Return of the King cut an ending that gave Lord of the Rings meaning

One universally acknowledged truth is that if you watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy with a fan of the books, they’re going to tell you about the things in the books that didn’t make it into the movies, even in the Extended Editions. Tom Bombadil will come up, or Glorfindel, or Quickbeam (not Ghân-buri-Ghân, thank goodness). The Scouring of the Shire will be mentioned by the book lover just as the film-lover comes to a halt after nine hours of movies.

The Lord of the Rings’ 20th Anniversary is 2021. It’s hard to imagine the three-part story that would be enough. Each Wednesday, throughout 2019, we will go back and forth between the two locations, looking at how and why these films are still considered classics. This is Polygon’s Year of the Ring.

Completing 2 chapters in a book The Return of the KingScouring of the Shire was one of the biggest omissions Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens made from J.R.R. Tolkien’s work to their screenplays. And while fans will argue Tom Bombadil should be included because he’s fun, even if he doesn’t really have an impact on the story, the Scouring of the Shire is the opposite.

Nobody You likeThe Scouring of the Shire. It’s anticlimactic. It’s depressing. This complicates themes. The Lord of the RingsIt interrupts the joyous homecoming that our heroes deserve. It’s essentially another adventure into itself, a repetition in micro of the last several hundred pages we spent reading.

Speaking from experience, if you promote its inclusion to a film viewer, it sounds like you are completely lost. The Return of the KingYou already have four-five or five possible endings. So why would you need another? And it’s true that it would take an enormous restructuring of Jackson’s The Return of the King — and probably Two Towers as well — to fit the Scouring into the film trilogy.

Even without the Scouring, the Lord of the Rings movies continue to work. They still captivate audiences, spreading Tolkien’s legacy farther than it ever could have gone from the books alone. Without Scouring, movies don’t tell the whole story. The Lord of the Rings novel.

Ok, so what’s the Scouring Of The Shire?

In Tolkien’s The Return of the KingFrodo and Sam return to the Shire with Merry and Pippin, where they find that their home has been invaded and oppressed and, in some cases, even enslaved.

The idyllic countryside of the hobbits has been marred by exploitation; the old watermill replaced with a coal-powered one belching smoke, hobbit holes destroyed so that quarries and ugly new houses could be built, fields flattened to park carts in, elder trees wantonly hacked down to their stumps — including, most devastatingly, the “party tree” that featured as the meeting site for Bilbo’s birthday in the series’ opening chapter. Cosy Bag End was taken as Saruman’s headquarters; the garden ransacked, the door marred, the rooms stinking and in disarray.

Saruman, who lost his magic in Isengard was not killed but was taken from him, arrived at home first and worked his way to power using political skill. Within a day of the four’s arrival, Merry and Pippin’s new martial experience is all it takes to rouse the Shirefolk against their oppressors, resulting in the Battle of Bywater, in which hobbits kill and die to deliver their home.

Image by New Line Cinema

Frodo tries to spare Saruman’s life and orders him to exile, only for Wormtongue to finally snap under the wizard’s abuse, cut his master’s throat, and be executed by several hobbit arrows before anyone can give an order not to fire. As they approach Bag End, the final confrontation is a very ugly one. While the Shire is able to rebuild and become a happier place, their relationship will be forever changed. Frodo realizes it’s too difficult to remain there after several years. Frodo decides to sail westward from Grey Havens.

Scholars and readers struggle to understand this bizarre denouement. The Return of the KingThe Scouring was published. Scouring was called anti-socialist, anti-fascist, and satire of post-World War II England’s bureaucracy. However, Tolkien and most other attempts to assert that The Lord of the Rings is “about” any specific historical moment, loudly resisted such characterizations.

“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 [roughly 1949-1955],” he wrote in his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “It does not. It’s an important part of the plot and was planned in advance [circa 1936], though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever.”

The author’s sole concession to critical interpretation was that, as with the rest of the The Lord of the RingsScouring was inspired by his pain as he watched urbanization take over the English countryside where he grew up.

However, what is Scouring?

With respect to Professor Tolkien, I won’t argue that the Scouring is important because of what it says about history, but rather what it says about his hero-hobbits.

It is one of the most cherished passages in history. The Lord of the Rings is Sam’s speech about how stories don’t end. The Scouring wraps Hobbiton in history, as Bag End is itself wrapped by it. Wormtongue was the lonesome of Saruman, who also was the lonesome of Sauron. Morgoth was the first Dark Lord to be born since the dawning of time.

Merry and Pippin’s experiences make them the most martially qualified leaders on hand, and they proactively spearhead the armed resistance to Saruman. Scouring, however, is also one of Tolkien’s most humanistic pieces of war writing. The Lord of the Rings — here there are hardly any “fighters” who our heroes don’t know by name. There isn’t a drop of magic involved. It is a meticulously compiled list of casualties from the Shire’s first armed conflict since 300 years.

Image: New Line Cinema

Our heroes can’t return home, because even their home has been irreversibly marred by the conflict they prevailed against — more than any other effect on The Lord of the RingsFrodo is absolutely destroyed by the Scouring of the Shire. Frodo’s story in Tolkien’s The Return of the KingIt is about a character who longs to have some control over his life, but finds it difficult every time.

