youhavegrownverymuchthescouringoftheshireandthenovelisticaspectsofthelordoftherings.593
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"You have grown very much": The Scouring of the Shire and the novelistic aspectsof the Lord of the Rings.
1. The Scouring and Novelistic Reintegration
In the grand sweep of The Lord of the Rings, "The Scouring of
the Shire" has very much its own tone and atmosphere. The chapter
(chapter 8 of Book VI, published in 1955 in The Return of the King), in
which Frodo and his three hobbit-friends, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, return
to overthrow the unjust order that has imposed itself on their homeland
while they were absent, has a distinct quality to it. As Robert Plank
has argued, the Scouring chapter is "fundamentally different from
the rest of the book" (103). There is no magic, no lyricism, no
Elvishness. The only character who is not either a hobbit or a man is
the evil wizard Saruman, ultimately the mastermind behind the unjust
order. The Scouring chapter has also attracted various historically
contextualized readings, such that J. R. R. Tolkien himself, in the
foreword to the 1966 second edition of The Lord of the Rings, had to
deny that it was an allegorical response to the socialist policies of
the 1945-51 UK Labour government. Tolkien stated: "It has been
supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire reflects the
situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does
not."
But what does the Scouring chapter reflect? This article will argue
that the chapter plays an essential role in the shape of The Lord of the
Rings because of how closely it resembles the prose fiction of the two
centuries before Tolkien began to write. My contention is that the
Scouring chapter is the most novelistic episode in Tolkien's
massive tale. The Lord of the Rings is an epic, a romance, and a
fantasy. But it is also a novel, specifically the sort of novel Ian Watt
described as reflecting "the dominance of the middle class in the
reading public" (Watt 48) by invoking a certain kind of bourgeois
social realism. It is my argument that "The Scouring," in what
Janet Brennan Croft calls "that deceptively anti-climactic but
all-important chapter" (102), epitomizes many of the book's
aspects of what Barry Langford calls "novelistic
verisimilitude" (Eaglestone 30). In the English novel as delineated
by Watt, novelistic verisimilitude consists of the following aspects.
First, there is a broad swath of society with several social classes
represented as interacting with each other. Second, the focus is
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domestic, or at the very least the resolution of the plot is a domestic
one and occurs within a domestic context. Third, though not recording an
overwhelming or revolutionary social change, the novel tends to
privilege the viewpoint and the ideals of the emerging and aspiring
middle classes, though accommodating them within an essential continuity
of English life in which existing hierarchies might seem only slightly
altered. "The Scouring of the Shire" as a piece of writing can
be said to, in different degrees, reflect all three above-described
traits of the English realist novel.
David Waito has recently presented an outstanding restatement of
the chapter's importance. Waito argues that "The
Scouring" presents a "Shire Quest" of equal moral
importance to the "Ring Quest" of the trek to Orodruin. The
Shire Quest, for Waito, possesses the same moral stakes as the Ring
Quest but applies them to daily life and to circumstances that the
hobbits have to address for themselves. This article concords with
Waito's emphasis on the moral and political aspects of the chapter,
but particularly emphasizes its formal role in the book's overall
composition--especially the ways in which The Lord of the Rings is a
novel. This compositional role depends crucially on the figure of
Saruman--the chapter's most unexpected character, and the figure
who renders the very idea of scouring necessary in the first place.
A final obstacle to the return home was part of Tolkien's plan
at least from the initial composition of the scene in Lorien in which
the mirror of Galadriel depicts mischief taking place in the Shire. This
sense of a final obstacle was a plot-aspect with a long epic pedigree
going back (as Giddings and Holland 129 indicate) to Odysseus's
nostos and his scouring of the suitors who have plagued Ithaca. Yet, as
the compositional history included in Sauron Defeated (the ninth volumeof Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle-earth and part four
of the History of The Lord of the Rings) shows, the presence of
Saruman-as-Sharkey, and thus the Scouring's connection to the
greater tale of the War of the Ring, was a very late entry. As in most
of Tolkien's revision-during-composition process, the later an
element appeared, the more serious it was, and the more serious an
element, the more likely it is to connect with, in Middle-earth terms,
southern and eastern geography (see Birns). In the final composition,
there can be no division between the parochialism of home and the
consequentiality of abroad. Indeed, one of the principal outcomes of the
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Hal Colebatch in his Communism entry in the Tolkien Encyclopedia argues,
using Tolkien's phraseology, for the "applicability" of
the Scouring episode to the Labour government (108), and sees Tolkien as
explicitly anti-socialist. Benjamin Wiker uses the Scouring episode,
with its critique of central planning, as a main reason why the book is
"a must read for conservatives" (260). Yet the chapter
presents a powerful pro-environmentalist argument as well (see Dickerson
and O'Hara 282). Its portent is as much conservationist as it is
traditionalist.
But the chapter's resonances go far deeper than any echoes of
its time of composition. The social background of the chapter leads also
to another, earlier source. As John Garth and many others--including
Tolkien himself--have stressed, the First World War, in which Tolkien
actually fought, had much more influence on his mind and writing than
did the Second. After four years of grueling warfare, the returning
troops in 1918-19 were a social problem for England; they needed to be
reintegrated into society but felt themselves possessed of a more
profound insight than that of the society they had returned to. Tolkien
was certainly conscious of the problem of the First War veteran as a
social issue. There is a light-hearted chuckling at the incongruity
bestowed by the hobbits parochialism in the narrative's
observations of Hamfast "Gaffer" Gamgee's minimizing ofthe war. But there is also a sense of injustice in that the actions of
the warriors are not entirely recognized on the home front.
