The Lord of the Rings is famous for taking ‘too long’ to end. The Ring is destroyed in chapter 3 of Book 6 of the story, followed by the final battle with Sauron in chapter 4. The next five chapters come decisively after the climax; they are the resolution, the denouement, the conclusion. Most stories opt to put the climax later in the process. My own novel set the climax in the last two chapters; my current project puts it in the second-to-last. With The Lord of the Rings, however, Tolkien opted for roughly five chapters of post-climax content, arguably six including Cormallen’s chapter, and, particularly perplexing to many, he tacks on what appears to be a completely unnecessary episode on at the end: the Scouring of the Shire. Yet to remove this segment would be a great harm to the book’s beauty and effect, as we will soon see.

The important question to ask, when we’re considering if part of a story should stay or go, is what it accomplishes. If the effect is worth the word-space, it stays; if the effect isn’t worth it, it goes. Wasted space isn’t just a net neutral; it’s an active harm, because it cheats the reader out of what was promised for his attention and thereby loses his investment, his good will, and his interest. Let’s ask the question about the Scouring of the Shire. What does this chapter get us?

First and most importantly, the Scouring of the Shire brings the whole story home. If you were here last week, I discussed why the movie version of the Pelennor Fields falls flat compared to the grandeur of the book version. It all came down to the way the ending worked, how problems were solved. The movie’s solution looked too easy, so the battle lost its weight, despite a promising start. The Scouring of the Shire has a similar role in modifying the impression of the preceding story, but it operates in the other direction.

Without the Scouring, the story of The Lord of the Rings is a story of ‘over there.’ Home is the Shire, and if the Shire is untouched, distant from the war, so too is home. The story becomes, in effect though not technicality, a portal fantasy. The weight of the War of the Ring doesn’t come home in the story, and so it doesn’t come home to the reader. The suffering, the terror, the danger of the war and its ugliness, all these become parts of the world outside, distant, kept away from the comfort of home. Like Kansas in the Wizard of Oz series, nothing changes. The immediacy and impact of the grimness of Gondor’s war is pushed away into the haze.

Unlike Kansas, a significant portion of Tolkien’s story actually takes place in the Shire; the Scouring both builds upon and builds up those earlier portions of the story. We now understand the Shire not as a place of complete safety but as a place protected. Without the Scouring, of course, we have still the notes that the Dunadain Rangers are protecting the Shire, but these historical facts have no visceral weight, not the way that petty Shiriffs and thuggish, bureaucratic tyranny do (particularly given how easy it is to conceive of such evils for those familiar with modern statism). We could point also to the invasion of the Black Riders into the Shire in The Fellowship of the Ring, but while that actually has a similar effect, it is on a much smaller scale. The Black Riders cause little widespread damage, being focused on the Ring and its bearer. While they definitely cause some incidental damage, they leave the Shire largely unaffected; what damage they do inflict is away somewhere else, not right in the face of the reader or Frodo’s party, and therefore less emotionally impactful.

Further, the mundane and the homely is core to the thematic and emotional weight of the book. To remove this mundanity from danger guts the impact of the whole story; to refuse to let it ever be tarnished tells the reader, in his heart though not his mind, that it cannot be harmed. The weight of Sauron’s tyranny and threat diminishes. What’s more, it becomes no longer a threat to the home and comfort of everyday life, the home and comfort the reader longs for and innately understands the beauty of; it’s threat is now reserved for the medieval vistas of Gondor, the fey strangeness of Lothlorien, the distant nobility of Rohan. In other words, the threat is limited to parts of the world that, however aspirational, are foreign to us. Rivendell may be the Last Homely Home, but the Shire is home itself, and Sauron’s threat must reach the Shire if the reader is to understand and empathize with its true depth. The plot of The Lord of the Rings was always ultimately about protecting the Shire, with the Ring quest being a means thereto, and so the Scouring is a fitting climax and end-cap.

The second reason flows from this and flows into it: the Scouring of the Shire grounds the characters of the hobbits (and to a lesser extent, of Aragorn and Gandalf) in a necessary context. In the first place, by making the fight come to their home, by making it real to the reader (who has himself a home or the longing therefor), Tolkien sanctified the suffering and growth of the hobbits. He explained to the reader’s heart, not just his mind, why the hobbits suffered, why they fought, why they endured to the end. What they came to fight for is made clear by the specter of its loss, and that specter is the more terrible because it comes when victory seemed already achieved. For Gandalf and Aragorn, it adds another facet to their role as protectors of the hobbits (and of all homes in the West), of a home they love though it is not theirs.

This episode serves too to more fully establish the nature of the hobbits. The peculiar resilience of Frodo, Sam, and hobbits in general towards the Ring is noted many times in the story, by implication or explicitly; even Gollum, miserable slave as he was, came parlous close to resisting its sway. Indeed, for a being so humble as a hobbit to last nearly a millennium in possession of the Ring without becoming a wraith, that is a marvel which needs explaining. The Scouring, then, explains it. The Scouring shows us, by risking it, what roots the hobbits to the earth, the simple and wholesome nature of their ambitions, the essential root of their resistance to the Ring: to a hobbit, home is the highest ambition, and adventure in the end a path towards home.

The third purpose the Scouring serves is to complete Saruman’s story. Saruman’s arc, heretofore, has been that of a lesser desperately imitating the greater. Sauron has Mordor, so Saruman has his fiefdom; Sauron has his armies, so Saruman has his orcs; Sauron has his domination of the minds of his servants, so Saruman has his own edition of the same, through subtler, more fragile means. Saruman is an undoubted danger to the Free Peoples, but he is nevertheless ever but a pawn in Sauron’s game, a subsidiary in the greater Maia’s domination. He imitates Sauron and envies him.

For Saruman to end as a prisoner in his tower, while possible, does not complete his arc. Saruman, like his master, must come to an end, but it must be a smaller end, fitting to Saruman’s smaller stature. The servant, in hating and desiring to usurp the master, becomes only an imitation of the original. In a way, Saruman’s journey is that of a great leader overtaken by the Ring, except that power and despair, not the Ring itself, are what drag him into Sauron’s image. So as Sauron fell, so must fall Saruman, with a pettiness fitting to his station. The pettiness must be in accordance, moreover, with the mean character of Saruman’s self-shaping into Sauron’s image, his foolishness and shortsightedness.

So, Saruman overtakes the Shire just as Sauron sought to overtake the world, for the Shire is a sort of world. Then Frodo and his companions return, and this is a lesser evil. They have defeated the greater evil, but now they prove that the defeat was a consistent pattern of character by defeating the lesser evil. Saruman, like Sauron, is toppled by the hobbits, though now, on their own ground, they need no direct aid from the great men of the earth (Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and the rest). Then, like Sauron, a servant¹ twisted by his malice (in a different way) turns upon him, kills him, only a moment later to be unmade himself. Thus, Saruman completes Sauron’s arc, but he completes it on a smaller, pettier scale, as is the nature of evil.

The Scouring of the Shire is not an openly conventional story structure, but it is a stroke of brilliance. While perhaps Tolkien’s style of storytelling and the sheer length of the work provides cover from potential drawbacks of such a long denouement, we should learn from this example that rules of convention, while always healthy to recognize, are to be obeyed only when they actually help the story. Cutting the Scouring out, as conventional story structure might dictate, would substantially lessen the story. The weight of the ending would be diminished; its connection to the reader, to us, would be harmed. In doing so, the whole story would be robbed of beauty and effect by the weakening of its completion. To keep the Scouring is precisely the right choice.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – I think an argument could be made that Wormtongue is an echo of Saruman, similar to Saruman’s echo of Sauron.