The Scouring of the Shire

• 1. Introduction

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  "The Scouring of the Shire" is the penultimate chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins, Sam, Merry, and Pippin reach the Brandywine Bridge, the border of their home, late at night. They find it barred against them. Months earlier, the four had left this same crossing as hobbits with no experience of war. A ring of power forged by the Dark Lord Sauron had turned up, forgotten, in Frodo's keeping. The wizard Gandalf convinced him it had to be destroyed. Sauron's Black Riders chased them from the Shire. They found shelter in the elvish stronghold of Rivendell. There they joined the Fellowship of the Ring, bound for the volcano of Mount Doom in Mordor, the only place the ring could be unmade. Merry went on to fight as a knight of Rohan. Pippin served as a guard of Gondor. Frodo and Sam carried the ring itself into the Cracks of Doom, and Sauron's power collapsed. Now the four are riding home, expecting quiet fields and open inns. Instead they find a locked bridge. The question this final stretch of the story asks is not whether the heroes can win a war far away. It is whether they can save the one place they fought to get back to.

• 2. Homecoming to Ruin

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  Shiriffs guard the Brandywine Bridge, a kind of hobbit police force. After some convincing, they let the four travelers through. Sam recognizes one of the guards. He tells him he should be ashamed of himself for joining in with "such nonsense". Every inn along the road stands closed. The group spends the night instead in a newly built, badly made Shiriff-house. Endless new rules cover the walls. Ugly new buildings have gone up where trees and old houses used to stand. The next morning, the four ride on toward Hobbiton. At the village of Frogmorton, Shiriffs try to arrest them for breaking several of those rules the night before. The Shiriffs cannot keep pace with the ponies. The hobbits simply ride past them. At Bywater, they find that Sandyman's mill has been torn down. In its place stands a much bigger mill, full of machinery that fouls the water and pollutes the air. Ted Sandyman is the only hobbit who approves of it. He now works for the Men who built the new mill. His own father, by contrast, had once been his own boss. A group of ruffians moves to confront the travelers. Merry, Pippin, and Sam draw their swords and use their height, grown tall on the road, to scare the men off. That skirmish convinces the four that scattered resistance will not be enough. The whole Shire will have to rise.

• 3. The Battle of Bywater

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  Merry blows the horn Éowyn of Rohan once gave him, and its sound starts pulling the village into motion. Sam runs to fetch his neighbor, farmer Tom Cotton. Cotton and his sons help spread the alarm further. Cotton explains what has happened in their absence. Wagonloads of goods, including tobacco, have been shipped "away," causing shortages across the Shire. The money behind it traces to Lotho Sackville-Baggins, known locally as the "Chief" or the "Boss". Lotho moved into Frodo's old home, Bag End, the moment Frodo left to destroy the ring. Pippin rides off to his home village of Tuckborough. There he calls out his own large family, the Tooks. Before help arrives, twenty ruffians from Hobbiton try to seize farmer Cotton. Their leader is shot dead with arrows, and the rest surrender on the spot. Overnight, word comes that Pippin's father, Thain Paladin II, has already raised Tookland. He is chasing a separate band of ruffians south. Pippin returns to Bywater with a hundred of his kin. He arrives just as a much larger force of ruffians approaches. Merry and Pippin spring a trap. They block a high-hedged lane with wagons at both ends, cutting off the ruffians' retreat. Most of the ruffians die in the fighting that follows, in what becomes known as the Battle of Bywater. Frodo, unlike his three companions, takes no part in the fighting itself. His fight, it turns out, is still to come.

• 4. Sharkey Unmasked

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  At Hobbiton, the hobbits go looking for Lotho. They find the whole area despoiled, and Bag End standing empty and unused. There they finally meet "Sharkey". Sharkey turns out to be the wizard Saruman, traveling with his servant Wormtongue. Saruman has lost his wizard's power. He keeps only his persuasive, deceptive voice. He admits he damaged the Shire on purpose, out of revenge. Frodo orders him to leave. Saruman lunges to stab Frodo instead. The knife snaps against a coat of chain mail Frodo has been wearing, hidden, all along. Frodo stops the other hobbits from killing Saruman. He even offers Wormtongue a chance to stay. Saruman then reveals, in front of Wormtongue, that Wormtongue was the one who killed Lotho. Provoked, Wormtongue cuts Saruman's throat on the spot. Hobbit archers shoot Wormtongue dead in turn. A column of mist rises from Saruman's body and blows away on the wind.

