Will We Ever See the Shire Again

One universally acknowledged truth is that if yous watch Peter Jackson'due south Lord of the Rings trilogy with a fan of the books, they're going to tell you most the things in the books that didn't make information technology into the movies, even in the Extended Editions. Tom Bombadil volition come upward, or Glorfindel, or Quickbeam (not Ghân-buri-Ghân, give thanks goodness). Finally, but equally you round the bend on nine-plus hours of films, the book-lover will mention the Scouring of the Shire.

2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in simply one story. So each Wednesday throughout the year, nosotros'll go there and dorsum once more, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. This is Polygon's Year of the Ring.

Filling two unabridged capacity of The Return of the King, the Scouring of the Shire is i of the largest omissions Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh fabricated from J.R.R. Tolkien'south piece of work to their screenplays. And while fans will debate Tom Bombadil should be included because he's fun, fifty-fifty if he doesn't actually have an impact on the story, the Scouring of the Shire is the opposite.

Nobody likes the Scouring of the Shire. It's anticlimactic. Information technology's depressing. It complicates the themes of The Lord of the Rings, interrupting the menses of the happy homecoming we feel our heroes deserve. It'due south essentially some other adventure into itself, a repetition in micro of the last several hundred pages we spent reading.

And speaking from experience, when yous abet for its inclusion to a movie viewer, you sound similar y'all have fully lost your heed. The Return of the Male monarch already has iv or five dissimilar endings, why on Center-earth would you want some other ane? And information technology'due south true that it would take an enormous restructuring of Jackson's Return of the King — and probably The 2 Towers every bit well — to fit the Scouring into the picture show trilogy.

The Lord of the Rings movies still work, without the Scouring. They still captivate audiences, spreading Tolkien's legacy farther than it ever could accept gone from the books alone. And without the Scouring, the movies are fundamentally not the same story as The Lord of the Rings novel.

OK, OK, what is the Scouring of the Shire?

In Tolkien'due south Return of the King, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive back in the Shire to discover their home and its people have been conquered, oppressed, and in some cases literally enslaved by Saruman, his lackey Wormtongue, and a small group of local humans.

The idyllic countryside of the hobbits has been marred by exploitation; the sometime watermill replaced with a coal-powered one belching smoke, hobbit holes destroyed and so that quarries and ugly new houses could be built, fields flattened to park carts in, elderberry copse wantonly hacked downwards to their stumps — including, near devastatingly, the "political party tree" that featured equally the meeting site for Bilbo's birthday in the series' opening chapter. Cosy Pocketbook Cease was taken as Saruman's headquarters; the garden ransacked, the door marred, the rooms stinking and in disarray.

Saruman, who was stripped of his magic at Isengard but not killed, has arrived home ahead of them and wormed his way into power with political skill, corrupting what hobbits he was able to and imprisoning others. Within a solar day of the iv'south inflow, Merry and Pippin's new martial feel is all it takes to rouse the Shirefolk against their oppressors, resulting in the Battle of Bywater, in which hobbits kill and dice to evangelize their home.

Image: New Line Cinema

Frodo tries to spare Saruman's life and orders him to exile, only for Wormtongue to finally snap under the wizard'south corruption, cut his main'southward throat, and exist executed by several hobbit arrows before anyone can requite an order non to burn. The final ugly confrontation happens as they stand at the very door of Handbag Finish. The Shire recovers, rebuilds, and becomes a happy place once again, but it is forever changed. And a few years afterwards, Frodo resolves that it is also painful for him to stay. And so he takes a ship westward from the Grey Havens.

Readers and scholars have struggled to pin specific meaning to this odd denouement since The Return of the King was published. The Scouring has been called an anti-socialist statement, an anti-fascist statement, and a satire of the hierarchy of post-Earth War II England. Only Tolkien, as with about attempts to say that The Lord of the Rings is "nearly" whatsoever specific historical moment, loudly resisted such characterizations.

"It has been supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire' reflects the state of affairs in England at the time when I was finishing my tale [roughly 1949-1955]," he wrote in his foreword to the 2nd edition of The Lord of the Rings. "It does not. It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset [circa 1936], though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, demand I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever."

The writer'southward sole concession to critical interpretation was that, as with the rest of the The Lord of the Rings, aspects of the Scouring were inspired by his own pain at watching urbanization encroach on the English countryside of his boyhood.

But what does the Scouring mean?

With respect to Professor Tolkien, I won't argue that the Scouring is important because of what it says about history, but rather what it says about his hero-hobbits.

Ane of the nigh celebrated passages in The Lord of the Rings is Sam'south speech about how stories don't terminate. The Scouring wraps Hobbiton and fifty-fifty Purse End itself upwardly in the long tail of history; Wormtongue was the lackey of Saruman, who was the lackey of Sauron, who was the lackey of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord built-in at the dawn of time.

Merry and Pippin's experiences make them the most martially qualified leaders on manus, and they proactively spearhead the armed resistance to Saruman. Merely the Scouring is also some of the near humanistic state of war-writing Tolkien produced for The Lord of the Rings — hither there are hardly any "fighters" who our heroes don't know by name. There isn't a drop of magic involved. The author carefully enumerates the casualties of the first armed disharmonize in the Shire in 300 years: 30 hobbits wounded and a dozen men captured, xix hobbits and seventy men dead.

Prototype: New Line Cinema

Our heroes tin't return domicile, because even their dwelling has been irreversibly marred past the conflict they prevailed against — more than any other effect on The Lord of the Rings, the Scouring of the Shire absolutely destroys Frodo. Frodo's story in Tolkien's The Render of the King is of a character who wants some control over his destiny, and fails to notice it over and over.