Sam's demurral when Rosie trivializes everything he has
accomplished so far is done not just out of decorum or politeness
towards his beloved. It proceeds out of awareness that the Shire
experience has been so parochial that the home hobbits are literally
incapable of registering the trauma of the returning veterans. This isseen in the localism of the Bree people in their skepticism regarding
any of the developments away south. Both the Shire and Bree folk are
civilians who only know their own local deprivations and, in what
Tolkien called in a 1963 letter "a mental myopia which is proud of
itself (Letters 329), are insensitive to those of the soldiers who have
travelled, both physically and experientially, much further. As Sue Kim
puts it, the "hobbits are caught in a bureaucracy for which their
own submission and lack of organization is partly responsible"
(884). Necessarily, it is this very provinciality that Frodo and company
went into peril in order to protect. They would not want their people to
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know all that they have known. To preserve ordinary life is why Frodo
and Sam made the sacrifices they did. Still, at the end of the war,
there is a pronounced difference in moral knowledge between Frodo and
Sam, on the one hand, and the majority of hobbits, on the other.
Frodo faces the same problem of reintegration encountered in many
First World War poems and narratives, albeit his is very differently
treated in mode and style and in a narrative universe that is, in
Tolkien's vision, much more integrated and harmonious. Ivor Gurney
(1890-1937), a poet who, like Tolkien, had actually fought in the war,
posited a similar issue of reintegration, albeit from a far angrier
vantage point. In "To The Prussians of England," Gurney has a
returning soldier say, "We ll have a word there too, and forge a
knife/Will cut the cancer threatens England's life" (34).
Gurney here proposes a kind of scourging of the cultural complaisance
and excessive bellicosity of Britain. Frodo's scourging, on the
other hand, is of the malevolent oppression of Saruman and Lotho. Frodo
returns disillusioned with, yet not entirely scornful of, military
action, and he certainly advocates overthrowing the Lotho/ Sharkey
regime. Yet he wishes to do so with minimal bloodshed and takes no great
pleasure in his side's triumph. Frodo's quandary does not
refer to, as in Gurney, the corruption of his people, but the trauma of
his own ordeal. More largely, Frodo realizes that his life in the Shirehas been, as Verlyn Flieger said of Tolkien's wartime life,
"diverted from its accustomed channels" (9). Despite his love
for the Shire, Frodo realizes it offers him no real possibility of
reintegration.
But reintegration into what? What is the polity of the Shire?
Identifying the polity of the Shire can take us, productively, beyond
the immediate politics of the twentieth century towards a more enduringsense of Tolkien's art and vision. Asking this question yields the
realization that any sense of the Shire's polity will have to be
found very late in Tolkien's compositional process. To be sure, in
the early chapters of Book I, we have a sense of the geography and
organization of the Shire, and of the relationship of Buckland to the
original four farthings. But there is no evidence of who the overall
ruler of the Shire is, or what is the nature of the authority they
exercise. Certainly, no sense of any of this can be found from The
Hobbit; indeed "the Shire," as a term, did not exist in The
Hobbit; there was just "Hobbiton." The Shire as a new concept
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is coextensive with the far darker reimagining of the world of The
Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings. Imagining a politically bounded region
surrounding Hobbiton was a necessary part of establishing the darker
historical circumstance of the Scouring. And all textual evidence shows
that many of the details of the polity of the Shire, as unfolded in
"A Note On The Shire"--that it had a Mayor and a Thain and a
Master of Buckland--were conceived in the course of Tolkien's
planning of the Scouring, the deliverance of the Shire from
Lotho/Saruman's oppression by the returning Frodo, Sam, Merry, and
Pippin. The final conception of the polity of the Shire is very much a
novelistic polity, in that it resembles the half-genteel, half-bourgeois
world in which the first major English novelists, such as Henry Fielding
and Samuel Richardson, wrote. Again, the evidence of the box Galadriel
presents to Sam indicates that Tolkien foresaw the need for scouring
early on. But the very idea of scouring changed his conception of the
Shire that would be so scoured.
It is notable, for instance, that the idea of a Thain is not
mentioned in the text until the Scouring chapter. Here, Paladin Took, as
described by Farmer Cotton, says that if anyone will give orders
"at this time of day" it will be "the right Thain of the
Shire" (RK, VI, viii, 1009). Pippin has earlier mentioned his
father, describing him to Bergil, son of Beregond, as someone who farmsthe lands round Whituell near Tuckborough in the Shire, not mentioning
that he is the Thain. Did Paladin Took only "become" the Thain
of the Shire when Tolkien had to conceive the sort of polity that would
resiliently reaffirm itself against Sharkey's depredations?
Christopher Tolkien comments, on page 103 of Sauron Defeated, that the
mention of the Thain was "introduced" on revision, and in
addition, reveals on pages 99 and 101 that mention of the Thain was
inserted. These alterations suggest that Tolkien at the very least mademore of the institution of the Thain in the text as he decided he needed
it for narrative reasons. "At this time of the day" in
Paladin's comment (as quoted or perhaps paraphrased by Farmer
Cotton) is also fascinating as it indicates that the Thain sees his
power as largely ceremonial and having, in institutional terms, passed
its height. If there is any de facto power in the Shire before the
Lotho/Sharkey crisis, it resides with the Mayor, however comical a
figure Will Whitfoot may be. This is seen in the initial draft of the
chapter where Robin Smallburrow speaks of the responsibility of the
Shirriffs to "do as the Mayor bids" (Sauron Defeated 81).
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Though this language was omitted in the final version of RK, the
assumption that the Mayor commands the Shirriffs is still latent.
