By Frederick Dixon:

“Raise the Shire” said Merry “Now! Wake all our people! They hate all this, you can see: all of them except perhaps one or two rascals and a few fools that want to be important but don’t at all understand what is really going on. But Shire-folk have been so comfortable so long they don’t know what to do. They just want a match though, and they’ll go up in fire. The Chief’s Men must know that. They’ll try to stamp on us and put us out quick. We’ve only got a very short time.”

Those who know Tolkien’s great saga “The Lord of the Rings” only from Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films will recall that the four hobbit heroes return to a Shire that is quite unchanged, and where all the battles, sieges and perilous adventures which have transpired in the greater world have passed unnoticed. That is not at all how their homecoming appears in the “The Return of the King” the last of the three books. In its place we have “The Scouring of the Shire”, said to be the chapter which Professor Tolkien felt most deeply and, in a sense, the real reason why he wrote the entire work.

Arriving at the border of their country, the Shire, at night the hobbits are disconcerted to find the way barred by a new gate. Their demands for admittance are rebuffed by the gate-guards, frightened hobbits themselves. Brushing aside the gate-guards, our heroes (“the Travellers” as the other inhabitants of the Shire now call them) find themselves in a Shire that is terribly changed. Everywhere the comfortable old hobbit holes have been destroyed and replaced by mean and shabby brick terraces, everywhere trees have been felled and gone to feed the furnaces of smoke belching new factories:

“As they crossed the bridge and looked up the Hill they gasped. Even Sam’s vision in the Mirror had not prepared him for what they saw. The Old Grange on the west side had been knocked down, and its place taken by rows of tarred sheds. All the chestnuts were gone. The banks and hedgerows were broken. Great wagons were standing in disorder in a field beaten bare of grass. Bagshot Row was a yawning sand and gravel quarry. Bag End up beyond could not be seen for a clutter of large huts. ‘They’ve cut it down’ cried Sam, ‘they’ve cut down the Party Tree!’ He pointed to where the tree had stood under which Bilbo had made his farewell speech. It was lying lopped and dead in the field…..’this is worse than Mordor’ said Sam ‘much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say, because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined'”

As if all this were not bad enough, all supplies of food and drink in the Shire have been confiscated in the interests of “fair shares”, but not much of it gets back to the hobbits whose lives are now controlled in every detail by new and petty regulations. Those who protest are locked up, or worse.

The havoc wrought in the Shire will remind those who have seen the films of the devastating industrialization of Isengard by the wizard Saruman. This is not a coincidence. The Shire has been invaded and taken over by a large gang of several hundred “ruffians” led by a certain “Sharkey” (which Tolkien tells us is probably from the Orkish “Sharku” – “Old Man”). Sharkey turns out to be Saruman who, having escaped from Isengard (in another departure from the film) has gathered up the scattered remnants of his forces and descended on the Shire. Throughout, Tolkien describes the ruffians as “ill-favoured, squint-eyed and sallow faced”, “like many that I saw at Isengard muttered Merry”. It seems clear that Tolkien intended us to understand that at least some of these creatures are orc-man mongrels, bred by Saruman just as he bred the Uruk-Hai, the great soldier orcs.

To cut a long and enthralling story very short, the Travellers did as Merry urged in the first paragraph, and raised the Shire. A battle was fought, most of the ruffians were killed (” Merry himself slew the leader, a great squint eyed brute like a huge orc”) and the survivors fled the Shire. Saruman was later killed by his minion Grima Wormtongue.

Then followed the “Scouring” – the cleansing – of the Shire. All the works of the ruffians were removed and the hobbit holes restored. “The trees were the worst loss and damage, for at Sharkey’s bidding they had been cut down far and wide.” But then Sam remembered and opened the little silver box which Galadriel had given him in Lorien, the Golden Wood, and found within a fine grey powder and a silver nut. So he planted saplings “where specially beautiful and beloved trees” had been destroyed and he put a grain of the precious dust at the roots of each. The silver nut he planted on the spot where the Party Tree had stood and then he took the little dust he had left to the centre of the Shire and cast it on the air.

