteen dwarf bankers on their quest to slay the dragon “who stole their deposits and ate their borrowers.”

The Wobbit (not to be confused with the term for a hobbit with a “wobbly chest” opens with a description of the Bunkins’ abode. “In a wholly below-ground apartment there lived a wobbit. His apartment was not as nasty, dirty and wet as a hole, but it wasn’t as fresh, bright and fun as a beach house,” the story goes.

Though The Wobbit is not a narrative of WaMu’s demise, it is written as a cautionary tale for bankers.

“Depositors from far and wide brought us their jewels. Borrowers came to us for their mortgages. Through outsourcing, automation and hidden fees we made SmithiBank huge and very profitable,” one of the dwarves explains.

But “mortgages became the source of our great wealth, and our downfall,” he adds. “As it happens from time to time, a dragon showed up and adjusted the market, ruining everything.”