YouhavegrownverymuchTheScouringoftheShireandthenovelisticaspectsoftheLordoftheRings.593

7/31/2019 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


16/25

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


18/25

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


19/25

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


20/25

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


21/25

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.

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