“Spring surpassed his wildest hopes. His trees began to sprout and grow as if time were in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty. In the Party Field a young sapling leapt up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. It was indeed a mallorn and it was the wonder of the neighbourhood. In after years, as it grew in grace and beauty, it was known far and wide and people would come long journeys to see it; the only mallorn west of the mountains and east of the sea, and one of the finest in the world.”

“Altogether 1420 in the Shire was a marvellous year. Not only was there wonderful sunshine and delicious rain, in due times and perfect measure, but there seemed something more, an air of richness and growth, and a gleam of beauty beyond that of mortal summers that flicker and pass upon this Middle-Earth. All the children born or begotten in that year, and there were many, were fair to see and strong and most had a rich golden hair that had before been rare among hobbits….and no-one was ill and everyone was pleased, except those who had to mow the grass.”

King Elessar (the Travellers old companion Strider) gave to the Shire two gifts of inestimable worth. He greatly enlarged its area by the addition of the Westmarch, and he reserved the Shire for hobbits alone, to be their homeland forever, all others being forbidden to set foot within its boundaries. This law he even applied to himself, meeting his friends Sam, Merry and Pippin on the border whenever he came north.

Tolkien, a subscriber to A.K. Chesterton’s publication “Candour” was an English patriot of the old school. As a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford he was expert in the Germanic languages and in the whole corpus of Germanic legend (there exists only one poem in the long extinct Gothic language, and it was written by Tolkien). As such he was very aware that the rich Germanic tradition, which the English must once have had in common with the other Germanic nations, had been largely eliminated by the Norman conquest, which replaced it with a French speaking culture ultimately of Mediterranean origin, leaving only a few rags and tatters of our native tradition. He was determined to replace what was lost with a newly minted “ancient” tradition which incorporated what was left of the old with elements culled from place-names, from Bede’s “History of the English Church and People” and from other Nordic traditions. He succeeded beyond all measure.

His other purpose was to add his voice to the movement for the conservation of the English countryside which gathered pace throughout his lifetime with the foundation of the National Trust in the 1890s, of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in the 1920s, and with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. This last instrument is responsible for the survival of so much of the countryside of our grossly overcrowded homeland – at least until now when we have the deadly combination of mass immigration with a Government of which Saruman would have been a valued member. The racial implications of Tolkien’s work are implicit – a popular uprising against an invasion of aliens and mongrels, a homeland for the Shire-folk alone. In this it might be said that Tolkien, who died in 1973, was merely a man of his time, “out of touch”. Perhaps, but if so his is the voice of the men of the First World War, in which he served and in which nearly all his friends died, calling out a warning and a summons to their descendants in degenerate times.

Tolkien’s Shire is an allegory for England herself, its capital Hobbiton lies notionally on the same latitude as Oxford, its countryside modelled on that of the Worcestershire which Tolkien knew and loved in his boyhood in the suburbs of Birmingham before the First World War. Above all, the hobbits are an allegory for the “little people of England” who are beneath the notice of the mighty until their courage, toughness and stubbornness (the qualities of the men Tolkien commanded in the War) turns the world upside down in a eucatastrophe, an appalling event which brings a happy deliverance and a new world.

Will there be a eucatastrophe for us? a scouring of our Shire? We do not know, but at one point of particularly dark despair when failure seems certain, Gandalf – the wizard who is Tolkien’s alter ego – tells the hobbits that “the future is hidden from us, but we must do what we can in our own time”. So, the whole saga can be summed up in one word – hope. But that hope cannot be realised unless we “do what we can in our own time”. That is what the hobbits did, they took a long, hard road with many perils and pitfalls but their courage, toughness and stubbornness brought them home in the end to the Shire, cleansed and renewed. Tolkien, that great Englishman and patriot, is telling us that we can do the same in our own way and in our own times.

By Frederick Dixon © 2013

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