Can anyone explain the Scouring of the Shire?

Cafe Society
1

I finished the LOTR trilogy a while ago. I’m rather bugged by the scouring of the shire. It seemed to me to be a thinly velied condemnation of communism (the cinderblock architecture, secret police, Saurumon living in luxury while the hobbits labored, etc.) It also, to be honest, seemed rather forced into the story and like something Tolkien just tagged onto the end.

So, does anyone know if I’m right in thinking it’s about communism, and does anyone know why Tolkien felt the need to include it and what it represents?

Thank you in advance.

2

I think it was more a condemnation of industrialism. Tolkien was something of an environmentalist–at least of unspoiled, pastoral, English environments. The Shire is an idealization of simple rural life.

3

It wasn’t about communism, it was about modernism. Of course Tolkien would hate communism but that was because communism was modernist through and through…throw away the old order and remake human beings to fit the new. He certainly didn’t believe in democracy or any such newfangled rubbish…see the scene in “The Hobbit” where the cowardly elected mayor of the Laketowners runs away and is replaced by a heroic King.

It is also supposed to tie the larger struggle against Sauron to the particular. Evil is at once vast and powerful, and yet small and petty. It’s not just marching armies and evil sorcery, it is some jerk chopping down a perfectly good tree, or putting up a factory where a garden used to be. And the quiet virtues of simple people–courage, community, and common sense–have as much to do with fighting evil as heroic Kings and Heroes.

4

There’s also a certain element of “You can’t go home again”. The four hobbits have been around the world (figuratively), and have been changed by the experience.

Meridoc and Peregrin have matured into natural leaders (who’d a thunk it! Pippen? What danger did the Fellowship run into in at least the first book and a half that wasn’t directly caused by Pippin’s screw-ups?), general the rebellion against Sharkey and his Men, and ultimately become, respectively, the Thain and the Took.

Sam has grown from a humble servent and gardiner, becoming a respected family man and Mayor of Hobbitown, ultimately earning the ultimate accolade of being deemed worthy to sail into the West.

Frodo, on the other hand, is so psychically wounded that he can find no rest in this world, and must sail with the last of the Noldor to Valinor, where his soul can find peace.

5

Whether you see Saruman as communistic or not he’s definitely a tyrant in the shire, and LOTR is all about the value of free will and the fight against those who would take it. I never saw the Scouring as tacked on. I think it was an integral and important part of the story (tho I must say I understand why it was left out of the movie version). Here are the themes/ideas that make it important in my estimation: 1. No place, even the Shire is immune from evil. Hobbits themselves are subject to the temptations of evil. At one point one of the hobbits says of the Shire that it has become like Mordor. then the other says, no its worse - because they knew it before it was ruined. 2. We have to continually be on guard and protect what is good in the world. Evil tho defeated will regroup and return always in another form. 3. This chapter shows how the four hobbits, the main characters really, have grown and changed through the long tale. As Gandalf and Saruman both say they have grown. Now, they can protect themselves. They don’t need Bombadil, Gandalf, or Aragorn to do it for them. 4. Frodo, being the hobbit most exposed to evil, has become a pacifist on his return. His gesture of forgiveness to Saruman is especially important I feel.

Well, there’s probably more, but most important is the idea that no place on MIddle Earth was untouched by the war in the book.

6

Inspired by the release of the first movie, I read the book for the third time just a few years ago.

As Tolkien is on record as having said the Middle-Earth is a model for Europe, I have to assume the the Scouringof the Shire is a reference to Communism, or any dictatorship.

As far as how it fits into the story, I felt this time around that Tolkien wrote the beginning and the end of the book first. At the end, we see the heroes we met at the beginning returning home, changed by their journeys, with new strengths beyond their previous imaginings, that they apply to save their home.

Notice the simpler tone of the narrative at the end of Return of the King, very reminiscent of the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring.

If you were to copy the first part of Fellowship, up to, say, the discovery of Bilbo’s petrified trolls (just before Weathertop, IIRC), then type…

<Insert Daring Adventures Here>

…and pick up again when they return to the Shire at the end of Return of the King, you’d have a marvelous little unfinished children’s story, a fitting sequel to The Hobbit that only needed the middle fleshed out.

I can’t help but think this is mroe or less what Tolkien did, before allowing the middle of the story to metastasize into something wondrously other.

7

Nitpick: Meriadoc became Master of the Hall, the biggest VIP in Buckland, while Peregrin became the Took and the Thain, the two terms being practically synonymous by this point in Shire history (the Took is the head of the Took family, and the Thain is the official representative of the King in the Shire. For many generations, now, the office of Thain has been held by the Took, and nobody expects it to be otherwise).

8

This is a major theme of Tolkien’s – in fact, I’d say that Tolkien says that evil may APPEAR to be vast and powerful, but deep down inside, it’s really small and petty.

