The four hobbit heroes arrive at the Brandywine bridge, where they find hobbit shiriffs guarding the gate, with instructions to not let anyone in. When Merry and Pippin break in anyway, they meet none other than Bill Ferny of
Bree, now stationed at the gate as a sort of duty thug. They drive him off, but it turns out that the whole Shire is now under new management: there are ugly new brick buildings, rules and regulations and Men bullying hobbits under the direction of the mysterious "Sharkey". Sure enough, a larger party of shiriffs shows up the next morning to arrest Frodo and company and take them to Hobbiton. Since it's where they were going anyway, the four hobbits set off.
Frodo and company proceed to defy the Men, mobilize hundreds of armed hobbits into an insurrection by basically just showing up, and then Merry leads an ambush and pitched battle against Sharkey's men. It's a little bit like one of those computer role-playing games where everyone was apparently just standing around doing nothing until the player character shows up and says a couple of fairly anodyne things, and all of a sudden everything changes.
After the battle, the hobbits advance on Sharkey's lair in Bag End, and find him to be none other than Saruman, with Gríma still at his heels. Saruman more or less admits to having fucked up the Shire out of spite, and Frodo tells him to piss off. As Saruman is leaving, he tries to stab Frodo, and then humiliates Gríma Wormtongue badly enough that Wormtongue murders him, and is shot by the hobbits.
**
I always thought Frodo's sudden sense of revelation at meeting Saruman ("A sudden light broke on Frodo. "Sharkey!" he cried.") was odd; earlier, it's Frodo who explains to the others that Lotho isn't behind the evil in the Shire, but a victim of Saruman - and just a few pages later, he's shocked to meet the same Saruman. Christopher Tolkien's
History of the Lord of the Rings sheds some light on this: in the original conception of the chapter, Sharkey wasn't Saruman at all, but rather a more anodyne chief ruffian (Christopher Tolkien,
The History of the Lord of the Rings, part 4: Sauron Defeated, HarperCollins 2002, p. 94). In this context, Frodo's surprise is understandable: he was expecting another footpad from Isengard.
The trouble is, though, that once the narrative was changed so that Sharkey is Saruman, the hobbits' encounter with him in Many Partings becomes strongly foreshadowing, and it's no longer at all clear why Frodo, having divined that Lotho was in trouble rather than making it, should ever have expected Sharkey to be anyone else. I mean Gandalf pretty much tells them outright in the previous chapter that it's Saruman.
As a whole, the Scouring of the Shire is one of the parts of the book most open to interpretation through what Tolkien's presumed political views are. In my opinion, we should start with his theology: machines and technology are bad.
Letters, 75:
There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and this cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom!
This is what I described
a long time ago as Tolkien's conservative anarchism:
Letters, 66:
Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as "planners" refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by "organization". [...] However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion) is not to have wars - nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation.
If only Tolkien had dedicated at least a little bit of effort into imagining what a fantasy society without planning and organization would be like, we'd remember him as one of the great anarchist authors of all time. Alas, his anarchism is like the faux libertarianism of 21st-century conservatives: I must be "free" to keep my privilege and property. Somehow, Aragorn's monarchy doesn't represent regimentation, but gatherers and sharers do; Sharkey's rules and notices get cheerfully torn down, but not King Elessar's. What's supposedly a rebellion against authority is really a royalist rising; the hobbits invoke the king several times.
Apart from rules and regulations, the other great offense of Sharkey is industrialization, mostly described in bleak terms as shoddily constructed buildings, littering and just random, pointless vandalism.
The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow.
First of all, I'm not even sure what the "new mill" is; based on Tom Cotton's description, it's a mill in the sense of grinding grain, but somehow it apparently produces water pollution. I don't know how you make it do that. But if you think about how central the Industrial Revolution is to British and English nationalism, this is Tolkien being a political radical: industry and what's ordinarily thought of as progress is, in fact, bad. The trouble is that he can't actually bring himself to make an argument about this, or even demonstrate any kind of logic for why this would be. The trouble with Sharkey's dudes isn't so much that they build things, it's that they seem to do everything maliciously and badly.
The only real way Saruman's despoiling of the Shire makes any sense is if it was originally part of his imitation of Mordor; he, too, wanted a subject realm to make into a miserable hell like Mordor, which then only accelerates when it turns into vengeance against Frodo and company. But then that undermines the industrialization/socialism analogy.
So if you take Tolkien at his word, the Scouring represents modernity and "progress" in general, and how it inevitably turns into destructive Sarumanism because a lady ate a fruit once. If you look at what he's actually written, the only kind of social change that's bad is one that threatens middle-class comforts. In Tolkien's world, descent from a strange lady born in Doriath is a valid basis for a system of government. "He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare raise our hands against," says Frodo of Saruman, after the latter stabbed him. This, and the royalism, is the closest Tolkien comes to the kind of authoritarianism many of his critics associate him with.
To sum up, then, the Scouring isn't an analogy of socialism or Britain's post-war Labour government -- directly; it's ludicrous to pretend that the Gatherers and Sharers aren't a swipe at the left -- or for that matter an analogy of how terrible industrialization was. It's a theological exposition of how fallen humanity can't improve its lot. Whether that makes any sense or is at all succesful is left to the reader.
Another interesting divide is made between Bilbo and Frodo, who are fabulously wealthy by Shire standards, and Lotho Baggins. Bilbo made his money adventuring, and apparently that's just fine by everyone. Lotho, however, makes it by selling pipeweed to Saruman for a profit. He then invests those profits into buying properties and businesses, which is apparently bad, and eventually leads to Men coming around and taking over the Shire, not to mention Lotho's murder. So I guess the question is whether the problem was Lotho acquiring his wealth by despicable commercial means, or investing it. Maybe it was both.
Overall, I feel like the Scouring is a sort of microcosm of Tolkien's work. Yes, the Shire is a minarchist rural utopia, now threatened by a caricature of modernizing socialists - and it isn't. The four hobbits are heroes returning from great deeds abroad who will now set things right in their own country - and they're not, because one of them is now a devoted pacifist who left his wargear behind on the slopes of Mount Doom. It's a very Boy's Own Adventure lark, where even the mean old lady gets a round of applause for having been mean to the bad guys, and at the same time it's a tragedy. I still feel that this creative tension is key to Tolkien's success, and it's definitely present here.
**
Next time: a boat trip.
