"The Scouring of the Shire" is the penultimate chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, return home to the Shire to find that it is under the brutal control of ruffians and their leader "Sharkey", who turns out to be the Wizard Saruman. The ruffians have despoiled the Shire, cutting down trees and destroying old houses, as well as replacing the old mill with a larger one full of machinery which pollutes the air and the water. The hobbits rouse the Shire to rebellion, lead their fellow hobbits to victory in the Battle of Bywater, and end Saruman's rule.
Critics have considered "The Scouring of the Shire" one of the most important chapters in The Lord of the Rings. Although Tolkien denied that the chapter was an allegory for Britain in the aftermath of World War II, commentators have argued that it can be applied to that period, with clear contemporary political references that include a satire of socialism, echoes of Nazism, allusions to the shortages in postwar Britain, and a strand of environmentalism.<!--lead summarizes article body, see below for citations-->
According to Tolkien, the idea of such a chapter was planned from the outset as part of the overall formal structure of The Lord of the Rings, though its details were not worked out until much later. The chapter was intended to counterbalance the larger plot, concerning the physical journey to destroy the One Ring, with a moral quest upon the return home, to purify the Shire and to take personal responsibility. Tolkien considered other identities for the wicked Sharkey before settling on Saruman late in his composition process.
The chapter, which has been called one of the most famous anticlimaxes in literature, has generally been excluded from film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson's film trilogy omits the chapter, but maintains two key elements: a burning Shire, glimpsed by Frodo in the crystal ball-like Mirror of Galadriel; and the means of Saruman's death, transposed to Isengard.
Fictional history
Context
The chapter follows all the main action of The Lord of the Rings. The story tells how the One Ring, a ring of power made by the Dark Lord Sauron, lost for many centuries, has reappeared and is in the hands of a hobbit, Frodo Baggins, in the England-like Shire. If Sauron finds the Ring, he will use it to take over the whole of Middle-earth. A Wizard, Gandalf, tells Frodo the history of the ring and persuades him to leave the Shire to destroy the Ring. He is joined by three other hobbits, his friends Sam, Merry, and Pippin. They are pursued by Sauron's Black Riders, but escape to a stronghold of the Elves, Rivendell. There, they learn that it can only be destroyed in the volcano, Mount Doom, where Sauron forged the Ring, in the evil land of Mordor. They are joined by others opposed to Sauron, forming a Fellowship of the Ring, led by Gandalf. They face many perils on the journey, and the Fellowship is split up. Merry and Pippin become involved in wars against the evil Wizard Saruman and then against Sauron: Merry becomes a knight of Rohan, while Pippin becomes a guard of Gondor. With Sauron distracted, Frodo and Sam manage to travel to Mount Doom. The Ring is destroyed in the Cracks of Doom, and Sauron is overthrown. The hobbits, much changed by their experiences, ride home to the Shire, hoping to return to a peaceful rural life.
The scouring
thumb|center|upright=2.75|Sketch map of the Shire. The Brandywine bridge is at upper right. Frogmorton is centre right. Hobbiton and Bywater are top centre. Tookland is centre left.
The hobbits of the Fellowship – Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin – returning home to the Shire, come to its border, the Brandywine Bridge, late at night. They are surprised to find it barred, but are taken in, after some convincing, by the Shiriffs, a kind of hobbit police, who are guarding the bridge. They are shocked at the state of the Shire, with endless rules, ugly new buildings, and wanton destruction of trees and old buildings. Sam recognises one of the Shiriffs and tells him he should be ashamed of himself for joining in with "such nonsense".
Setting off on ponies for Hobbiton at the centre of the Shire the next morning, the four hobbits are met by Shiriffs at the village of Frogmorton who attempt to arrest them for breaking several rules the night before. Unable to keep up with the ponies, the Shiriffs let the hobbits pass. The cleanup is described in the first pages of the final chapter, "The Grey Havens"; the new buildings put up during Sharkey's rule are torn down and their materials reused "to repair many an old [hobbit] hole".
The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey writes that the Shire is certainly where Middle-earth comes nearest to the 20th century, and that the people who had commented that the "Scouring of the Shire" was about Tolkien's contemporary England were not wholly wrong. Shippey suggests however that rather than seeing the chapter as an allegory of postwar England, it could be taken as an account of "a society suffering not only from political misrule, but from a strange and generalized crisis of confidence." Shippey draws a parallel with a contemporary work, George Orwell's 1938 novel Coming Up for Air, where England is subjected to a "similar diagnosis" of leaderless inertia.
thumb|Tolkien related the chapter to his childhood experiences at [[Sarehole as it was taken over by the industrial growth of Birmingham, and the old mill there fell into disrepair.]]