The confrontation with the great hideous powerful evil Sauron turns out to be only greedy, pathetic, self-torn Gollum. The magnificent and powerful wizard Saruman turns out to be, at heart, a petty bully who picks on small innocent folks. The Sackville-Bagginses find that their own petty nastiness has backfired on themselves. So, the Scouring is necessary, as a reminder that the heart of evil is greed, selfishness, and quibbling over meaningless bullying power.

And I agree, it’s not communism per se so much as industrialization and standardization. Replacing hand-made, individualized art/craft with machine-pressed, standardized dull.

9

An old volume of A Tolkien Compass I have contains an article that discusses “The Scouring of the Shire,” in terms of Tolkien’s view of fascism rather than communism and draws some parallels between Saruman and Mussolini (The article is “The Scouring of the Shire: Tolkien’s View of Fascism,” by Robert Plank, originally published in 1975).

And there is always the evils of the Industrial Revolution view, regardless of the political underpinnings.

What I always see it as–and as others have mentioned–is the point where you realize just how far the hobbits have come since they left the Shire.

Once they leave the Shire and enter the Old Forest, the first half of FOTR becomes a catalog of incidents wherein terribly helpless hobbits get themselves into danger by doing some very stupid things, and need rescuing by somebody more powerful. They seem less able to fend for themselves than a lost troop of Cub Scouts, and it’s only through the intervention of people like Tom Bombadil and Aragorn that all 4 of them manage to survive to reach Rivendell.

Then, after their adventures are over and the hobbits are home again and see what has happened to the Shire, there is a wonderful moment where Pippin, Merry, and Sam draw their swords. We see them through the eyes of the ruffians who are trying to bully them; Tolkien describes them as “fearless hobbits with bright swords and grim faces.” For me, that’s the moment where it really hits home (so to speak): they are not the same boys Frodo took along with him as comic relief. They are not only able to take care of themselves now, but their home.

10

We have more drafts of the book than one necessarily wants to read in the 12-vol. History of Middle Earth (HOMES) edited by JRRT’s son, and this is not the case.

NONETHELESS, you’ve picked up on the use of languages/style thing here. Hobbit Common Speech is modern English–with class variations for gardeners and the educated and travelled; Gondorian Common Speech is more Shakespeare or King James; Rohan’s language is like middle or old English and this is reflected in the way they speak Common Speech; then you’ve gotcher Elf Latin and elvish languages, dwarf-speech, etc., all of which cause the speakers of those languages to “sound” slightly different in Common Speech. The language Saruman (and his minions) use is spot-on politico/fascist/communist/ends-justifying-means talk. JRRT was anti-industrial more than anything else, but he was using the “sound” of fascism for his industrialist/modern politician talk. The cowardly democratic mayor in Dale talks this way too.

11

Not more drafts than I want to read!

BTW, it’s fascinating to read the initial version of the Scouring of the Shire, where Frodo turns into quite the bloody-minded swashbuckling hobbit leader. If you want to see that, just pick up a copy of “Sauron Defeated” aka HOMES #9.

12

First, bear in mind that MANY literary epics have had “scourings” of one sort or another. It’s not something that originated with Tolkien.

Think of Homer’s “Odyssey,” the granddaddy of epics. After ten years of fighting in Troy, and another ten years of wandering, Ulysses finally makes it back to Ithaca. And what does he find? His kingdom is in shambles, his palace is occupied by drunken revellers who all want to take his position, his beautiful wife is now an old woman, his baby son Telemachus is a grown man, and NOBODY on the island recognizes him except a sick, dying dog. Ulysses has to take back his kingdom and his family by force!

Was Homer making some sort of commentary on Communism, or any other political movement? Not at all! Homer simply recognized that change, often painful change, is inevitable. Not only do our experiences change us, but the people and places we leave behind change, too. After our adventures are finished, the homes we long to return to won’t be the same places we left behind. They can’t be.

Now, I’m sure that Tolkien’s own experiences in World War I and his observations of the changes England underwent during World War II influenced his depiction of the Shire under Saruman’s rule (more on that in a moment). But he’d have been disappointed if readers looked at the Scouring of the Shire and saw only a facile metaphor for postwar England. Tolkien’s point was general, as well as specific: if we do battle with evil, we’ll be changed in the process, and so will our worlds. The Shire can’t possibly remain a tranquil, Edenic place, untouched by evil forever. NOPLACE can. As long as there’s evil in the world, it will eventually make its presence felt everywhere.

