Before I introduce limerick author Bob Turvey, a reminder that you still have time to enter the 6th Annual Lefse Limerick Contest. The theme for the 6th Annual Lefse Limerick Contest is Lefse and Hope.
The essentials of the contest:
- Email your limericks about Lefse and Hope to glegwold@lutefisk.com by March 31, 2026.
- First place winner gets the maple-walnut rolling pin shown above.
- Second place winner gets the Keep on Rolling! hat, which captures the essence of life and lefse.
- Third place winner gets the Let’s Make Lefse! Jigsaw Puzzle, which offers hours of family fun.
And now, about Bob Turvey, pictured above in front of a very small part of his limerick library in Bristol, England. Turvey emailed when he learned of the Lefse Limerick Contest. One look at Turvey, and I say to myself, “There is a happy man!” No doubt, the headwaters of his ever-flowing stream of cheerfullness is his interest in reading and writing limericks — and in writing about limericks “I have put four decades’ worth of study of the limerick verse into a coherent and readable form,” Turvey writes. “The results of my labour so far have been four books.”
I purchased The Limerick: A History, 1820-1920, and was hooked by a gut-puncher in this opening paragraph in the Introduction:
I was perhaps ten when I came across my first limerick. A school friend told me a variant of the legendary “Young Man of Racine.” This limerick is widely believed to have been written by the Hungarian polyglot genius and mathematician, John van Neumann. Modified for an English audience it went:
A young man from near Aberdeen
Once invented a wanking machine
On the niney-ninth stroke
The bloody thing broke,
And whipped up his balls into cream
It is a joy to read about Turvey’s passion as he “searched the great libraries of the world. I examined private book collections, newspaper collections, private correspondence and diaries.” He found “fascinating people, stories, places, publications and limericks … And, I believe, an accurate picture emerged of how the limerick verse form developed historically.”
In our emails, Turvey threw in a few lefse limericks, including the following limerick that is apropos to this year’s theme and very special to me:
Gary Legwold makes great LEFSE bread,
So I HOPE he’ll forget what I said,
When he used tomatoes
Instead of potatoes –
And his face, like the bread, was bright red.
Now, it’s your turn. Again, the theme for the 6th Annual Lefse Limerick Contest is Lefse and Hope. Get cracking! Write a mess of limericks (you just can’t write one, right?) that are about Lefse and Hope and then send them my way. The 6th Annual Lefse Limerick Contest runs through the end of March, 2026. That means you have one more week to craft and polish oodles and oodles of limericks about Lefse and Hope.
Email your limericks to glegwold@lutefisk.com by March 31, 2026.