  The cleanup that follows "took less time than Sam had feared," according to the opening pages of the book's final chapter, "The Grey Havens". Workers tear down the buildings put up under Sharkey's rule. They reuse the materials to repair old hobbit holes. Sam goes around the Shire replanting trees. He places a grain of dust from Galadriel's garden with each sapling, and saves a single nut to plant in the Party Field. The following spring "surpassed his wildest hopes". The year, 1420 by the Shire's reckoning, becomes "a marvellous year". A mallorn tree, like those of Lothlorien, grows where the old Party Tree once stood. A wave of children are born with unusually rich golden hair. Young hobbits that year "very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream". None of this recovery was left to chance. Tolkien said the chapter had been part of his plan from the very beginning.

• 5. A Plan from the Start

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  According to Tolkien, a chapter like this one had been part of his plan for The Lord of the Rings from the very beginning. Its exact shape only came together much later in the writing. He meant it to balance the outward journey to destroy the Ring with an inward one. This inward journey was a moral quest, upon returning home, to purify the Shire and take personal responsibility for it. Tolkien tried out other identities for the villain Sharkey before settling on Saruman, and only late in the writing process.

  The critic Bernhard Hirsch notes that this chapter has "provoked considerable critical debate," unlike the quiet homeward journey that fills the rest of Book 6. Hirsch points to Tolkien's own foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring. That foreword frames the whole novel as a journey out and a journey home. It means this chapter, and the two others of the return trip, were "foreseen from the outset". Nicholas Birns cites the scholar David Waito's argument that the chapter carries as much moral weight as the main quest, but "applies the morals to daily life". Paul Kocher observes that Frodo, having thrown aside his weapons and armor on Mount Doom, chooses in the Shire to fight "only on the moral plane". Birns adds that the chapter's real surprise is Saruman's appearance. It is his presence, Birns argues, that makes the scouring necessary in the first place. As evidence Tolkien planned this early, Birns points to Sam's vision of a Shire in peril. Sam glimpses it in the Mirror of Galadriel, back in Lothlorien, in The Fellowship of the Ring.

  Christopher Tolkien's later work on his father's manuscripts added further evidence for how the chapter took shape. Scholars trace its lineage back to Homer's Odyssey. There, Odysseus returns to his home island of Ithaca to clear it of Penelope's unwelcome suitors. Robert Plank notes that Tolkien could have drawn on any number of other returning heroes for the same purpose. David Greenman instead contrasts it with Tuor's escape from a ruined kingdom in The Fall of Gondolin, a scene Greenman compares to Aeneas fleeing Troy. Early drafts collected in Sauron Defeated show that Tolkien once gave Frodo a far more active role in confronting the ruffians. The drafts also show he hesitated over who Sharkey really was. He weighed the hobbit Lotho Sackville-Baggins and an unnamed human ruffian leader before arriving at Saruman. Birns argues that the effect of that choice is to drag the "consequentiality of abroad," including Isengard, back into the "parochialism of home". In the process, Merry and Pippin become what Birns calls "world citizens". It is a claim that leads directly to the question of what, if anything, the chapter says about England itself.

• 6. Not Quite Allegory

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  In his "Foreword to the Second Edition," Tolkien directly denied that the chapter was an allegory of postwar Britain. "It has been supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire' reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale," he wrote. "It does not. 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." Tom Shippey argues that the Shire is where Middle-earth comes closest to the twentieth century. Readers who saw contemporary England in the chapter, he says, were "not wholly wrong". Rather than a straight allegory, Shippey suggests it reads as an account of "a society suffering not only from political misrule, but from a strange and generalized crisis of confidence". He draws a parallel with George Orwell's 1938 novel Coming Up for Air, which he says offers a "similar diagnosis" of leaderless inertia in England.

  Tolkien himself pointed to an older, more personal source: his childhood at Sarehole, in rural Warwickshire, as the growing city of Birmingham swallowed it in the early 1900s. "The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten," he wrote. He recalled a photograph of "the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important". He disliked the mill's "Young miller," he added, while his own father, the "Old miller," "had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman". Robert Plank, weighing both readings, concluded that the chapter works best as "a realistic parable of reality" rather than a point-by-point allegory. Birns and other critics also hear an echo of soldiers returning from the First World War, Tolkien among them, to find their sacrifice unappreciated. Sam's father, Gaffer Gamgee, worries more about damage to his potatoes than about Sam's "trapessing in foreign parts".