Notably, the Shirriffs obey the Mayor, not the Thain. In crises such as
the Lotho/Sharkey one, however, the Thain can assert his institutional
reserve power, as indeed Paladin does in resisting Lotho (fortified by
the impregnability of the physical stronghold of the Tooks in the
Smials). The power is still there, formally, on the books, able to be
activated if need be, as in the case of what Christopher Tolkien calls
Paladin's "refusal to have anything to do with the pretensions
of Lotho" (Sauron Defeated 103). But Paladin's own words give
the impression that the more active exercise of the power of the Thain
was in the past. And the office of the Mayor, as an institution, seems
more modern than that of the Thain (which even in Shakespeare's
Macbeth--so eloquently linked to Tolkien by T. A. Shippey--was used as a
synonym for archaism, replaced by the earls introduced by the
English-influenced Malcolm Canmore). The Mayor is elected for a
renewable seven-year term, a democratic practice that certainly did not
exist other than on the village level in the Middle Ages. The
institution of shirriffs or shire-reeves, is a historical one stemming
from Anglo-Saxon times, but there are no records of the Mayor of a
pre-Norman Conquest English shire or of the institution of Mayorship,
which in its etymology is French and Latin. The Mayorship seems an
institution more of the sort that would have existed in the eighteenthcentury, at the time of the rise of the novel.
This is in line with Tolkien's description of the Shire as
"half-republic, half-aristocracy" (Letters 241)--indeed a
winning and apt description of Britain in the eighteenth century. The
Shire is seen as a place where democracy in the sense we would use the
term today is not absent. (1) Of course, the fundamental idea is that
the Shire is a place where concentrated power is abhorred as the enemyof all virtue and freedom. Ideally speaking, there should be as few
orders given as possible. Tolkien's hobbits, and his conception of
them, exude a love of near-anarchy close to the distributism of a vision
such as G. K. Chesterton's in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This
relation is argued by, among others, Paul E. Kerry, who speaks of
Tolkien's sympathy with the older Catholic writer's critique
of "the encroaching artificiality of industrialization" (225).
Certainly this encroaching artificiality is what Saruman represents, and
it may well overpower any consideration of the society that emerges from
Saruman's impingement. But Tolkien does portray a Shire after
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Saruman, one in which Mayor Sam Gardner is a resounding success. The
general arc of history in the Shire seems to point to the rise of the
Mayorship, even if this is not automatically accompanied by the decline
of the other offices.
Indeed, in the next generation, even after the cosmopolitan heroes
Pippin and Merry revitalize the offices of Thain and Master of Buckland,
it is Sam Gardner, the Mayor, who is the principal power in the Shire.
As important as the institutions of Thain and Master still are, it is
that of Mayor of the Shire that is preeminent. Sam represents social
mobility and the rise of the middle class. As symbolized by Sam, the
post-Sharkey Shire is not a restored aristocracy but a continuing
incipient democracy that resumes its course after Sharkey's menace
is removed. The emphasis is less on the Return of the Thain than the
Rise of the Mayor. In the epic-romance world of the rest of Middleearth,
virtuous kings retain, inherit, or resume thrones. Sam's emergence
as Mayor during the years of his maturity and achievement in the early
Fourth Age, on the other hand, reconfirms the novelistic nature of the
world of the Shire.
2. Frodo and Saruman: Novelistic Characters
Yet, for all that, the character who makes the Scouring mostnovelistic is a millennia-old wizard who has ensnared himself with his
own devices--Saruman. Saruman's fate in this chapter is one of
degradation and humiliation. He has spurned the last genuine offer of
the victors for forgiveness, taken advantage of Treebeard's
half-intentional mercy by slinking off and putting himself up to no
good. His putative last moment of command under the name of Sharkey
turns to dust when he loses both the physical battle and the struggle
for psychological supremacy to a bunch of hobbits, albeit heavily armedand militarily experienced ones. Sharkey, originally suspected by the
returning Hobbits to be merely a nasty ruffian, is revealed as Saruman.
But, equally, Saruman's character has dwindled to become, in
effect, merely a nasty ruffian. This fall is symbolized in the way
Saruman, ejected from the lofty battlements of his tower of Orthanc,
ends up in-a hole in the ground! Bag End embourgeoises Saruman. He
diminishes into a local magnate. Shippey termed Bilbo the
"bourgeois burglar" (10). Saruman has become the bourgeois
wizard. Just as Wormtongue becomes Worm, Saruman becomes Sharkey. For
both Saruman and Wormtongue, it is a process of diminishment, of
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truncation. When he first heard of hobbits via Gandalf, Saruman had
contempt for them. Now he is as petty as the worst of hobbits upon whom
he has looked down. Just as Frodo has attained the aura of an Elf or a
Wizard, so has Saruman slunk down to meanness and pettiness. If romance
or epic characters, for good or evil, are necessarily larger than daily
life, Saruman's final pettiness is merely life-size, and typical of
the sort of character one finds in a post-1700 novel, defined by Watt as
possessing "formal realism" that constitutes "a full and
authentic report of human experience" (31).
The constructive, affirmative elements of the Scouring also have a
novelistic aspect. The Ents give Merry and Pippin draughts that have the
effect of making them larger. This seemingly random plot element pays
off on their return to the Shire, where the newly grown hobbits are that
much more physically mighty in contrast with their former peers. Merry
and Pippin do not find the Entwives, as wistfully requested of them by
Treebeard. Yet, through the increased height and self-confidence
Treebeard (as well as their participation in the victory over Sauron)
gives them, Merry and Pippin grow large enough to salvage a land the
Entwives--as Treebeard makes a point to say--would have loved. Saruman,
on the other hand, dwindles, becomes petty, and is knocked down rather
than bolstered by his interactions with the world. Saruman, furthermore,
becomes more aged and hunched, and grows smaller just as Merry andPippin grow larger. Merry and Pippin increase from comic sprites to
novelistic figures capable of moral growth. Saruman diminishes from a
fearsome wizard to a self-seeking villain more on the scale of a Mr.
