The Scouring

Today, a short look at the The Scouring of the Shire. Surely the most Marmite of all chapters of The Lord of the Rings... I personally hate it. I've read many arguments as to why it's actually the most important section of all, but every time I read it I just think “nope”. Let's begin with a reasonably sensible defence of the chapter I stumbled upon some time ago.

To be fair, there are more than a few reasons why multiple adaptations have forsaken the chapter. For one, it is sort of an anti-climax, taking place well after the principle plot of The Lord Of The Rings is over.

That’s part of it, but more important is that it’s a huge tonal mismatch. We go from epic, literally world-shaping events, to… an impotent wizard messing up people’s gardens. There’s just no way to naturally flow from one to the other in a narratively satisfying way. As Tolkien himself said about Beowulf :

I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf [i.e. all the villains are monsters]. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf’s rise to fame in a ‘typical’ or ‘commonplace’ war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon*. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a ‘wild’ or ‘trivial’ Swedish invasion !

Incidentally the truly Norse sagas do stuff like this all the time, and to be fair, they're mostly crap.

Which is exactly the problem. We have the Hobbits go from being key players in the destruction of the last great evil of the world, to having to fight the equivalent of “some Swedish prince”. It’s deeply unsatisfying. The argument is sometimes made that they need to prove themselves, but this makes no sense, because after what they’ve already done, no such activity is necessary.

The way the Shire saves itself is, in part, an opening up. Sam uses one of his gifts from the elves to restore the Shire. Merry and Pippin travel throughout the region and maintain their ties with both men and dwarves. Preservation can mean change. In fact, it may require it. Making the Shire an untouched place carries a stagnant stench. In Tolkien’s books, nothing can be protected forever, and all requires active vigilance and care. In the films, the Shire is already perfect and needs no change at all.

This is well put (the Silmarillion explores in much more detail the moral differences between a healed world versus one perfect from the beginning), but the need to save the Shire is just not apparent. The Hobbits have already fought to preserve it, making them do even more – having people's gardens dug up by some loser wizard after having destroyed Bard-dûr  – doesn’t add anything. It can't, really, because the main task has already been accomplished. It's Done. The ending of Sauron couldn't possibly be any more final; anything that happens next is necessarily a detail.

The argument is also made that it was necessary to show the Hobbits have been changed by their experiences, but this too is abundantly obvious. It's clear to reader and cinema audience alike that the Frodo who comes home is not the Frodo who sets off, nor is Sam, nor even Merry and Pippin to a lesser degree. There's no need to be any more explicit about something which is already very explicit... it would be like asking for more nudity in Game of Thrones.

Finally, another point is that this gives the work an added depth of character realism, but again… it’s a fantasy. It isn’t helpful to try and do this. To my mind the chapter is nothing but a weird and colossal distraction : I can see why it’s there, but it’s not a good bit of writing, even if many of the themes are important. It’s just too much of a clash with the narrative imperative, like trying to set up a creepy graveyard scene only to suddenly fill it with hamsters, or something. But others may disagree.

None of this is intended to criticise the linked article, which I do think is rather good. I take issue with the following, however :

The battle of Helm’s Deep, a slim handful of pages in the novel, takes up 40 minutes in Jackson’s The Two Towers. The necessity of peace and restoration, the hard work they require, are left to the cutting floor, while hour-long scenes of heroic violence take more and more space in each subsequent film. Though the films’ pastoral sequences have warmth and joy to them, they lack the bitter, beautiful edge that Tolkien’s prose grants them. That’s the cost of cutting Return Of The King‘s most crucial chapter: A loss as profound as the one Frodo Baggins suffers by novel’s end.

Yes, battles are exciting, and easier to drum up audience engagement if you've got the budget for it. But the text of the battles is some of Tolkien's most magnificent, and I would reject utterly any notion that the films are in any sense "shallow" by focusing on the spectacle. The stakes in the book are the very highest, practically cosmic in scope, and demand an appropriate and lengthy visual. More importantly, it is precisely the combination of this mythic scale combined with the human-level events (not least of which is Theoden's speech) that give the film tremendous, almost overwhelming emotional depth. Reducing the battles would be the direct equivalent of asking for less monsters in Beowulf : entirely and spectacularly missing the point. The mythic grandeur is exactly where the film most beautifully delivers its most potent message.

Nor do I find anything beautiful or bitter in Scouring; it just feels oddly tacked-on and badly-written. I would note that in the early drafts, Tolkien's "note to self" was that Hobbiton was dominated by a biscuit factory and the returning Hobbits decide to sail away to Greenland, so don't you dare tell me that the man who wrote stuff like this wasn't also capable of writing utter shite as well.

But...

One Quora answer to a question of the politics of Lord of the Rings does offer a better answer :

Sam, the humble gardener, has returned from war. And he does not take shit from anybody. He is appalled by the weakness and complacency of his countrymen. They mindlessly go along with whatever the new rulers suggest… anything to stay out of trouble. And Sam doesn’t play that way. He’s seen some shit. Seen the horrors of war. And he urges his people to resist.

You can read the totalitarian state the Shire is turned into as a far-right nightmare scenario. Or as a far-left nightmare scenario. Either way, it is dark, twisted and bleak. Public [sic; surely "private"] property is taken over by the [abjectly fascist] state, the rivers and fields are polluted and factories pump out black smoke as mighty forests are cut down… and most people just keep their heads down, and don’t resist. That’s Tolkien’s politics in a nutshell — do resist, do fight back, and don’t stand idly by as evil does what evil does best.

This is much more credible. It's not about some vague, unspecified way in which the Hobbits have learned important life lessons, nor about them proving their abundantly-clear newfound abilities (after Shelob, what other horrors can life hold for Sam ?). It's about exactly what those lessons they've learned actually are : to resist oppression, to urge their fellows to defend their idyllic lifestyle when the need arises, to realise that the inevitability of evil is an illusion. It can be defeated even by the small : "help shall oft come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter", as Gandalf says earlier. No-one is truly helpless.

Not, however, that this much changes my mind about the chapter. I can see the point to it, but I still find it badly-executed. For it to have any poignancy would require, I think, some far worse tragedy than trampling a few flower beds, and to avoid the tonal mismatch would require some remaining vestige of the cosmic scale of the threat for the Hobbits to overcome (perhaps if Saruman was left with considerably more power, this might have helped matters). 

Regardless, blending this into the narrative consistently is a virtual impossibility. However important the message might be, there's simply no way of defeating the Enemy and having anything else feel like fighting "some Swedish prince". And again, the Hobbits have already demonstrated this resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, so to now scale things back and give them a challenge manifestly below their abilities proves nothing. 

No, the movie's approach is better by far : show that they're conscious of saving the Shire during the War of the Ring ("courage Merry, courage for our friends") with a very gentle nod to show their changed nature on their return : bittersweet in that Sam is now able to face the altogether difficult challenge of approaching a not-especially-attractive barmaid but that Frodo is truly broken, unable to live in the Shire any more. The theme of Scouring, I accept, is hugely important. But I argue that the movie is not shallow by omitting the chapter, nor does it lack the "bitter and beautiful edge". On the contrary, this is somewhere where the movie is a good deal more subtle and – beware incoming treasonous heresy – greatly improves on the books.