Why I Love the Scouring of the Shire
“That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for. ”
Game of Thrones is fantasy for people that don’t like fantasy, and by fantasy, they mean the Lord of the Rings. It’s gory. It’s sexy. It’s morally complex. There’s not one ultimate source of evil that needs to be destroyed, everyone is evil! But the Lord of the Rings ends with a powerful sequence that undermines the normal complaints about it (other than it’s not sexy, that’s still true). The bad is not solely dependent on Sauron. Good people do bad things. The work of overcoming evil with good is not the domain of incorruptible heroes, but the work of all of us, overcoming our fears, and standing up for what’s right. After the Ring is destroyed, the hobbits return to their home in the Shire, and find evil there. Not an externally imposed evil, like war or slavery, but internal evil that the inhabitants of the Shire participate in and perpetuate. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, returning after their quest, now have to cleanse the land of the darkness that has fallen upon it in the second to last chapter of the Lord of the Rings: the Scouring of the Shire.
The Scouring of the Shire shows that even though the Dark Lord Sauron is defeated, the status quo is not restored. The Hobbits return to their home in the Shire and find it completely changed. When they try to get back to one of their old pubs, gates bar the entrance to the Shire, and they’re arrested for breaking though. The Sheriffs, formerly a group of drinking buddies that restored the peace in those rare instances when it was broken, have been militarized. Trees have been cut down. Hobbit holes plowed up and replaced with brick factories. While Frodo carried evil from the Shire to Mount Doom, evil found its way back. Without the help of their more powerful companions, it is now up to the hobbits to make things right. But the hobbits also aren’t who they were when they left the Shire.
The quest to destroy the Ring has changed Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, and they return to the Shire stronger and wiser. They scare off some of the thugs that arrested them, and together they rally the hobbits to overthrow ‘the Chief,’ Lotho Sackville-Baggins, Frodo’s relative who has taken over. Sam gets Tom Cotton and his sons to help, Pippin recruits his kin, the Tooks, and Merry leads the hobbits to victory over the Chief's men. After the battle, they discover that the Wizard Saruman has come to the Shire and taken over from Lotho. Even after his staff and power are broken, Saruman is still able to work corruption in the Shire. Frodo offers Saruman forgiveness, which he rejects. Instead he further demeans his henchman Grima, who falls into fury and kills Saruman. Grima is killed when he tries to flee. After the death and bloodshed, Hobbiton is slowly rebuilt with Sam as the Mayor.
Even though I love the Scouring of the Shire and think it is critically important to the Lord of the Rings, I understand why it was dropped from Peter Jackson’s the Return of the King. It’s a long movie, and the whole pacing of the film is structured around Frodo destroying the Ring in Mount Doom. People already complain that there are too many endings to the Return of the King, and the Scouring of the Shire would add a fourth act that would make it longer and confuse the simplicity of the movie’s ending. Books, however, have a little more flexibility to extend their ‘run time.’ That said, the Scouring of the Shire does confuse the simplicity of throwing the Ring into Mount Doom, ending all evil. But that’s the point, complicating that ending adds depths to the themes of the Lord of the Rings.
Jackson cuts the Scouring of the Shire to better fit the constraints of movies, but in doing so, the trilogy kind of becomes a formulaic Hero’s Quest story. Frodo is the only one who can defeat the big bad guy, Frodo succeeds, and when Sauron is defeated, everything is fixed. But Frodo really isn’t a Hero. He doesn’t have a special birth, or any powers or connection to Sauron. He doesn’t have the constitution of Gimli, the immortality of Legolas, the strength of Boromir, the destiny of Aragon, or the wisdom and magic of Gandalf. He’s just a hobbit who lives in a hole. And Frodo ultimately fails in his quest. He brings the Ring, the object into which Sauron poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life, to the fires where it was created. And standing in the heart of Mount Doom, Frodo claims the Ring for himself. He does not destroy evil, he is overcome by it. Only through repeated acts of mercy to Gollum, and divine intervention is the Ring destroyed.
The Scouring of the Shire can’t be in Jackson’s the Lord of the Rings, because it doesn’t follow the stripped down version of the Hero’s Quest. Frodo fades into the background, as Merry, Pippin, and Sam lead the rest of the hobbits. However, the Scouring of the Shire shows the real heart of the Hero that we often miss. It is not enough for the Hero to be transformed. True Heroes, like Merry, Pippin, and Sam, return transformed and thus change their society. Tom Cotton, a regular hobbit farmer, is about as far as you can get from a typical Hero, yet he and his sons are vital to restoring the Shire. Merry, Pippin, and Sam not only return to the Shire as Heroes, their courage and strength makes heroes of the people around them.
This is why I love the Scouring of the Shire. It brings what Sam says to Frodo, in the greatest part of the Lord of the Rings, home:
It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.
There is good in this world, and that good is worth fighting for. That fight is not just for Mythic Heroes, and it’s not just against the huge Saurons of the world. It’s a fight for all of us. For people like Aragorn, as well as people like Sam Gamgee. For people like Gandalf, and people like Tom Cotton. It’s for me, in my own life.
It takes work to overcome evil with good, in Mount Doom and at home everyday, hard work. The hard work of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. But that work is worth doing, because when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. And when I ask how can the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened, that hard work of love is what I hold onto, and the hope that the sunshine which I now see in a mirror dimly, I will see face to face.