Carker in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son or a Sir John Chester in
his Barnaby Rudge. Saruman's rivalry with Gandalf is a contest in
which mutual rancor takes the priority--at least in Saruman's
mind--from the search for knowledge and wisdom. For Saruman, it is only
mastery that matters, and the need for mastery arises ultimately fromboth a personal flaw and a personal grudge. Saruman cannot confess his
interest in the Shire to Gandalf because he would be admitting that he
shares Gandalf's quirks and enthusiasms more than he lets on. This
interpersonal rivalry has the intricacy of motive most often associated
with novelistic characters, what Peter Brooks has termed the ability of
the novel to negotiate with "the ethical complexity of
reality" (145).
Moreover, Saruman has already violated the implied instructions to
the Istari to circulate and be helpful to all by claiming a specific
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place, Orthanc, as his own, while Gandalf is obediently itinerant,
indeed finding the Shire in the course of his travels. (2) When Saruman
is exiled from Orthanc and dwindles into Sharkey, the Shire becomes his
last redoubt. But perhaps, as Vincent Ferre suggests (52), Saruman may
also have hope of using the Shire as a new base through malevolent
counsel much the same way Sauron used Ar-Pharazon's Numenor after
being carried there as a conquered captive. Saruman's post-Orthanc
recourse to Eriador is one of many links between the Shire and the
mid-Anduin basin region of Middle-earth, going back to the Hobbits
original migration and their kinship with the Rohirrim. In every case,
the Eriador location is a more domesticated version of the
Anduin-oriented location. The Hobbits have ventured out from Eriador and
become cosmopolitanized. Saruman has retreated into the provincial realm
he had successively derided and exploited, fallen from menacing wizard
in a fearsome fortress to bourgeois smallholder of Hobbiton.
For, if, on the one hand, the Lotho who gleefully took over Bag End
from Frodo became transmogrified, as Tolkien revised the text, into
Saruman, on the other hand, Saruman has, in terms of his moral
ambitions, dwindled into being just another claimant to what is still a
hobbit-house, "a hole in the ground," no matter how socially
grand in hobbit terms Bag End is. Saruman has shriveled morally. But he
has also narrowed his ambitions to mere shelter and a chance at ruiningthe lives of others. Just as Saruman becomes Sharkey, Wormtongue becomes
Worm, totally losing any vestige of humanity. It is a process of
diminution that inverts the hobbits growth, both moral, and--given the
effect of the Ent-draughts--physical.
Much of Tolkien's recasting of the chapter, including his
giving to Merry lines originally ascribed to Frodo (on which Christopher
Tolkien briefly remarks in Sauron Defeated 81, but whose completeelucidation must wait until there is a comprehensive textual history of
The Lord of the Rings), can be explained by the new prominence of
Saruman. Merry and Pippin have been on the Saruman "side" of
the plot, while Frodo has not. Though Frodo's "side" is
far more serious--Saruman at his worst is a far less menacing enemy than
even a Sauron much weakened from his height in the Second Age--Frodo and
Saruman have not met and have had no history comparable to that supplied
by Merry and Pippin's ill-treatment by Saruman's Orcs and
their friendship with Saruman's enemies Treebeard and Theoden.
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Frodo's interaction with Saruman is still necessary. But
because of their earlier non-conjunction, Tolkien handles it gingerly
and with a sense of consequence and magnitude. Saruman has certain
expectations of Frodo, probably formed by his interactions with hobbits.
He expects a triumphant Frodo will be boastful and self-important in his
defeat of Saruman, just as Saruman's hobbit minions have been in
their mistreatment of the Shire populace. Yet Frodo knows in his heart
the necessity for sacrifice and self-disavowal. Rebekah Long speaks of
the "lasting sadness and narrative resignation" of the
Scouring chapter, and emphasizes the "urgent wish" of
Frodo's desire for no more killing, reflected in his not actively
participating in the Battle of Bywater (130). This largely has to do
with Frodo's physical and psychological wounds. But the Shire as a
whole has also suffered a trauma. It is a short and reparable trauma.
But it is a trauma that adds to the book's ample experiential
reservoir of pain and suffering, and one to which novelistic
reintegration, expressed for instance in Sam and Rosie's marriage,
is a solution.
The fact that Frodo's lines in draft are taken over by Merry
in the published version also signifies that Tolkien realized that
Frodo, after his suffering, temptation, and sacrifice, was an
insufficiently bourgeois hero (again using "bourgeois" asShippey used it of Bilbo). Merry has endured horror, including a serious
war wound. But he has not undergone the truly extreme perils faced by
Frodo. Merry is a more appropriate accomplisher of the task of repairing
errors that are caused by avarice and arrogance but that are not direct
embodiments of Sauron's metaphysical evil of the sort Frodo has
faced in Mordor. It is for this reason that Merry and Pippin take the
lead in dealing with the minions of Sharkey. Merry and Pippin's
draught-assisted physical growth can deal with the obstacles on theground. But Frodo's moral growth is needed to deal with the
obstacles within the heart. If Frodo had not been laden with suffering,
Saruman would not have been so shocked at Frodo's moral growth.
