The Scouring of the Shire

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", revealed 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 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.

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.

[T 1] 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.

The hobbits decide to 'raise the Shire'; Merry blows the magic horn given to him by Éowyn of Rohan, while Sam recruits his neighbour Tom Cotton and his sons, who rouse the village.

[T 2] 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".

[T 2] A mallorn sapling like those of Lothlórien replaces the Party Tree, many children are born with "a rich golden hair", and young hobbits "very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream".

[4][6] The Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher writes that Frodo, having thrown aside his weapons and armour on Mount Doom, chooses to fight "only on the moral plane" in the Shire.

Evidence that Tolkien had planned something of the sort is found, Birns notes, in Frodo's vision of the future of the Shire in peril when he looks in the Mirror of Galadriel in Lothlorien in The Fellowship of the Ring.

[8] This theme, of a last obstacle to the heroic homecoming, was paradoxically both long-planned (certainly back to the time of writing of the Lothlorien chapter) and, in the person of Saruman-as-Sharkey, "a very late entry".

[9] In Sauron Defeated, earlier drafts of the chapter show that Tolkien had considered giving Frodo a far more energetic part in confronting Sharkey and the ruffians.

[10] Birns argues that the effect is to bring the "consequentiality of abroad" (including Isengard, where Saruman was strong) back to the "parochialism of home", not only scouring the Shire but also strengthening it, with Merry and Pippin as "world citizens".

It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever.

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.

"[11] 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.

[11] 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.

[12][13] 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".

[16] 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".

[15] 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".

[17] 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.

Birns echoes Plank's comment that the chapter is "fundamentally different from the rest of the book",[8] and states that it is "the most novelistic episode in Tolkien's massive tale.

[24] 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.

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[c] of inertia dissolve"[26] from England.

The horn, he explains, is "a magic one, though only modestly so":[26] 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"[26] and quickly gets the Shire purified.

[4] Plank describes the chapter's emphasis on the "deterioration of the environment" "quite unusual for its time",[30] with the returning hobbits finding needless destruction of the old and beautiful, and its replacement by the new and ugly; pollution of air and water; neglect; "and above all, trees wantonly destroyed".

Further, Scott writes, Tolkien shows war to be at once "exhilarating and thrilling", as at the Battle of Helm's Deep, and ugly, as when human heads are catapulted into the besieged Minas Tirith.

[33] 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, when she bathes in the fire of immortality.

[35] 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.

[44] 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.