"There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same."
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King.
I watched Peter Jackson's concluding part of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King again last weekend, and it set me thinking about the book, and what Tolkien was really driving at. I have always liked but never really loved Lord of the Rings, even when I first read it as a teenager. To me it had a strange, bloodless, rarified quality; oddly stilted, like a pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life, full of Solemn Councils and Chaste Maidens. The descriptions of scenery seemed to go on forever, and what was it with all of the bloody songs and poems? Get on with it already! I skimmed a lot of that.
Yes, I know, I know - it's supposed to be A Mythology for England, Anglo-Saxon epic mixed with Arthurian Romance, and all that, but it always felt to me more like the last dying gasp of English Romanticism, and I freely confess that I'm constitutionally more at home with the dirtier, lustier worlds of Swords & Sorcery - Robert E Howard and Fritz Lieber, and that High Fantasy has always somehow alienated me - it never felt like it was about real people with real drives and emotions. Nevertheless, I did very much enjoy Peter Jackson's films (at least, the LOTR trilogy, not the Hobbit films, which are, let's face it, the Star Wars Prequels of the piece) - incredibly long as they were - because they managed to avoid most of the problems I had had with the original books. Jackson did this by compressing and focusing the narrative; instead of the three page descriptions of mountains, now the sweeping vistas of scenery spoke for themselves, and the songs and poems were wisely mostly chopped away - especially Tom Bombadil, who I know some people think of with kindness, but who only ever irritated me. The ending of the final film could have benefitted from some judicious editing, but generally they were as a good a version as we're likely to see. With one exception.
Everyone has their pet gripe with the films, I know, but for me there was one area where I felt they had seriously mis-stepped, and that was by cutting out one of my favourite bits of the books; The Scouring of the Shire. This final reckoning with Saruman and Wormtongue was presumably cut from the films to allow them to kill Saruman at the end of the second film in order to provide an artificial kind of ending/closure there that it would otherwise lack, and perhaps because it would have been too anti-climactic a scene to end with after the struggle at Mount Doom, but I personally missed it being where it should be. It's the completion of the Hero's Journey; the return of the four hobbits to the Shire that they left at the start, and the realisation that they are not the same people that they were when they left, and that they can no longer simply just slot back into the roles they once filled. It's almost like the Trilogy's 'Deer Hunter' moment. It shows that they have been forged in a crucible of war, and now are unafraid to tackle the petty tyrants and bullies that Saruman's pint-sized police state represents. But it also brings home to the four how out of kilter they are with what was once their homeland - it is only via corruption and collusion within elements of the existing hobbit power structure that Saruman has come to power, after all.
This downbeat, melancholy ending was excised from the films because it is quite at odds with the epic quest that has gone beforehand, but to me it feels like the mask slipping from the upright world of elves and High Magic, and instead giving us a glimpse into the soul of Lieutenant John Tolkien of the Lancashire Fusiliers, a veteran of the Somme, and the feelings he had when he came back from Flanders. If The Shire is a bucolic fantasy of rural England, and the blasted, lifeless, ash-strewn wastes of Mordor are the horror of the trenches (yes yes, Tolkien's dislike of the Industrial Revolution, but come on...), then the Scouring of the Shire is what it feels like to come back to that rural idyll after four years of slaughter, and find that nothing is quite as you remembered it. Although the final book of The Lord of the Rings was not completed until 1949, Tolkien always strenuously denied that it was anything to do with World War II, that Sauron was not Hitler, and that the Ring was not the Atomic Bomb, and I believe him. Rather, I think it was very much to do with WWI and his experiences of it - with the passing of the Victorian/Edwardian world of his youth, diminshing and passing into the West, where the new rising power of the USA lay, and the birth of the new world of the 20th Century, and I think that leaving out that final chapter diminishes the whole.