When Saruman says to Frodo, "You have grown very much"
(RK, VI, viii, 1019), and that he, Frodo, has robbed Saruman's
revenge of his sweetness, Saruman is saying Frodo has gone beyond what
might be expected of a hobbit. Even when corrupt and miserable, Saruman
is still, intermittently, wise. He can see that Frodo will not have a
long and happy life. Saruman understands-in the way that a Sauron, at
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least a Third Age Sauron, would not--that Frodo has indeed grown. But
Saruman has lost the ability to put his percipience in any overall moral
frame. That is the core of his bitterness, his perdition. The moral
complexity here is novelistic. Certainly heroes in epic or romance grow
morally. The protagonist of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a text
profoundly important to Tolkien, is a good example. Yet Tolkien's
moral canvas has a three-dimensionality to it that medieval texts
arguably lack. This scene is a consummate example of what Ian Watt
argued was the "much richer psychological and moral content"
(167) of the modern novel. Frodo's moral growth is an eminently
novelistic element. So is Saruman's agony at having to concede it
although it gnaws at his heart to do so.
Indeed, Saruman's percipience becomes turned even against his
ostensible allies. When Saruman says, mockingly, of Wormtongue,
"Even when he sneaks out at night it is only to look at the
stars" (RK, VI, viii, 102), he is jeering at his only continuing
loyalist. Here, any vestige of a moral understanding on Saruman's
part has collapsed--even as Frodo, in showing to Saruman at Bag End the
mercy that he had shied away from feeling for Gollum in his discussion
with Gandalf in "The Shadow of the Past," has achieved a
larger and more comprehensive moral insight. The tension within Saruman
and Wormtongue, the friction within the camp of the adversaries, is alsofriction within fiction itself. The aphorism gains its thrust from
Saruman's pointed psychological deployment against his alleged
helper. What is, thematically, evil turning in on itself, being
schismatic and disputatious, becomes, on the level of articulation, a
deepening novelistic effect yielding a multiplicity of psychological
planes.
Frodo can neither subside back into the Shire nor resume his formerrole as squire, despite a brief stint as temporary Deputy Mayor. Sam,
Merry, and Pippin, on the other hand, assume roles much larger than
those they had once had. Saruman, though, becomes morally diminished,
and his character dwindles to the merely novelistically malevolent. He
is still of much greater intelligence than anyone else in the tableau.
But he is so filled with rancor and loathing for himself and others that
this intelligence has no context. That his spirit seeks the West after
he dies is a sign that some of his potency remains. That it is rejected,
presumably by the Authorities (Eru, that is to say "God,"
and/or the Valar), via a cold wind shows how far Saruman has fallen.
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From being the mightiest wizard in Middle-earth, Saruman has become a
petty criminal, a half-comic, half-monstrous blocking figure who would
be at home in a Moliere comedy or, perhaps especially, a Dickens novel
(see Nelson for a discussion of Dickens's possible influence on
Tolkien). Conversely, from being a bourgeois gentlehobbit, Frodo has
become a hero deserving of welcome and sanctuary in Eressea but is no
longer at home in the Shire. Tolkien anchors the moral clarity of
Saruman's deserved punishment in the moral nuance of novelistic
psychological detail.
3. Middle Class, Marriage Plot, and the Novelistic Shire
The post-1700 British novel has long been considered to focus
around one contextual and one structural feature: the rise of the
middle-class and the marriage plot. Watt, the preeminent theorist of
this conjunction, puts all the elements together when he speaks (140) of
"the middle-class concept of marriage." (3) In The Lord of the
Rings, this combination is epitomized in the life of Sam Gamgee. Sam is
the unobtrusive moral center of the book. His return to domestic
happiness with Rosie after dropping Frodo off at Mithlond is
paradigmatically novelistic. In 1951, Tolkien said of this aspect,
"I think the simple ' rustic love of Sam and his Rosie
(nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (thechief hero's) character, and to the theme of the relation of
ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests,
sacrifice, causes, and the 'longing for Elves, and sheer
beauty" (Letters 161).
The "nowhere elaborated" is key. Why, in a sprawling,
teeming saga, replete with details of Dunland and Lossarnach, Archet and
Aglarond, would an author nowhere elaborate something he says isessential to the understanding of a character that he says is his hero?
Obviously, Tolkien thought about having a more expanded role for Rosie
(explicitly in the shelved epilogue, but perhaps elsewhere, in possible
reveries by Sam during his Mordor travails) and decided this would
distort the shape of the book. If he only came to explicitly understand
there was a Rosie late in composition, that sequence would explain why
Rosie is not mentioned at the beginning and why Sam thinks of Galadriel,
but not explicitly of Rosie, in Mordor. Bywater, the Cotton family, and,
for the most part, Lotho are new names in narrative terms, manifesting
themselves first and only in the Scouring chapter. Christopher Tolkien,
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in discussing the original draft for the murder of Saruman by
Wormtongue, remarks that "There is... no Battle of Bywater"
(Sauron Defeated 100) and speaks of the battle descriptions as being
"inserted" later on in the compositional process.
These insertions do much to fill in the picture of the Shire as a
developed polity. But they remind us all the more that Tolkien's
vision of the Shire grew considerably in heft and nuance as he neared
the end of his great work; the final polity of the Shire was clearly
considerably amplified from his original intent. Cotton, Rosie, and
Bywater all, as referents, give a more embodied view of the Shire. They
give it a felt social context that ramifies and diffuses the polity
described in section one of this article. The three-dimensionality and
sense of paradox here are novelistic. The very people such as Rosie and
the Gaffer, who do not understand the scope of the War of the Ring, are
those who must be protected against the remnants of the evil it was
fought to combat. Once again, Waito's differentiation of Ring Quest
and Shire Quest becomes relevant. The epic/romance plot exists in order
to safeguard the lives of those living the novel plot. All this is a
testimony to what Robin Anne Reid calls the "multiple styles and
registers and languages" that flourish within Tolkien's
polyphonic text (535). This very multiplicity is novelistic.
