“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. It does not. It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, 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. It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.”

Tolkien - Foreword to LOTR 2e

Well, on the one hand - a Christian Libertarian reading of the Shire: why not! The Shire is a sufficiently fantastical place that we can all project different world-views on it without arguing against the text. And, as I say, why not!

For contrast, what I see there is a rather crazy mix of:

• William Morris Arts and Craftiness (the love of growing things; the anti-industrialism and proto-greenery; the work done voluntarily rather than by coercion) and;
• Disraeli-style One-Nation Toryism (the idea that a hierarchical and unequal society is not only natural but everyone can live together in their allotted place in the scheme provided the powerful are generous with their paternalism).

But that's the great thing about Readings. We can all have one. My balrog has no wings maybe yours has some. Trying to prove which is the True Meaning of Tolkien is pointless.

Whether Morris and Disraeli would have got along running the Shire I doubt - Morris, an early socialist, would have wanted all that wealth in the hands of the Bagginses, Tooks, Brandybucks and the like distributed in a more systematic way than just via Bilbo's charity. That would have ground Disraeli's Gears. But maybe the yokel Shire hobbits would be just baffled by socialism, being perfectly content with their lot, and having no higher goal than that the Bagginses, Tooks, Brandybucks and the like enjoy their riches. This is a fantasy world, I say again.


On the other hand, Tolkien RJJ, I felt you owed it to the readership of your article to say that we know full well that the Scouring of the Shire was not a response to British political history post 1945 (and not, BTW when Tolkien returned from World War I in 1916: you seem to have conflated the two world wars). We know this because Tolkien says so in the Foreword to LOTR 2e:

Quote

It has always struck me as odd that some had supposed Tolkien to be writing about (or at least influenced by) events of the British post WWII recovery. Growing up in England when I did, I had the chance to speak to many adults who experienced that, starting with my parents (though I never, of course had a chance to ask Tolkien about it). It was most certainly a time of shortages, and a continuation of the rationing scheme started in 1940 by the wartime coalition government*.

But the adults to whom I spoke remembered these inconveniences as being unpleasant to be sure but understandable and necessary. And a darned sight better than being carpet-bombed or in battle.

Thinking about it now, I suppose it is only natural that there were different opinions. We'll all remember the recent pandemic in which people were asked or required by their legal authorities to make various sacrifices for the public good. The ins and outs of what was asked for would have varied depending on which jurisdiction each of us was in, and any discussion about the details of this would be very obviously out of scope on this forum. My point is that people reacted differently - everything from assiduous compliance (with or without personal reservations, and at various personal costs) via grumbling, then cheating, to ...other less compliant behaviours.

It was probably the same back then.

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*"This is what you need to know about rationing in the second world war" (according to the Imperial War Museum) if you want to consider it as an influence upon Tolkien. The scheme did not work the way it is sometimes supposed, or like what we infer is happening in the Scouring-era Shire:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/...the-second-world-war

I'd note that the UK has not been self-sufficient in food and other requirements since the Nineteenth Century. And therefore trade blockade is always one tool of our enemies. The threat of Hitler's U-boats was all too apparent. So rationing was an near inevitable policy for any British government of the time - that or let prices rip and the poor decide whether to starve or in desperation become a fifth column.

The post-war government (democratically elected by a landslide in 1945) would have proudly agreed that it was socialist. I have a very strong feeling that that's a word which has connotations in the US that are different in the UK (or most of the rest of Western Europe). Just as the British and Australian Liberal parties are identical in name but diametrically opposed in policies. And British Conservative governments have in my life time introduced some of the worlds strictest gun control legislation and legalised same-sex marriage (policies that would not, I believe be likely to appeal to US conservatives).

But whatever confusion might exist around political labels, it can't have been socialism that made the post-war shortages happen - Atllee's government was replaced (democratically, at the polls: it was no tyranny) by a Conservative one under Winston S Churchill, which retained rationing until 1954. They also couldn't import goods on merchant ships that had been sunk in the war, or replace the war casualties in the labour force. Nor could they get bombed factories magically back to work or other destroyed and damaged infrastructure to do its stuff.


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