Critics including Plank have noted that Tolkien denied that the "Scouring of the Shire" reflected England in the late 1940s, claiming instead that the chapter echoed his youthful experience of seeing his home at Sarehole, then in rural Warwickshire, being taken over by the growing city of Birmingham in the early 1900s. Tolkien related the chapter to his childhood experiences at the end of the 19th century:
Instead of a strict allegory with exact correspondences between the elements of the chapter and 20th century events and personages, Plank suggested that the chapter was "a realistic parable of reality". Birns and others note, too, that there is an echo in the chapter of the soldiers, including Tolkien, returning home from the trenches of the First World War, and meeting an unfair lack of appreciation of their contribution, as when Sam's father, Gaffer Gamgee, is more concerned with the damage to his potatoes than any "trapessing in foreign parts".
Significance
Satire on mid-20th century politics
thumb|left|Saruman's use of "Ruffians" to tyrannise the Shire has been compared to the Nazis' handling of dissent, here by marching people off to an [[internment camp in Serbia.]]
Various commentators have noted that the chapter has political overtones. The critic Jerome Donnelly suggests that the chapter is a satire, of a more serious kind than the knockabout "comedy of manners" at the start of The Hobbit. Plank calls it a caricature of fascism. Donnelly agrees with Tolkien that the "Scouring" is not an allegory, but proposes that Saruman's "Ruffians" echo the tyrannical behaviour of the Nazis, as do "the use of collaborators, threats, torture and killing of dissenters, and internment".
Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt write that "conservatives and progressives alike" had seen the chapter as a "pointed critique of modern socialism", citing the scholar of politics Hal Colebatch's comment that the rule- and redistribution-heavy Saruman regime "owed much to the drabness, bleakness and bureaucratic regulation of postwar Britain under the Attlee Labour Government". They note similarly Plank's identification of "parallels" between the Shire under Saruman and both the German Nazi Party under Hitler and Italian Fascism under Mussolini. Plank discusses, for example, why the hobbits did not resist fascism, giving as reasons cowardice, lack of solidarity, and what he finds "the most interesting and the most melancholy": the shirriff-hobbit's statement "I am sorry, Mr. Merry, but we have orders." Plank comments that this recalls statements from the Nuremberg trials. He further compares Saruman with Mussolini, noting that they both came to "a miserable end". Richards and Witt concede that the chapter has wider themes, including the ugliness of Saruman's "vengeful heart", the nastiness of (sub)urban development, the hobbits' love-inspired defence of their homeland, and the need not to just obey orders, but state that Tolkien's letters demonstrate his dislike of socialism, and that in the chapter Tolkien deftly satirizes "socialism's pose of moral superiority".
thumb|The export of "wagonloads of pipeweed" (here, tobacco, in a 1916 American photograph) from the Shire suggested postwar England's "gone for export" explanation of shortages.
Shippey comments that whatever Tolkien's protestations, readers back in the 1950s would have noticed some features of the Shire during the "Scouring" that "seem[ed] slightly out of place", such as the fact that wagonloads of "pipeweed" (tobacco) are being taken away, seemingly at the wizard Saruman's orders, with no visible in-universe explanation. What, Shippey asks, was Saruman doing with so much tobacco: a wizard was hardly going to be trading it for profit, nor "issuing" it to his orcs in Isengard. Instead, Shippey suggests, it echoes Britain's shortages just after the Second World War, routinely explained at that time with "the words 'gone for export'". Kocher adds that the devastation and people's responses in the Shire after the War would have been only too familiar to people in the 20th century.
Not all critics have seen the chapter as political; the medievalist Jane Chance notes the "domestic image" of the "Scouring" in the chapter's title, suggesting in her view a "rejuvenation" of the Shire. She describes the chapter's social cleansing of the Shire in similar terms, writing of washing and purifying it of "the reptilian monsters" Sharkey and Wormtongue.
A "novelistic" chapter
Tolkien critics have noted that the chapter has a distinctive novel-like quality. Birns echoes Plank's comment that the chapter is "fundamentally different from the rest of the book", and states that it is "the most novelistic episode in Tolkien's massive tale." He cites Janet Brennan Croft's description of it as "that deceptively anti-climactic but all-important chapter". Birns argues that it meets three aspects of Ian Watt's definition of the kind of novel read by the middle class, dominant among the reading public: firstly, it shows multiple social classes interacting; secondly, it is in a domestic context, the homely Shire; thirdly, it favours the point of view of the "emerging and aspiring middle classes". Birns concludes that "'The Scouring of the Shire' is where Tolkien's dark romance bends the most towards the realistic novel of domestic reintegration and redemption." Plank writes that the distinctive feature of the "Scouring" is that unlike in the rest of the book, there are no miracles and the laws of nature work with "full and undisputed force". Saruman, Plank notes, was once able to work magic, but in the chapter he works as a politician, without sorcery: the chapter is "realistic", not fantasy, except for the moment of Saruman's death.