The combination of marriage-plot, domesticity, and Sam's rapid
social and political rise (even seen in his surname-change from Gamgee
to the more aristocratic-sounding and less parodic Gardner) are
juxtaposed with the troubling transformation of the Shire, once thought
to be inherently free from evil, but now its repository. As Fleming
Rutledge puts it, "murder has come home to the Shire" (363).
Ted Sandyman's delight in the new order, even though he is no
longer master of his own mill, sacrificed to the oncoming of themachine, is reminiscent of Barnaby Rudge's pride, in Dickens's
novel of that name, in being enrolled in an anti-Catholic cause he does
not at all understand. Lotho and Saruman do not merely inject a foreign
toxin of pride and exploitation utterly alien to the Shire. They play on
vulnerabilities that already existed, as in the case of Sandyman.
Rosie's provinciality is a far more benign version of the
Shire's negative traits. But Sam is genuinely hurt by it because
for a moment he doubts the understanding with Rosie that instantly
thereafter very movingly manifests itself. That this convergence of
domesticity, middle-class qualities, and psychological depth is
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"nowhere elaborated" speaks to Tolkien's reluctance to
have these novelistic aspects burst his epic/romance frame. But his
comment about the centrality of the Sam/Rosie relationship surely leads
the reader to consider these aspects more deeply than first might have
seemed appropriate. Few would say The Lord of the Rings owed more to
Barchester Towers than it did to Beowulf. But it is worth considering
these minority aspects of the book along with its more obvious debts.
Obviously, medieval romances had marriage-plots; even the Odyssey
and the Aeneid did. Equally, the rise of the middle class had its
correlates in medieval lore. Dickens's Dombey and Son, a great
example of the Victorian Bildungsroman, took the model for the rise of
its hero, Walter Gay, from the Renaissance legend of the late medieval
figure of Dick Whittington rising from humble circumstances to be Lord
Mayor of London. Modern fiction holds no copyright on these themes. But
the way these themes are treated in the Scouring chapter involves a rich
mixture with the complicated and often disturbing psychological
implications of Frodo's and Saruman's moral fates. This
mixture brings the Scouring chapter near to what Martha C. Nussbaum
describes as the novel form's "moral 'record' and
'projection'" which presents its particular characters
and events as "something that might happen in a human life"
(166). It is because of this ability to project, Nussbaum hypothesizes,that makes the "concrete doings and imaginings" of novelistic
characters accumulate "a universal significance" (166). Q. D.
Leavis speaks of "the moral drama essential to the novelist's
art," which she sharply differentiates from mere "moral
fervour" (150). In the Scouring chapter, there are certainly moral
absolutes. There is no paring-down of the manifest distinction between
good and evil. But Frodo's stance makes a retaliatory vengeance
impossible. As, indeed, in a different way, does the domesticresolution. The aim is ultimately not to settle accounts with the
malefactors. It is to create, or re-create, a society in which Sam and
Rosie's progeny can flourish.
It is indeed Sam and Rosie's progeny whose future is open.
Frodo has no progeny. The Baggins line, its headship (as Tolkien
conjectures in Letter 214, p. 290) passed to a distant cousin, the
second Ponto, peters out, like the Buddenbrooks family in Thomas
Mann's novel of that name. Frodo never does manage to go back to
the Shire fully. For him, it can never be "There and Back
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Again." For Sam, it can. Sam may pass to the West eventually, but
for him there is a resolution this side of the Sea. The rising middle
class replenishes the aristocracy of Hobbiton. Marriage, reproduction,
social mobility are all aligned as they are in many an English novel of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And Sam's rise is not just
a fluke. Nor is it merely a personal reward to him for his loyalty to
Frodo. The "very considerable rise in the fame and fortune of the
Cottons" (RK, VI, viii, 1016) dates from the Battle of Bywater. Far
from restoring the old order, the Scouring seems to precipitate an
intensification of the Shire's incipient development towards a
middle-class democracy. This was the kind of world that was depicted in,
and that consumed, domestic, marriage-plot fiction. Just as the landed
class, as manifested by Merry and Pippin, becomes broadened, more
cosmopolitan, becomes not just an aristocracy but, in its appreciation
of Gondorian and Rohirric lore, a cultural avant-garde, so do the middle
class use their yeoman virtues no longer just to obey but now to govern.
(4)
Often in a Victorian novel (say, one by Anthony Trollope), there
seem to be a lot of lords and ladies around at the end of the book, but
in reality, a middle-class hero's rise has both opened up the
social hierarchy for that individual and set the entire society on a
more open and consensual path. Similarly, the rise of the Gamgees andthe Cottons epitomizes the class mobility and opportunity that are
evident in a post-Scouring, post-Sharkey Shire. Sue Zlosnik has aptly
pointed out that Tolkien's book has aspects of the "Victorian
questromance" (Eaglestone 51); the Scouring chapter gives a glimpse
of Victorian domesticity, once the quest has been fulfilled. The
resolution of the Shire plot is redolent of the optimistic possibility
of class transition and upward mobility for distinguished individuals
such as Sam. Just as, despite his awareness of the anonymity andtradition-mindedness of much medieval literature, Tolkien's idea of
authorship was individualistic--Jason Fisher reminds us how Tolkien
"vigorously defended his intellectual property from
infringement" in the Ace Books controversy (34)--and so too is
Tolkien's social model partially one of democratic individualism,
as represented by Sam. Sam's individual rise and that of the middle
class that he represents transpire amid a realistic milieu where, as
Plank puts it, "Miracles do not happen" (106). It gives a
novelistic ending to The Lord of the Rings much as other chapters in
Book VI give elegiac, poetic, or epic endings.
