The Scouring of the Shire

The Scouring of the Shire is a chapter from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It is the eighth chapter of Book VI of The Lord of the Rings, and it is the penultimate chapter of the whole story.

Template:Spoiler In the final book of the trilogy, the five travellers (Gandalf the wizard and Hobbits Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Peregrin Took) stay overnight at The Prancing Pony in Bree where they catch up on the last year's local events with proprietor Barliman Butterbur. They learn that strangers from the South have come to settle in and around Bree, much to the discomfort of the peace-loving Men and Hobbits indigenous to the region. Barliman is impressed to discover that Strider has been crowned King of Gondor.

Gandalf parts ways with the Hobbits to the Shire to have a long talk with Tom Bombadil. Gandalf assures the four that their training in the War of the Ring will be sufficient to settle the troubles, and what ensues is in some ways anti-climactic.

When they discover that the evil they had fought in Mordor had come home to roost, they rouse the Shire and are able to kill or drive off the evil-doers that infested it. With the assistance of Farmer Cotton, Merry and Pippin lead the Battle of Bywater, the last battle in the War of the Ring, in which 19 hobbits died.

Saruman and Wormtongue die shortly thereafter, when Wormtongue avenges a kick from his master by cutting Saruman's throat and is in turn killed by Hobbits. An eerie column of smoke arises from Saruman's corpse and is blown away in the wind, a scene reminiscent of Sauron's demise. Frodo covers the suddenly shriveled skull of Saruman and turns away.

Commentary

Despite Tolkien's much-publicised dislike of allegory, he admited (only grudgingly) that the transformation of the Shire from rural idyll to industrial wasteland was an allegory of what Tolkien viewed as the destruction of the English countryside by the steady creep of industrialisation. In particular, the loss of the old Mill in Bywater, only to be replaced by a much larger, grimier version, mimics an event from Tolkien's childhood. Tolkien commented that the symbolism also lay in the feeling of loss he felt after returning from the First World War, to discover that many of his close friends had died, and the world he remembered from his youth had largely disappeared.

Another idea is that Tolkien is also lampooning Soviet Communism by making the remade Shire a dictatorship with heavy-handed police, roadblocks, Rules, ugly buildings, "the Lockholes" (prison), confiscation of crops " 'for fair distribution', which means they get it and we don't" (as one hobbit put it), and so forth, and has Frodo and his friends orchestrate a revolution.

Book vs. movie

The Scouring of the Shire is one of several chapters from the book which were either not featured, or only partially featured, in the theatrical and extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. In the The Fellowship of the Ring film, the 'Mirror of Galadriel' scene (Chapter VII - The Mirror of Galadriel) does, like the book, foretell the Scouring. However, when the hobbits return to the Shire in The Return of the King film, the Shire is unchanged, so within the film adaptation the Scouring is intended as an alternate future that was avoided. The Scouring was also not featured in the 1980 animated film The Return Of The King.