A Chris Trotter rewind – 20 years of LOTR

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The ‘Scouring of the Shire’ from Lord of the Rings

As LOTR turns 20, I think the best political cultural evaluation of the movie and the Shire that is NZ was written by Chris Trotter back in 2016…

Sleepy Hobbits? Or, Something Worse?

ARE WE “SLEEPY HOBBITS” – or something worse? Certainly, it doesn’t sound very sinister. Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury’s description of the New Zealand electorate seems a lot more like gentle chiding than a full-blown assault. Kiwis are upbraided for their general failure to respond appropriately to the increasingly alarming news reaching their ears. Comparing them to the complacent patrons of Hobbiton’s Green Dragon, Martyn chastises New Zealanders for being much more interested in listening to gossip than hearing news.

Martyn’s characterisation acquires greater force, however, if his audience’s only reference point is Peter Jackson’s film version of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Significantly, concerns about the project’s burgeoning length required Jackson to leave out what is, in many respects, the most powerful chapter of the entire trilogy – The Scouring of the Shire.

It is only when Frodo, Merry, Pippin and Sam return home that the universal impact of Sauron’s bid for absolute power strikes them. With a rising sense of outrage, and horror, they see that their beloved Shire has been transformed into what Tolkien clearly wants his readers to recognise as an industrial wasteland. Worse still, the Hobbits themselves are in the process of being industrialised. The sturdy peasants and artisans of the trilogy’s opening chapters, along with their aristocratic masters, are on the point of being turned into proletarians. They have been driven from their hobbit-holes and herded into barracks. Trees have been cut down. The old flour mill belches black smoke.

Not everyone, however, believes this to be a bad thing.

“This country wants waking up and setting to rights … and Sharkey’s going to do it; and make it hard, if you drive him to it. You need a bigger Boss. And you’ll get one before the year is out if there’s any more trouble. Then you’ll learn a thing or two, you little rat folk.”

Even some hobbits have succumbed to the new order. Ted Sandyman, the miller, scoffs at Sam’s anguish at the Shire’s obliterated beauty:

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“Don’t ‘ee like it, Sam? … But you always was soft. I thought you’d gone off in one o’ them ships you used to prattle about, sailing, sailing. What d’you come back for? We’ve work to do in the Shire now.”

Given the way Jackson behaved when his “independent contractors” made a bid for better wages and conditions, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that he decided to keep The Scouring of the Shire out of his movie.

Tolkien makes it clear that tyranny warrants only one response from those it oppresses: rebellion and revolt. Led by the four veterans of the War of the Ring, the Hobbits rise up against “Sharkey”, the new “Boss”, and overthrow his new order. More importantly, they follow the disease to its source – the Wizard Saruman, whose magic, corrupted by Sauron, has wrought so much havoc, even in the Shire.

It is only in Jackson’s movie that the Hobbits (with the obvious exceptions of Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, Pippin and Sam) are portrayed as sleepy and complacent. The film version, similarly, misrepresents the Shire itself. According to Jackson, it is a happy (if utterly powerless) Utopia from which brave souls, very occasionally, venture out, but into which nothing untoward – excepting, briefly, Sauron’s Black Riders – ever venture in.

Tolkien’s fantasy is much more realistic. His Shire is not overthrown by rampaging Orcs, but by the fear and greed of its own inhabitants. As the steadfast Farmer Cotton explains to Frodo:

“It all began with Pimple, as we call him … and it began as soon as you’d gone off, Mr Frodo. He’d funny ideas, had Pimple. Seems he wanted to own everything himself, and then order other folk about. It soon came out that he already did own a sight more than was good for him; and he was always grabbing more, though where he got the money was a mystery: mills and malt-houses and inns, and farms, and leaf-plantations. He’d already bought Sandyman’s mill before he came to Bag End, seemingly.”

If that doesn’t remind New Zealanders of the fate of their own beautiful country, then Martyn’s right, we really have become “Sleepy Hobbits”! Or, maybe, something even worse. Could it be that we, too, have fallen victim to our own Pimples, our own Ted Sandymans? That far too many of us have allowed ourselves to be ordered around by the Shirrifs? The Boss? By Sharkey?

We must hope not. Because in our own case – in our own Shire – we cannot rely upon four returning heroes to put things right. “Raising the Shire” is something we will have to do on our own. Forging our own swords. Stringing our own bows. Summoning our own neighbours. Only when we have fashioned our own horns and bugles will we, like Tolkien’s Hobbits in revolt, be able to send their clarion blasts echoing across New Zealand’s fields, towns and cities:

Awake! Awake! Fear, Fire, Foes! Awake!
Fire, Foes! Awake!

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8 COMMENTS

  1. I am still waiting for the Hobbit’s to wake up after they were put in a coma in 1984.
    When they do eventually wake they will be horrified by what they see.

  2. Hopefully the Government doesn’t try to ban swords & bows too. If England is anything to go by, they probably would. Our rulers prefer their peasants disarmed, lest they get any funny ideas about democracy, rights & the distribution of wealth.

  3. The problem with sleepy Hobbitonites is that they are too middle class. Too comfortable and are too lazy to consider others or put willing to put others first.
    They would rather go out and buy rental properties and extort rent from other less fortunate hobbits of a different class. And when things go wrong, the middle class go all out to make life for the renters and lower waged hobbits harder by voting en-mass for a mythical creature who claims to feel their pain and will protect them because they’re the most unfortunate while at the same time deals to the poorer hobbits, just for fun and a photo op!

    Fuck I’m bored with these clowns! Can we have an early election, please!!

  4. One of the many troubles with our shire is that rich bullies have our means of survival tied up to a tree and they’ll be milking the mangy cow until her udder’s a mere dry old flap.
    What I find extraordinary, and I mean truly extraordinary, is that I seem to be the only one here who has an alternative opinion on the dire state of our primary industry and again, no one other than myself seems to care whether our primary industry survives or not. So long as rugby, beer, tits and arse. Doesn’t anyone else find that extraordinary?
    AO/NZ’s cities are quite nice and all that but they’re an irrelevance. Sorry guys but your cafe’s, clubs and bars are a luxury, not an essential.
    The housing ‘market’ isn’t just a wonderful thing for a few, it’s a scam. We’re all living in a wacky, quasi-reality and I must wonder if our grain farmers are not to blame rather than our usual demonised scape goat of choice , dairy farmers?
    Wikipedia:
    “Ergotism”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism
    “Being chemically similar to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), ergot would not survive in the acidic environment of a typical human’s stomach, especially in properly cooked food. But if some but not all residents were malnourished and suffering bleeding stomach ulcers, only they could be affected by ingesting contaminated grains, leaving the majority unaffected, explaining why ergotism was not previously recognized. ”
    On a cautionary note:
    “When the belly’s full, all else is art.”

  5. “Given the way Jackson behaved when his “independent contractors” made a bid for better wages and conditions, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that he decided to keep The Scouring of the Shire out of his movie.”

    As I recall, Jackson’s stoush with the unions was in connection with the Hobbit movies, not with LOTR. Those movies had been made some years before.

    And the Scouring of the Shire comes at the end of book 3 (The Return of the King). It has nothing to do with the Hobbit book. I think it’s more plausible that Jackson had to omit it from the last LOTR movie because of movie length and cost considerations. Although in any event I doubt that either Jackson or his Hollywood financiers fully understood its importance to the story.

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