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4. Lobelia's Repentance and Novelistic Morality
Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, as depicted in The Hobbit and in the
first book of The Lord of the Rings, is an opportunistic, avaricious
ogre. Yet the conclusion of her story allows her possibilities for moral
regeneration and reform. Lobelia's reappearance is brief and
potentially lost amid a welter of other plot developments. But the moral
change is notable. If with Saruman we see a potential hero become a
villain, with Lobelia we see a minor villain become a heroine. When she
emerges from the Lockholes, the "clapping and cheering" that
greets her renders her "touched" and moves her "to
tears" (RK, VI, ix, 1022). The evidence provided by what
Christopher Tolkien reveals in Sauron Defeated shows that the
development in the minds of Frodo and company--from Lotho and his mother
as villains, to them as victims of Saruman--also occurred in the
compositional process. In sum, Lobelia and Lotho fall into the group of
characters in various shades of gray--Boromir and Denethor, for
instance--who give to Tolkien's romance a Shakespearean depth and
nuance of character. Boromir is of a far more noble background and
character, and his final repentance transpires on different planes of
representation and importance. Yet Boromir's final repentance and
regeneration after his terrible lapse presents a model of atonement,humbling, and forgiveness equivalent to Lobelia s. The villainy at the
end had to be more structural, less personal--had to be ingrained into
the moral perils of Middle-earth, not just manifest as a fluke of the
difficult personalities of certain cadet branches of Hobbit families.
Thus, the spite of Lobelia's contra-Frodo vendetta turns into
the spirit of Lobelia's contra-Sharkey resistance. The goad and
bane becomes someone to be cheered. To get there, Lobelia had to evolve,to suffer. She had to be put away as a political prisoner. She had to
suffer the loss of her son, whom she had made into the vehicle of her
misguided ambition, the pressure of which, we may infer, had expedited
the moral weakness of Lotho's willingness to give, in essence, his
soul to Sharkey as the price for the momentary afflatus of illgained
power. Lobelia also shows moral growth in her realization of the limits
of her newfound acceptance. Ashamed at the results of Lotho's
actions, she retires back to her people in Hardbottle and leaves her
money to Frodo to help redress the calamitous losses of the Shire for
which her greed and ambition were partially responsible. Lobelia has
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responded to the Shirefolk's acceptance of her with grace and
humility. She has stepped forward along with them into a new
relationship that transcends the divisions of the past. Christopher
Tolkien indicates that Tolkien revised Lobelia's words after her
release from prison to emphasize her repentance and maturation. The
initial draft, as recorded in Sauron Defeated, has Lobelia saying, of
the disastrous Sharkey episode, that Lotho (at that time called Cosimo)
was not to blame, that "it was not his fault" (110). The final
version retains Lobelia's inability to get over the death of her
son, but leaves out this bit of exculpatory pleading. The final
presentation of Lobelia is of a character who knows her son's
guilt, even if she does not avow it. The use of her money to repair the
damages her son wrought testifies to this tacit but powerful moral
acknowledgement.
But Lobelia was not the only one who had to grow in this scenario.
So did Frodo, in the first instance, and the Shirefolk more generally.
Frodo had inherited Bilbo's long-term animus against the
Sackville-Bagginses, whose behavior when Bilbo had ostensibly
disappeared was opportunistic and unsympathetic. In settled
non-emergency times in the Shire, it was normal for Frodo to loathe the
Sackville-Bagginses, with their self-interest and bourgeois avarice.
But, even before learning of Lobelia's imprisonment andlate-in-life heroism, Frodo, on his way back from Mordor, has forgiven
Lobelia and her son. Frodo comes to save Lotho, not to punish him. Frodo
has seen the evil of Mordor, and after that there can be no other evil.
To hold on to the Sackville-Bagginses as villains would be to
shortchange the hard lessons learned during the Quest. The victory over
Sauron and over the perils of the Ring itself would be no victory if it
just meant triumphing over pathetic, deluded, vainglorious hobbits.
Embracing these hobbits, forgiving them even in their manifold flaws, iswhat must be done in the light of Frodo's glimpse of the ultimate
Evil.
When the ruffians mock Frodo, Merry thinks back to the Field of
Cormallen and the honor Frodo earned from all the great of the West. Not
just by dispatching Sharkey and his ruffians, but also by showing mercy,
and compassion for Lotho, Frodo demonstrates he is worthy of Cormallen,
and that Merry is right to be indignant at his cousin's deprecation
by the mob. Frodo's forgiving of those who attack him is, of
course, profoundly Christian in spirit. But in many ways the post-1700
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novel, from Richardson onward, deploys Christian values on a realistic
psychological plane. The aim was not so much to transcend these values
as to actualize them. The post-1700 novel showed moral issues affecting
people concretely, not just through precept and instruction. Even though
C. W. Sullivan rightly says that "Tolkien was certainly not writing
a modern novel" (11), the Scouring chapter is where he comes
closest to doing this. Even Tolkien's overtly non-novelistic
aesthetics allows for representational aspects that mirror and parallel
the post-1700 realistic novel. Frodo provides not a paradigm of morality
but an actual practice of it that, in its serviceability and its
concrete understanding of the flaws and needs of others, is preeminently
novelistic in mien. And the people of Hobbiton and Bywater follow
Frodo's lead, even if they have not had his specific experiences.
They cheer for Lobelia's spirited resistance and forgive her past
avarice and the malevolent contribution she made to the rise of Sharkey.