  Other critics read the chapter as pointed political satire regardless of Tolkien's denial. Jerome Donnelly calls it satire of a more serious kind than the "comedy of manners" that opens The Hobbit. Plank goes further, calling it a caricature of fascism. Donnelly agrees the chapter is not a strict allegory. He argues that Saruman's ruffians echo Nazi tactics: collaborators, threats, torture, the killing of dissenters, and internment. Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt write that "conservatives and progressives alike" have read the chapter as a critique of modern socialism. They quote the scholar Hal Colebatch, who argued that Saruman's rule "owed much to the drabness, bleakness and bureaucratic regulation of postwar Britain under the Attlee Labour Government". Plank separately draws parallels between Saruman's Shire and both the German Nazi Party under Hitler and Italian Fascism under Mussolini. He explains the hobbits' initial failure to resist through cowardice and a lack of solidarity. One line stands out to him as "the most interesting and the most melancholy": a shirriff telling Merry, "I am sorry, Mr. Merry, but we have orders". Plank says that line recalls testimony from the Nuremberg trials. He also notes that Saruman, like Mussolini, comes to "a miserable end". Richards and Witt add that the chapter carries wider themes too, including the ugliness of Saruman's "vengeful heart" and the nastiness of unchecked development. They argue that Tolkien's own letters show his dislike of socialism, and a deliberate satire of "socialism's pose of moral superiority".

  Shippey points to one detail that struck readers in the 1950s as "slightly out of place": wagonloads of pipeweed, or tobacco, shipped out of the Shire on Saruman's orders, with no explanation given. A wizard, Shippey notes, had no obvious use for that much tobacco, whether to sell it for profit or issue it to his orcs. He suggests the detail instead echoes Britain's real postwar shortages, when goods vanishing was routinely blamed on having "gone for export". Kocher agrees that the devastation, and the way people responded to it, would have felt familiar to readers of the time. Not every critic accepts a political reading, though. The medievalist Jane Chance points to the "domestic image" already present in the chapter's title. She argues it points instead toward a "rejuvenation" of the Shire, describing the story as a cleansing that washes and purifies it of "the reptilian monsters" Sharkey and Wormtongue. That cleansing, several critics note, is not only social. It runs through the natural world of the Shire as well.

• 7. Green Shoots, Hard Choices

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  Environmental readings of the chapter began appearing among critics in the 1970s. Paul H. Kocher was among the first to describe "Tolkien was an ecologist," pointing to this chapter as evidence. Birns calls the chapter "as much conservationist as it is traditionalist". Plank finds its focus on the "deterioration of the environment" "quite unusual for its time": needless destruction of the old and beautiful, replaced by the new and ugly, pollution of the air and water, neglect, and "above all, trees wantonly destroyed". Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans read the chapter as a call to environmental action closer to home, in the reader's own "backyard".

  The scholars Nan Scott and Janet Brennan Croft focus instead on a pacifist dilemma running through the chapter. The hobbits come home wanting peace, only to find they must fight, and even lead the fighting, to free the Shire. Scott notes that the four had been so peace-loving they set out for Rivendell without weapons at all. They were surprised when Tom Bombadil gave them swords taken from a Barrow-wight's hoard. Aragorn had told them at Rivendell that the Shire stayed peaceful only because his Rangers quietly watched over it. Scott argues that Tolkien presents war as both "exhilarating and thrilling," as at the Battle of Helm's Deep, and ugly, as when human heads are catapulted into the besieged city of Minas Tirith. Frodo feels pity even for Saruman by the time they meet him. But his pacifism cannot clear the Shire of ruffians on its own. Merry recognizes this before Frodo does, warning him plainly that "if there are many of these ruffians... it will certainly mean fighting". That warning describes not just the coming battle. It describes the uneasy bargain between heroism and homecoming that runs through the whole chapter's afterlife in criticism.

