page_title: The Scouring of the Shire
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: The Scouring of the Shire / Significance / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Sarehole Mill in Birmingham, England.
context_page_description: "The Scouring of the Shire" is the penultimate chapter of the heroic romance The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. 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", revealed 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" the most important chapter in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien denied that the chapter was an allegory of the state of Britain during the aftermath of World War II. Commentators and critics have however seen it as applicable to that period, with clear contemporary political references. These include a satire of socialism; echoes of Nazism; allusions to the shortages in postwar Britain; and a strand of environmentalism.
context_section_description: 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. Birns writes 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 echoes the comparison with the Odyssey, adding 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". 
  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:
  An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.... it has been supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire' reflects the situation in England at the time [in the 1940s and 1950s] when I was finishing my tale. It does not. It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever.
  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.
  Critics including Plank have noted that Tolkien denied that the "Scouring of the Shire" reflected England in the late 1940s, claiming instead that the chapter echoed his youthful experience of seeing his home at Sarehole, then in rural Warwickshire, being taken over by the growing city of Birmingham in the early 1900s. Tolkien related the chapter to his childhood experiences at the end of the 19th century:
   It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back [than the Second World War]. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways.  Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill [Sarehole Mill] beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important.  I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.
  Instead of a strict allegory with exact correspondenc
caption: Tolkien related the chapter to his childhood experiences at Sarehole as it was taken over by the industrial growth of Birmingham, and the old mill there fell into disrepair.[14]
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