The Sackville-Bagginses are novelistic villains. They may do bad
things but love their fellow Sackville-Bagginses (as Farmer Cotton
admits that Lotho loved his mother, and, importantly, as Saruman and
Wormtongue do not love each other). Above all, they operate within
social forms. One might not like the Sackville-Bagginses living next
door, but one could (barely) tolerate them. Sauron, or any of his
immediate minions, is just not tolerable in the same way. Moreover,Lobelia's repentance, her metanoia, as the New Testament would put
it, takes place within the framework of a life lived in realistic moral
terms. Much like Janet Dempster in George Eliot's novella
"Janet's Repentance," Lobelia is turned from a life of
scorn to one of understanding, both by her own experience at the hands
of Sharkey and, later, by Frodo's mercy and compassion. As a
Christian, Tolkien would most likely believe, with St. Augustine, that
Lobelia was ultimately pardoned by the pure mercy of grace. But Frodowas the vehicle of that grace, as the Reverend Tryan was in Eliot's
story. In both Eliot and Tolkien, metanoia and Augustinian pardon are
expressed not through moral precept but through a narrated turning of
the heart in a world where social relationships and gestures (such as
Lobelia's leaving her money to Frodo to care for the victims) are
of primary consequence.
These sorts of novelistic concerns, the problems of what Jane
Chance refers to as "the domestic and quotidian" (230), would
not come into play in connection with villainy on a vastly grander scale
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than Lobelia s. Sauron, at least in the Third Age, cannot operate within
social forms at all. He is thus unable to be a manifest character in a
book that is, after all, named after him. Saruman, in social and
novelistic terms, splits the difference between a Sauron and a Lobelia.
Saruman's role throughout is to play the aspect of evil that
operates, or thinks it can operate, within socially acceptable matrices.
When the Hobbits return to the Shire, they know the evil that is facing
them is from Saruman, not a residuum of Sauron, because of its
continuity with the less admirable aspects of existing Hobbitry. Now,
Saruman is not truly socializable either. The smooth exterior he
projected during White Council meetings, in conclaves with Theoden
before the betrayal, and even in his last futile projection of his voice
while immured in Orthanc, provides a veneer of social polish. But by the
time Saruman comes to the Shire as "Sharkey," he has become so
diminished as to be part of a social and novelistic frame. Saruman has
become an aging, raggedy, abject failure hoping to make one last
comeback on a smaller stage. His diminution would move the reader--as it
nearly moved Frodo--were he not so vile.
Yet Saruman's implosion fosters positive lessons. Just as,
even after the demolition of the "new" Shirriff-houses, the
bricks from them "were used to repair many an old hole, to make it
snugger and drier" (RK, VI, ix, 1022), so do the lessons of theScouring contribute to an enlarged moral atmosphere. Using the bricks
for good purposes and welcoming even the repentant Lobelia back into the
fold of the Shire shows a maturity that in its generosity is as much a
signpost of the novelistic as the marriage-plot of Sam and Rosie and the
resulting rise of the middle-class Gardners and Cottons (and two
generations later the Fairbairns of the Towers). The denouement of the
Scouring integrates recent pain and suffering, integrating the near past
into the rhythms of the present and the future. Bywater is the firstbattle in Shire history since the Battle of Greenfields over two
centuries before. It was sad there had to be a battle, and even the loss
of just nineteen Hobbits is lamentable. But there is nonetheless a
certain satisfaction for the Shire in integrating the Battle of Bywater
into its history. This is not just in terms of the Shire being
battletested, but also of having the Hobbits of the Shire undergo the
moral experience of, for example, Frodo's reconciliation with
Lobelia and his acceptance of the heartfelt spirit of her repentance.
Events such as Lobelia's repentance signal that there can
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indeed be common ground between the war experiences of the Travellers
and the ordinary life of those among whom they return to dwell.
Crucially, Sam and Rosie do find they understand each other enough to
have a long and happy life together. This common ground is the ground
traversed above all by what Ian Watt called "the infinite formal
and psychological complexity" of the post1700 English novel (238).
The Lord of the Rings indeed is an outlier in modern fiction; its key
links are to a certain tradition of modern fantasy as well as to a whole
series of medieval, Renaissance, classical, and Biblical works. Yet, for
all the book's exalted and manifold ancestry, the post-1700 novel
can be a vehicle useful for understanding important aspects of
Tolkien's prodigious text. "The Scouring of the Shire" is
where Tolkien's dark romance bends the most towards the realistic
novel of domestic reintegration and redemption.
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Notes
(1.) One of the few exceptions is Esgaroth in The Hobbit, where a
(presumably elected, certainly non-inheritive) Master continues to rule
even after a King is restored in nearby Dale. This can be seen to
anticipate the way that, in the Scouring of the Shire, no polity that
has achieved anything like democracy sees it rolled back in the favor of
aristocracy. Stewards take second place to Kings in Gondor, but Mayors
do not take second place to Thains in the Shire.
(2.) The Saruman/Shire relationship is also colonial (much like the
cultivation of the real-life pipe-weed, tobacco, in North America.) He
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is extracting commodities out of a faraway land that he perceives as
culturally inferior.
(3.) Novel criticism of the past fifty years has moved on from
Watt, and indeed has redefined the novel in ways that would be far
friendlier to Tolkien's practice than is Watt's conception.
But my point is that Watt's narrow, realist, and
middle-classcentered idea of the novel, as inadequate as it may be for
an account of the entire form, is surprisingly pertinent to certain
aspects of Tolkien's work.
(4.) As Christopher Tolkien shows in Sauron Defeated, the name of
the character that ended up being called Lotho was Cosimo for most of
the draft stage. Tolkien might have decided the name was too
stage-villainy. But it is interesting that, considering the cosmopolitan
traits of the "enlarged" Merry and Pippin, Tolkien shied away
from using "Cosimo" for a character with largely negative
connotations, and substituted Lotho, a name that suggests
"loathsome" and "Lothario." Interestingly, the
Cosimo/Lotho name change is the major difference in a final product
that, for The Lord of the Rings, was atypically close to the first draft
as provided by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth.
Text The Romance Back
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