"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, different commentators have argued that it can be applied to that period, with contemporary political references that variously include a satire of socialism, echoes of Nazism, allusions to the shortages in postwar Britain, and a strand of environmentalism.
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
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". All the cheerful inns are closed, so the Fellowship hobbits stay in the depressing, badly-built new Shiriff-house.
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.
Reaching the village of Bywater, the four hobbits discover that Sandyman's mill has been replaced by a big, noisy one full of machinery that fouls the water and pollutes the air; Ted Sandyman is the only hobbit who likes it, and he works for the Men who built it, whereas his father was his own boss. Merry, Pippin and Sam use their swords and their height to scare away a group of ruffians. 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. Cotton tells them that wagonloads of goods, including tobacco, have been sent "away", causing shortages; they were paid for with unexplained funds by Lotho Sackville-Baggins, known as the "Chief" or the "Boss", who moved into Frodo's home, Bag End, when Frodo left on the quest to destroy the Ring. Pippin rides to his home village, Tuckborough, to rally his kin, the large Took clan. A gang of twenty ruffians from Hobbiton try to take farmer Cotton prisoner; the leader of the gang is killed with arrows, and the other ruffians quickly surrender.
The next morning the hobbits at Bywater learn that Pippin's father, Thain Paladin II, has raised Tookland and is pursuing ruffians who have fled south; that Pippin will return with all the hobbits his father could spare; and that a much larger group of ruffians is heading towards them. Pippin returns with one hundred members of his family, before the ruffians arrive. Merry and Pippin lead the hobbits to victory in the brief Battle of Bywater. They ambush the ruffians by blocking a high-hedged lane with wagons in front of them and then behind them; most of the ruffians are killed. Frodo does not take part in the fighting.
The hobbits go to Hobbiton to visit Lotho. The whole area has been despoiled, and Bag End is apparently empty and unused. There they meet "Sharkey", alias of the Wizard Saruman; he is accompanied by his servant Wormtongue. He has lost his Wizard's power, except for his deceptive voice; he tells them he has deliberately harmed their home in revenge. Frodo tells him to leave the Shire; Saruman in reply tries to stab Frodo, but the knife snaps on Frodo's hidden coat of mithril chain-mail. Frodo asks the other hobbits not to kill Saruman and offers Wormtongue the opportunity to stay. Saruman reveals that Wormtongue killed Lotho, provoking Wormtongue to cut Saruman's throat. Wormtongue is shot dead by hobbit archers. A column of mist arises from Saruman's corpse and is blown away in the wind.
Aftermath
After the scouring, "the clearing up certainly needed a lot of work, but it took less time than Sam had feared". 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". Sam goes around the Shire planting saplings to replace lost trees, giving each one a grain of the dust from Galadriel's garden; the single nut he plants in the Party Field. The work is successful: "spring surpassed his wildest hopes", and "altogether 1420 in the Shire was a marvellous year". 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".
Concept and creation
Formal structure
Tolkien scholars and critics have noted that the chapter implies some kind of formal structure for the whole work. The critic Bernhard Hirsch writes that "The Scouring of the Shire" has "provoked considerable critical debate", unlike the rest of the "homeward journey" in Book 6. Hirsch accepts Tolkien's statement in the foreword to the Fellowship of the Ring that the formal structure of The Lord of the Rings, namely a journey outward for the quest and a journey home, meant that the chapter, along with the other two chapters of the return journey, was "foreseen from the outset". Another critic, Nicholas Birns, notes approvingly David Waito's argument that the chapter is as important morally as the Fellowship's main quest to destroy the One Ring, "but applies [the morals] to daily life". 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.
Birns goes further, arguing that the chapter has an important formal role in the overall composition of The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien had stated. In Birns's view, the chapter's main surprise is the appearance of Saruman, and it was indeed, Birns writes, his presence that made it necessary to scour the Shire. Evidence that Tolkien had planned something of the sort is found, Birns notes, in Sam'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.
Origins
Scholars have identified several possible origins and antecedents for the chapter, and these have been added to by Christopher Tolkien's exploration of the literary history of his father's work on it over the years. Scholars agree that the "Scouring" has an ancient pedigree, echoing Homer's Odyssey when after long years away Odysseus returns to his home island of Ithaca to scour it of Penelope's worthless suitors. Robert Plank adds that Tolkien could have chosen as a pattern any number of other returning heroes. 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". David Greenman in addition contrasts the scouring with Tuor's Aeneas-like escape from a wrecked kingdom as told in The Fall of Gondolin.
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. These throw light on Tolkien's choice of who Sharkey actually was, whether the "boss" hobbit Lotho Sackville-Baggins, a human leader of the gang of ruffians, or Saruman. Tolkien had thus hesitated over how to implement the "Scouring", only arriving at Saruman after trying other options. 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".
In his "Foreword to the Second Edition", Tolkien denies that the chapter is an allegory or relates to events in or after the Second World War:
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.