• 8. An Anticlimax That Stuck

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  Birns, echoing Plank, calls the chapter "fundamentally different from the rest of the book" and "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". By Birns's reading, the chapter satisfies three parts of the critic Ian Watt's definition of the novel favored by the reading middle class. It shows several social classes interacting. It unfolds in a domestic setting, the homely Shire. It favors the outlook of what Birns calls 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 adds that the chapter is unusual in the book for containing no miracles. The laws of nature apply here with "full and undisputed force". Saruman, once a wizard capable of real magic, operates in this chapter purely as a politician, without sorcery, except at the moment of his death. The scholars Michael Treschow and Mark Duckworth, writing in Mythlore, note that the return to the Shire measures how much the four hobbits have grown. It echoes the moment at the end of The Hobbit when Gandalf tells Bilbo he is "not the hobbit that you were". In this chapter, Gandalf declines to enter the Shire with his four friends, telling them: "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."

  Shippey detects a "streak of 'wish-fulfilment'" running through the whole episode. He argues that Tolkien would have liked to hear the horns of Rohan sound over England itself, and watch its own "Black Breath of inertia" dissolve. Merry's horn had been brought to Rohan long before by its founder, Eorl the Young, from the dragon-hoard of Scatha the Worm in the North. It is, in Shippey's words, "a magic one, though only modestly so": it brings joy to friends and fear to enemies. In this chapter, it helps spark the "revolution against sloth and shabbiness and Saruman-Sharkey" that quickly clears the Shire. Tolkien wrote in one letter that "the man-made... is ultimately daunting and insupportable". If a mythic Ragnarok, he added, "would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs," he would gladly let it burn "all the works of art" too, and "go back to trees". Caitlin Vaughn Carlos points to Sam's outburst on seeing the ruined Shire: "This is worse than Mordor!... It comes home to you, they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was ruined." She reads it as a longing for a remembered home, rather than the one now in front of him.

  Introducing Birns's article in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Brian Attebery notes that Birns calls the chapter "one of the most famous anticlimaxes in literature". Conventional storytelling wisdom, Attebery says, holds that a story should stop once its main action ends. Attebery disagrees. He compares the chapter to Jane Austen's habit of having her characters work everything out in careful detail once they have reached an understanding. In his view, the novel "would be much the less" without it. The critics John D. Rateliff and Jared Lobdell compare the way Saruman's flesh shrivels from his skull at his death to the instant aging of the character Ayesha, in Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She: A History of Adventure, when she bathes in the fire of immortality. Tolkien acknowledged Haggard, and especially She, as a major influence on his own writing. In a 2015 interview, the novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin called this section of The Lord of the Rings brilliant. He said it was the tone he wanted for the ending of Game of Thrones. Jonathon D. Langford, also writing in Mythlore, frames the scouring as the hobbits' coming of age. Merry and Pippin have visibly matured, he notes, while Frodo and Sam watch hobbit society reassess what their quest actually achieved.

  The 1981 BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is one of the few versions to include the chapter in full. It keeps the original ending, in which Saruman dies by Wormtongue's knife and Wormtongue is killed by arrows inside the Shire. The Finnish television miniseries Hobitit also retells the events of the scouring. Peter Jackson's film trilogy leaves the chapter out almost entirely. It survives only as a brief flash-forward when Frodo looks into the Mirror of Galadriel in 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring. The extended edition of The Return of the King restores Wormtongue killing Saruman, by stabbing him in the back rather than cutting his throat, and being killed in turn by an arrow. The scene now takes place at Isengard, though, with Legolas firing the shot instead of Shire archers. Jackson decided against including the chapter as early as 1998, calling it anticlimactic. He folded Saruman's and Wormtongue's deaths into the "Voice of Saruman" sequence from The Two Towers, rather than send the story back to Isengard after the Battle of Helm's Deep. He later said the scene, in post-production, felt like a seven-minute coda to The Two Towers. It gave The Return of the King an unsteady opening and made the film too long, so it was held back for the extended DVD. The illustrator Alan Lee closed his series of fifty paintings for The Lord of the Rings with the four hobbits riding home along a hedged lane, past freshly cut tree stumps, a tall chimney trailing smoke in the background. Reviewing the painting for Mythlore, Glen GoodKnight described it as "anti-climactic, containing no joy, and denying us even the hint of the bitter-sweet resolution of the story". For most audiences who only know the films, that painting, tree stumps and all, remains the closest thing to seeing the Shire's ruin for themselves.