He struggles for years with carrying the Ring. Finally, he gives up and claims its power. On the journey through Mordor, Frodo speaks of how he wishes to never carry a weapon or strike a blow again, gifting his uncle’s sword Sting to Sam. Then, in the ceremony for his honor as the heroic Ringbearer — for something he achieved, in the end, by accident — Gandalf and Sam, of all people, convince him he must wear Sting for “tonight at least.”

From the moment they realize something is very wrong in the Shire, Frodo insists that the hobbits’ liberation be accomplished without bloodshed, on any side, including absolution for Saruman, Wormtongue, their human forces, and all hobbits who colluded with them. It’s a radical mercy that mirrors Frodo’s choice to spare Gollum, one of the only completely free and unadvised (some might say selfish!) He makes the choices that lead to destruction of the Ring, as a result of these decisions.

Frodo’s post-Ring pacifism could be interpreted as a simple fatigue of war, but that feels off. Frodo was not present for any of the book’s actual battles, he did not befriend any of its tragically fallen heroes, or see firsthand the suffering in the story’s great sieges. Frodo’s arc wasn’t about fighting.

Frodo’s search for agency and absolution is even more fitting. He’s looking for something that he does to matter, and it never does. He couldn’t destroy the Ring, he couldn’t keep his oath to never wear a weapon, he couldn’t protect the Shire, he can’t free it without bloodshed, and he can’t even successfully show Saruman and Wormtongue the mercy he wishes for himself.

Peter Jackson, has he explained why the Scouring of the Shire was not included?

Universal Pictures

The special features of the Extended Edition of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the KingA small portion of the film is dedicated to the Scouring of the Shire. The production did film scenes of hobbits battling orcs and being clapped in chains — but to create an homage to the Scouring in aFellowship of the RingFrodo’s scene looking into the Mirror of Galadriel. Not the complete sequence.

“The reason to lose the Scouring to me was very straightforward,” Jackson says in a filmed interview for the Extended Edition, “it was one of those no-brainers.

“At the very beginning of this process, we’d identified the spine of our movies — Frodo taking the ring to Mordor — which means that the climax of our movies is Frodo destroying the Ring. There is a denouement. In fact, it’s the denouement. The Return of the King is long and extensive, it’s 20 minutes, which is 20 minutes that we wanted to spend covering the damage to Frodo as a result of this journey that he’s had.”

In the film version, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive home to a Shire so untouched by war that they don’t even bother explaining themselves. They share the War of the Ring, as they know each other’s secret adventures. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin look over their halves at the Green Dragon while the rest of the world stares wide-eyed at a large pumpkin. Sam is married. Frodo monologues a bit about how hard it’s been to pick up his old life. In the very next scene, he’s in a cart with Bilbo going off to the Grey Havens.

“To get to that point and then to deviate into a completely different event and storyline,” Jackson says in a DVD special features interview, “to me felt — anticlimactic, I guess, is how I would describe it.”

In the movie, Frodo’s victory is simple and obvious: The world was saved and the Shire remains an Eden that has never truly known evil. Frodo’s newfound isolation is very specific. His inability to return to hobbit society after his death is due to events outside of the Shire. The juxtaposition of the experienced hobbit heroes with the ruddy-faced farm-people cooing over a big gourd makes Frodo’s isolation more of an “ignorance is bliss” problem.

Frodo’s eaten the fruit of Hobbiton, which is an Eden. His experience has made him too dark, too complex in thought to masquerade as a happy, simple hobbit anymore — and so he throws up his hands and leaves his entire society behind. If you squint, it’s the same decision he makes in the book, in the same way an abstract painting of vertical bars can resemble a photograph of a forest.

The Lord of the Rings has many facets.

Image: New Line Cinema

Fantasy is a collection of storyforms and archetypes. You are born with a destiny. The hero defeats an inhumane evil and wins the status quo. Maybe you find love. And then, you get power, praise, and acceptance from society. The hero is someone we see as a human being. The Lord of the RingsIt is the core text of this genre. It does tell a similar story, however: Aragorn II’s rise to power as High King of The Reunited Kingdom.

But no one would claim that Aragon was Tolkien’s main character. The Lord of the RingsThe story of a hero who is obligated to do something, rather than have a fate. A heroic figure struggling in vain to conquer an evil within themselves. The hero is unable to control their destiny once they have completed their task. In fact, the world is actually saved by a seemingly naive and disconnected choice they made oodles of time before the story’s climax.

Instead of feeling empowered and supported by their experiences, they feel discomfited. They find they can neither reenter society — because they have changed beyond restoration — nor return home — because their home has as well.

Scouring of the Shire refers to the element which expands The Lord of the RingsIt can be anything from intricately-crafted adventure fiction to timeless literary relatability. That is what distinguishes Tolkien and his imitators who throw a hero/a wizard/a sword and a trip together and call their Aragorn Story Lord of the Rings-inspired.

Scouring the Shire has more impact than any other speech or fight. The Lord of the RingsA war story in which one side is rewarded with fame and fortune while the other does not. Both are heroes. It is the story of heroic and necessary battles. The final chapter shows that something can be beautiful, important, celebrated, and yet wrong.