After struggling for then long with the burden of carrying the Ring, he ultimately fails, claiming its ability for his ain and forcing Gollum to wrest information technology from him. On the journey through Mordor, Frodo speaks of how he wishes to never carry a weapon or strike a blow again, gifting his uncle's sword Sting to Sam. And so, in the ceremony for his laurels as the heroic Ringbearer — for something he accomplished, in the end, by accident — Gandalf and Sam, of all people, convince him he must wear Sting for "tonight at least."

From the moment they realize something is very incorrect in the Shire, Frodo insists that the hobbits' liberation exist accomplished without bloodshed, on whatever side, including absolution for Saruman, Wormtongue, their human forces, and all hobbits who colluded with them. It's a radical mercy that mirrors Frodo's selection to spare Gollum, one of the just completely free and unadvised (some might say selfish!) decisions he makes in the story, and ultimately the selection that led to the devastation of the Band when his will failed.

Frodo's mail service-Ring pacifism could be interpreted as a uncomplicated fatigue of war, but that feels off. Frodo was not present for whatsoever of the book's actual battles, he did not befriend any of its tragically fallen heroes, or see immediate the suffering in the story'due south great sieges. His arc was not about fighting.

What fits more closely is that Frodo is looking for absolution and agency. He's looking for something that he does to affair, and it never does. He couldn't destroy the Ring, he couldn't go on his oath to never wearable a weapon, he couldn't protect the Shire, he can't free it without bloodshed, and he tin't even successfully testify Saruman and Wormtongue the mercy he wishes for himself.

Has Peter Jackson said why they omitted the Scouring of the Shire?

Image: Universal Pictures

The special features of the Extended Edition of Peter Jackson's The Render of the King devotes a pocket-size section just to the Scouring of the Shire. The production did film scenes of hobbits battling orcs and being clapped in bondage — only to create an homage to the Scouring in a Fellowship of the Ring scene in which Frodo looks into the Mirror of Galadriel, not to play out the whole sequence.

"The reason to lose the Scouring to me was very straightforward," Jackson says in a filmed interview for the Extended Edition, "it was one of those no-brainers.

"At the very beginning of this procedure, we'd identified the spine of our movies — Frodo taking the band to Mordor — which means that the climax of our movies is Frodo destroying the Ring. We manifestly have a denouement; in fact the denouement of The Return of the King is long and all-encompassing, it'south 20 minutes, which is xx minutes that we wanted to spend covering the impairment to Frodo equally a effect of this journey that he'due south had."

In the film version, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive home to a Shire then untouched by state of war that they don't even carp explaining themselves. The State of war of the Ring is a secret adventure they share, in knowing looks over their half-pints at the Green Dragon, while everyone else goes wide-eyed at an particularly large pumpkin. Sam gets married. Frodo monologues a bit about how hard it'due south been to choice up his old life. In the very side by side scene, he'due south in a cart with Bilbo going off to the Gray Havens.

"To get to that bespeak and then to deviate into a completely dissimilar event and storyline," Jackson says in a DVD special features interview, "to me felt — anticlimactic, I guess, is how I would describe it."

In the motion picture, Frodo's victory is elementary and obvious: The world was saved and the Shire remains an Eden that has never truly known evil. His newfound isolation is restrictively specific; his inability to reenter hobbit order is internal to his person, and was acquired by events external to the Shire. The juxtaposition of the experienced hobbit heroes with the crimson-faced farm-people cooing over a big gourd makes Frodo's isolation more than of an "ignorance is bliss" problem.

If Hobbiton is an Eden, Frodo has eaten of the tree. His feel has made him as well dark, too complex in idea to masquerade as a happy, simple hobbit anymore — and so he throws upwards his hands and leaves his entire society behind. If you squint, it'south the same decision he makes in the volume, in the same way an abstract painting of vertical bars can resemble a photo of a wood.

The Lord of the Rings is anything just uncomplicated

Image: New Line Cinema

Nosotros think of fantasy every bit a genre of basic archetypes and storyforms. The hero is born with a destiny, defeats a nifty and inhuman evil to restore or improve a status quo (maybe finding honey along the way), and is rewarded with power, praise, and societal acceptance. We think of The Lord of the Rings every bit the foundational text of that genre. And the saga does take such a story: The rise of Aragorn Two, Loftier Rex of the Reunited Kingdom.

Merely no one would merits that Aragon was Tolkien'south master character. The Lord of the Rings is most a hero with a duty rather than a destiny, who struggles ingloriously to defeat an incorporeal evil that eventually fully overcomes them. A hero who has no more control over their destiny afterward completing their task than earlier or during information technology. In fact, the globe is actually saved by a seemingly naive and disconnected choice they fabricated oodles of time before the story's climax.

They are discomfited past their experience rather than empowered, isolated rather than embraced. They find they can neither reenter society — considering they accept changed beyond restoration — nor return abode — because their home has besides.

The Scouring of the Shire is the element that expands The Lord of the Rings from intricately crafted hazard fiction to timeless literary relatability. It is what separates Tolkien from his imitators, who throw a hero and a sorcerer and a sword and a journeying together and phone call their Aragorn Story Lord of the Rings-inspired.

More than than whatever other speech, or fight, or graphic symbol, the Scouring of the Shire makes The Lord of the Rings a war story, in which some come abode to fame, fortune, and just advantage, others never truly come abode at all, and both are however heroes. A story of glorious, necessary battles that, in its last chapter, shows that a thing tin be glorious, necessary, celebrated, and still incorrect.

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/lord-of-the-rings/22848239/lord-of-the-ring-return-of-the-king-endings-explained-scouring-of-the-shire

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