Satire on mid-20th century politics camp in Serbia. Various commentators have noted that the chapter has political overtones. The critic Jerome Donnelly suggests that the chapter is a
satire, of a more serious kind than the knockabout "
comedy of manners" at the start of
The Hobbit. Plank calls it a
caricature of fascism. Donnelly agrees with Tolkien that the "Scouring" is not an allegory, but proposes that Saruman's "Ruffians" echo the tyrannical behaviour of the
Nazis, as do "the use of collaborators, threats, torture and killing of dissenters, and
internment". Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt write that "conservatives and progressives alike" had seen the chapter as a "pointed critique of modern
socialism", citing the scholar of politics
Hal Colebatch's comment that the rule- and redistribution-heavy Saruman regime "owed much to the drabness, bleakness and bureaucratic regulation of postwar Britain under the
Attlee Labour Government". They note similarly Plank's identification of "parallels" between the Shire under Saruman and both the German Nazi Party under
Hitler and Italian Fascism under
Mussolini. Plank discusses, for example, why the hobbits did not resist fascism, giving as reasons cowardice, lack of solidarity, and what he finds "the most interesting and the most melancholy": the shirriff-hobbit's statement "I am sorry, Mr. Merry, but we have
orders." Plank comments that this recalls statements from the
Nuremberg trials. He further compares Saruman with Mussolini, noting that they both came to "
a miserable end". Richards and Witt concede that the chapter has wider themes, including the ugliness of Saruman's "vengeful heart", the nastiness of (sub)urban development, the hobbits' love-inspired defence of their homeland, and the need not to just obey orders, but state that Tolkien's letters demonstrate his dislike of socialism, and that in the chapter Tolkien deftly satirizes "socialism's pose of moral superiority". Shippey comments that whatever Tolkien's protestations, readers back in the 1950s would have noticed some features of the Shire during the "Scouring" that "seem[ed] slightly out of place", such as the fact that wagonloads of "pipeweed" (tobacco) are being taken away, seemingly at the wizard Saruman's orders, with no visible in-universe explanation. What, Shippey asks, was Saruman doing with so much tobacco: a wizard was hardly going to be trading it for profit, nor "issuing" it to his orcs in Isengard. Instead, Shippey suggests, it echoes Britain's shortages just after the Second World War, routinely explained at that time with "the words 'gone for export'". Kocher adds that the devastation and people's responses in the Shire after the War would have been only too familiar to people in the 20th century. Not all critics have seen the chapter as political; the medievalist
Jane Chance notes the "domestic image" of the "Scouring" in the chapter's title, suggesting in her view a "rejuvenation" of the Shire. She describes the chapter's social cleansing of the Shire in similar terms, writing of washing and purifying it of "the reptilian monsters" Sharkey and Wormtongue.
A "novelistic" chapter Tolkien critics have noted that the chapter has a distinctive novel-like quality. Birns echoes Plank's comment that the chapter is "fundamentally different from the rest of the book", and states that it is "the most
novelistic episode in Tolkien's massive tale." He cites
Janet Brennan Croft's description of it as "that deceptively anti-climactic but all-important chapter". Birns argues that it meets three aspects of
Ian Watt's definition of the kind of novel read by the middle class, dominant among the reading public: firstly, it shows multiple social classes interacting; secondly, it is in a domestic context, the homely Shire; thirdly, it favours the point of view of the "emerging and aspiring middle classes". Birns concludes that "'The Scouring of the Shire' is where Tolkien's dark romance bends the most towards the realistic novel of domestic reintegration and redemption." Plank writes that the distinctive feature of the "Scouring" is that unlike in the rest of the book, there are no miracles and the
laws of nature work with "full and undisputed force". Saruman, Plank notes, was once able to work magic, but in the chapter he works as a politician, without sorcery: the chapter is "realistic", not fantasy, except for the moment of Saruman's death. Michael Treschow and Mark Duckworth, writing in
Mythlore, note that the return to the Shire emphasises the protagonists' growth in character, so that they can deal with life's challenges for themselves. Just as at the end of
The Hobbit Gandalf tells
Bilbo that he is "not the hobbit that you were", having learnt from his adventures, so in
The Lord of the Rings Gandalf tells Frodo and the other hobbits that he will not be coming to the Shire with them since "you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you."
Wish-fulfilment to bring joy and cleansing to England. Illustrated is a French 15th century hunting horn. Another element in the chapter is the appearance of Tolkien's own feelings about England. Shippey writes that there is a "streak of '
wish-fulfilment'" in the account, and that Tolkien would have liked "to hear the horns of
Rohan blow, and watch the Black Breath of inertia dissolve" from England. More specifically, Shippey applies this idea to "The Scouring of the Shire", noting that Merry returns from Rohan with a horn, brought by Eorl the Young, founder of Rohan, from the dragon-hoard of Scatha the Worm from the North. The horn, he explains, is "a magic one, though only modestly so": blowing it brings joy to his friends in arms, fear to his enemies, and in the chapter, it awakens the "revolution against sloth and shabbiness and Saruman-Sharkey" and quickly gets the Shire purified. Shippey suggests that Tolkien wished to do the same, and notes that with his novels he at least succeeded in bringing joy. Tolkien wrote in a letter that "the
man-made ... is ultimately daunting and insupportable", and that "If a
Ragnarök would burn all the slums and gas-works, and shabby garages, and long arc-lit suburbs, it [could] for me burn all the works of art – and I'd go back to trees." Caitlin Vaughn Carlos writes that Sam Gamgee's exclamation "This is worse than Mordor! ... It comes home to you, they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was ruined" Tolkien critics
John D. Rateliff and
Jared Lobdell have compared the sudden shrivelling of Saruman's flesh from his skull at the moment of his death with the instantaneous aging of the protagonist Ayesha in
Rider Haggard's 1887 novel
She: A History of Adventure, when she bathes in the fire of immortality. Tolkien acknowledged Haggard as
a major influence, especially
She. In an interview in 2015, the novelist and screenwriter
George R. R. Martin called this section of the
Lord of the Rings story brilliant, and said it was the tone he would be aiming for at the end of
Game of Thrones. Jonathon D. Langford, writing in
Mythlore, describes the scouring as the hobbits'
coming of age, the culmination of their individual quests. He states that Merry and Pippin have clearly matured on their journey, while Frodo and Sam see the success of their quest reassessed by hobbit society. He notes that a heroic quest as described by
Joseph Campbell ends with the hero's return from the enchanted lands to the ordinary world, renewing his community, as the hobbits' return does. == Adaptations ==