However, the Shire didn’t stay stagnant while they were gone, and actually encountered a lot of troubles of its own. When Frodo returns at the end of the story, not only is he completely changed as a person, but the Shire has undergone a transformation as well. The movie adaptations don’t really get into this part of the story, but Tolkien’s original novels have a whole chapter dedicated to the Shire in the aftermath of the War of the Ring. What was it that really happened to the Shire while Frodo and company were away, and how did the Hobbits that lived there deal with its upheaval?
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This period of the story in the books takes place near the end, in a chapter entitled “The Scouring of the Shire”. After Frodo left, Lotho Sackville-Baggins (a distant relation) bought a lot of land around the Shire with money he made from selling Pipe-weed to Saruman at Isengard. He eventually gained enough that he had quite a bit of power and took to calling himself the Chief, extending his reach over the Shire in an attempt to rule it by himself. He eventually took control (with some subtle assistance from Saruman) and began to industrialize the Shire, which was obviously a big change from its usual pastoral and natural state. However, Lotho’s reign didn’t last long, because Saruman quickly moved in and took over, imprisoning Lotho and eventually tasking Wormtongue with killing him.
After the War of the Ring, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin all returned to the Shire and were shocked with what they found. There were ugly new buildings, many of the trees had been razed, and there were numerous strict rules that had to be followed, enforced by the Shiriffs (essentially Hobbit police). The group attempted to rouse the villages that they pass through and get the story from their neighbors about what was going on, and also fought off bands of ruffians that had moved into the Shire. As more ruffians began to converge, Merry and Pippin led the Battle of Bywater against them, resulting in a victory for the Hobbits and the deaths of most of the ruffians.
When the four Hobbits finally reached Hobbiton in an attempt to contact Lotho, they found that the whole area was a mess, and Bag End was abandoned. This is where they meet “Sharkey”, who claims to be the leader of the ruffians but is actually Saruman in disguise. This highlights one key difference from the movies; in “The Scouring of the Shire”, Saruman and Wormtongue are still both alive after the events of the War of the Ring. Saruman has, however, lost most of his magical abilities except for his deceptive voice, which he uses to tell them that he has intentionally attacked their home as an act of revenge. He tries to stab Frodo, but the blade can’t penetrate the hidden chain-mail that Frodo wears.
Frodo shows mercy by asking the other Hobbits not to kill Saruman, and offers Wormtongue sanctuary. At this, Saruman reveals that Wormtongue killed Lotho, which causes Wormtongue to slit Saruman’s throat. Wormtongue is then shot and killed by a Hobbit archer, and mist rises from Saruman’s corpse to be blown away in the wind. The Hobbits, Sam in particular, then set out to revitalize the Shire, repairing homes and reversing the destruction that Saruman wreaked on their home. Sam plants new trees to replace the ones that were torn down and gives them all a grain of dust from Galadriel’s garden. The nature of the Shire comes back more beautifully than ever before thanks to his work and the magic of Lothlórien.
This chapter in The Return of the King is interesting because it gives the Hobbits a new, smaller-scale conflict after their woes with Sauron and the Ring. However, the stakes are just as high for them because the war has now come home to the Shire, which is supposed to be a place of safety. Many commentators have noted that the chapter could be an allegory for the state of Britain in the aftermath of World War II, with political references, references to the shortages Britain faced after the war, slight references to socialism and Nazism, and an added note of environmentalism. Tolkien apparently denied that this was the intention of the chapter, but the comparisons are very apt.
For Tolkien, “The Scouring of the Shire” was more about the structure of the story, because the central theme of The Lord of the Rings was about the physical quest to destroy the One Ring, while this chapter near the end was a smaller, more internal struggle to repurify the Shire, applying the moral lessons that Frodo learned on his grand quest to something much more personal. It’s also reminiscent of Homer’s The Odyssey, where the story follows Odysseus through a long and exciting quest, only to have him still have to deal with troubles back home - in the form of the many suitors who have shown up to his palace to compete for his wife on the assumption that Odysseus would not be returning. It’s always interesting when the hero’s story doesn’t just end with the end of their main quest, and they still have consequences to deal with when they return to the place that they departed from.
“The Scouring of the Shire” doesn’t appear in the films, other than a small reference when Frodo looks into the Mirror of Galadriel and sees the destruction of the Shire. It was likely cut for time (and also because it would be a strange tonal shift that wouldn’t work with the structure of the films) and is one of the few things from the books that didn’t make it in. The Scouring is one of the more interesting parts of Tolkien’s books, simply because of how strange and out of place it seems at first. However, it’s interesting to see how the Shire, the place that is supposedly the safest and most peaceful place in Middle-Earth, fared while Frodo was away, proving that no part of the world was safe while evil still ruled.
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