But as I said earlier, the real world was much on Tolkien’s mind when he wrote LOTR, and I’m sure that when he wrote of the scouring of the Shire, he was thinking about “Tommy Atkins,” the ordinary working-class English bloke who went off to fight Hitler in 1939. Tommy underwent 6 years of hardship, danger, heartbreak, terror, pain, cold, loneliness and misery during World War II. How did he get through it? Well, just the way Sam Gamgee did: by reminding himself of all the ordinary comforts and pleasures that awaited him as soon as he got back home. “When I get back home,” he fantasized, “Mum will be waiting for me with tea and scones. I’ll slip over to the old pub, grab a pint, have a smoke, and see my old mates again. Maybe my old girlfriend will be there… it’s gonna be grand. As soon as we beat Hitler, I can have my old life back.”

But of course, when Tommy got home, he found that England wasn’t the same place he’d left behind, and that even in defeat, Hitler had made his presence felt in England. Maybe the old pub had been destroyed in the Blitz. Maybe Mum was now a frail old woman. Maybe most of his old mates had been killed in action at Dunkirk or El Alamein. Maybe his old girlfriend had married someone else. In any event, England was now a land of rationing and shortages, where his Mum couldn’t get tea, and he couldn’t readily get a pint.

It’s not that his life was over. It’s not that he’d never be happy again. It’s not that he’d never have a good life again. It’s just that he could never have his old, happy, carefree life again. With hard work and determination, Tommy and his generation could rebuild their land, but it would never be exactly the same. And one imagines that in his corner of Hell, Hitler took some small glee (as Saruman/Sharkey did) in knowing “I failed, but at least I caused my enemies some small misery.”

I don’t see any indication that Tolkien was thinking about Communism at all.

13

Actually, I find the Scouring of the Shire to be the most important part of the trilogy, and the rest of the tale to be just an overlong prequel and set-up to the Scouring.

To me this is the story of three unassuming hobbits, Merry, Pippin and Sam who leave their community with their comrade Frodo and have some adventures so that they can gain the strength of character and the abilities necessary to retake their community from the creeping deterioration that has happened while they were away. The quest to save the world is really an oversized MacGuffin leading Merry, Pippin and Sam to participate in the battles and adventures that shape them so that they may revive the shire when they return.

To me the omission of the Scouring of the Shire from the movie was a real problem, because that was the whole point of the books.

14

Well, I was sorry that the scouring was eliminated, but I understand perfectly why Peter Jackson left it out. ROTK was already a very long movie, and required all kinds of cuts just to get it to a manageable length. Tacking on the scouring of the Shire would have made a problematically long movie even longer, well after the point at which most viewers thought the story was already over.

15

A couple of points…

First, I think it’s not quite right to look for parallels between the 20th century and LOTR. I read somewhere that Tolkien didn’t approve, and, really, you don’t need to write a thousand page novel to denounce facsism or communism.

About the Scouring… I think it was my favourite chapter of LOTR, basically a celebration of Frodo’s victory: the smug “I’m a hobbit in the Shire, I go wherever I want” from Frodo (sorry, quote inexact, don’t have the book here, and I think something like that was said twice - near the bridge and halfway from thee bridge to Hobbiton) was very pleasant to read. So that’s one thing.

Another thing, the Scouring is a necessary prequel to the “Grey Haven” chapter – a chance to write about Frodo doing something in the Shire, if nothing else.

16

Perhaps Jackson could work it into the Hobbit.
:eek: :smiley:

17

Remember that Tolkien explicitly disclaimed all allegorical interpretations of his work, ESPECIALLY those that attempted to find links between The War of the Ring and WWII. His experiences in WWI no doubt had some influence on his writing – as he pointed out, by 1919 all but one of his old schoolmates were dead – but the basic outline of the story was completed in the early 1920’s, long before the rise of fascism.

18

Just a quick note to Astorian, whoever you really are: I heartily agree with both your posts. Your thoughts were also in my mind; unfortunately my previous post was pretty inchoherent, and yours were, well, magnificent and right on the mark. Thanks.

19

That was very wrong, wasn’t it? Like Bingo and Trotter.

I’m almost done with HOMES–my eyes twitch over stuff like Gilrain v. Gilraen.

What do y’all think of it as an editorial project (there’s worthwhile JRRT-sourced material, but I mean the compilation/commentary work)? I find some of the editorial comments (“how can I possibly present the complexity of these disordered manuscripts? version a is nearly the same as b so I have made the difficult decision to exclude a but will give notes as to important differences. I find my father’s decision to abandon this draft at the middle of a sentence inexplicable. this omission of the word “the” is clearly a mistake of the typist simply overlooked by my father under the pressure of looming deadlines”), repeated over and again, almost maddening.

Brother C: a lot of the backstory/Silmarillion stories were in existence by the 1920s but LOTR was not even a glimmer.

20

I’m quoting (paraphrasing, actually), Tolkien’s forward to LOTR, where he describes his detestation of “allegory in any form”, and notes that, if LOTR had been a WWII allegory, Sauron would have been enslaved, not overthrown, Saruman would have created a second Ring, etc. He also claims that the basic story outline was complete long before WWII.

Does someone have a copy of the book handy and can give us chapter and verse?