page_title: The Scouring of the Shire
section_title: Satire on mid-20th century politics
hierarchical_section_title: The Scouring of the Shire / Significance / Satire on mid-20th century politics
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: Hauling tobacco. Abstract: Photographs from the records of the National Child Labor Committee (U.S.) Physical description: 1 photographic print. Notes: Boys.; Agricultural laborers.; Tobacco industry.; Carts &amp; wagons.
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: Various commentators have noted that the chapter has political overtones. The critic Jerome Donnelly suggests that the chapter is a satire, of a more serious kind than the knockabout "comedy of manners" at the start of The Hobbit. Plank calls it a caricature of fascism. Donnelly agrees with Tolkien that the "Scouring" is not an allegory, but proposes that Saruman's "Ruffians" echo the tyrannical behaviour of the Nazis, as do "the use of collaborators, threats, torture and killing of dissenters, and internment".
  Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt write that "conservatives and progressives alike" had seen the chapter as a "pointed critique of modern socialism", citing the scholar of politics Hal Colebatch's comment that the rule- and redistribution-heavy Saruman regime "owed much to the drabness, bleakness and bureaucratic regulation of postwar Britain under the Atlee Labour Government". They note similarly Plank's identification of "parallels" between the Shire under Saruman and both the German Nazi Party under Hitler and Italian Fascism under Mussolini. Plank discusses, for example, why the hobbits did not resist fascism, giving as reasons cowardice, lack of solidarity, and what he finds "the most interesting and the most melancholy": the shirriff-hobbit's statement "I am sorry, Mr. Merry, but we have orders." Plank comments that this recalls statements from the Nuremberg trials. He further compares Saruman with Mussolini, noting that they both came to "a miserable end". Richards and Witt concede that the chapter has wider themes, including the ugliness of Saruman's "vengeful heart", the nastiness of (sub)urban development, the hobbits' love-inspired defence of their homeland, and the need not to just obey orders, but state that Tolkien's letters demonstrate his dislike of socialism, and that in the chapter Tolkien deftly satirizes "socialism's pose of moral superiority".
  Shippey comments that whatever Tolkien's protestations, readers back in the 1950s would have noticed some features of the Shire during the "Scouring" that "seem[ed] slightly out of place", such as the fact that wagonloads of "pipeweed" (tobacco) are being taken away, seemingly at the wizard Saruman's orders, with no visible in-universe explanation. What, Shippey asks, was Saruman doing with so much tobacco: a wizard was hardly going to be trading it for profit, nor "issuing" it to his orcs in Isengard. Instead, Shippey suggests, it echoes Britain's shortages just after the Second World War, routinely explained at that time with "the words 'gone for export'". Kocher adds that the devastation and people's responses in the Shire after the War would have been only too familiar to people in the 20th century.
  Not all critics have seen the chapter as political; the medievalist Jane Chance Nitzsche notes the "domestic image" of the "Scouring" in the chapter's title, suggesting in her view a "rejuvenation" of the Shire. She describes the chapter's social cleansing of the Shire in similar terms, writing of washing and purifying it of "the reptilian monsters" Sharkey and Wormtongue.
caption: The export of "wagonloads of pipeweed" (here, tobacco, in a 1916 American photograph) from the Shire suggested postwar England's "gone for export" explanation of shortages.[16]
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