Michael Treschow and Mark Duckworth, writing in Mythlore, note that the return to the Shire emphasises the protagonists' growth in character, so that they can deal with life's challenges for themselves. Just as at the end of The Hobbit Gandalf tells Bilbo that he is "not the hobbit that you were", having learnt from his adventures, so in The Lord of the Rings Gandalf tells Frodo and the other hobbits that he will not be coming to the Shire with them since "you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you."
Wish-fulfilment
thumb|Shippey suggests that Tolkien wished he had Merry's magic [[hunting horn|horn to bring joy and cleansing to England. Illustrated is a French 15th century hunting horn.]]
Another element in the chapter is the appearance of Tolkien's own feelings about England. Shippey writes that there is a "streak of 'wish-fulfilment'" in the account, and that Tolkien would have liked "to hear the horns of Rohan blow, and watch the Black Breath of inertia dissolve" from England. More specifically, Shippey applies this idea to "The Scouring of the Shire", noting that Merry returns from Rohan with a horn, brought by Eorl the Young, founder of Rohan, from the dragon-hoard of Scatha the Worm from the North. The horn, he explains, is "a magic one, though only modestly so": blowing it brings joy to his friends in arms, fear to his enemies, and in the chapter, it awakens the "revolution against sloth and shabbiness and Saruman-Sharkey" and quickly gets the Shire purified. Shippey suggests that Tolkien wished to do the same, and notes that with his novels he at least succeeded in bringing joy.
Tolkien wrote in a letter that "the man-made ... is ultimately daunting and insupportable", and that "If a Ragnarök would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs, it [could] for me burn all the works of art – and I'd go back to trees." Caitlin Vaughn Carlos writes that Sam Gamgee's exclamation "This is worse than Mordor! ... It comes home to you, they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was ruined"
Tolkien critics John D. Rateliff and Jared Lobdell have compared the sudden shrivelling of Saruman's flesh from his skull at the moment of his death with the instantaneous aging of the protagonist Ayesha in Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She: A History of Adventure, when she bathes in the fire of immortality. Tolkien acknowledged Haggard as a major influence, especially She.
In an interview in 2015, the novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin called this section of the Lord of the Rings story brilliant, and said it was the tone he would be aiming for at the end of Game of Thrones.
Jonathon D. Langford, writing in Mythlore, describes the scouring as the hobbits' coming of age, the culmination of their individual quests. He states that Merry and Pippin have clearly matured on their journey, while Frodo and Sam see the success of their quest reassessed by hobbit society. He notes that a heroic quest as described by Joseph Campbell ends with the hero's return from the enchanted lands to the ordinary world, renewing his community, as the hobbits' return does.
Adaptations
thumb|upright|[[Alan Lee (illustrator)|Alan Lee's illustration for the chapter, showing the hobbits returning amidst felled trees to a Shire dominated by a tall smoking chimney, has been criticised in Mythlore.<!--does not give all these details, however-->
The events of "The Scouring of the Shire" are retold in the Finnish miniseries Hobitit.
The chapter has been left out of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, except as a brief flash-forward when Frodo looks into the crystal ball-like Mirror of Galadriel in Peter Jackson's 2001 The Fellowship of the Ring. In the extended edition of The Return of the King, Wormtongue kills Saruman (stabbing him in the back, not slitting his throat) and is in turn killed by an arrow as in the chapter; however, this takes place at Isengard instead of the Shire and it is Legolas who shoots Wormtongue. Peter Jackson called the chapter anticlimactic, and decided in 1998 not to include it in the film trilogy. He decided to merge Saruman's and Wormtongue's death scene with "The Voice of Saruman" chapter from The Two Towers, but did not wish to go back to Isengard after the Battle of Helm's Deep. Jackson explained that in post-production of The Return of the King, the scene felt like a seven-minute wrap up of The Two Towers, gave the film an unsteady beginning, and made the film too long, so it ended up in the extended DVD.
Alan Lee, in the last of his series of 50 illustrations of The Lord of the Rings, depicted the four hobbits of the Fellowship returning on horseback along a hedged lane, with the stumps of recently cut trees and felled trunks in the foreground, and a tall chimney making a plume of dark smoke in the background. The painting was reviewed for Mythlore by Glen GoodKnight, who wrote that it was "[[wikt:anticlimax|anti-clima[c]tic]], containing no joy, and denying us even the hint of the bitter-sweet resolution of the story".
See also
- The Making of the English Landscape – a non-fiction book by an Oxfordshire author contemporary with Tolkien, concerned about the loss of the historic landscape
Notes
References
Primary
Secondary
Sources
- <!--Carpenter 1981-->