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3months2mordor · 2 months ago

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On Hobbits and Existential Dread

or Why “The Scouring of the Shire” is the True Climax of The Lord of the Rings

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Or more accurately, there lived a human who had been in hard COVID quarantine for six months and certainly felt like a hobbit, what with all the staying inside and eating second breakfast and trying her best to ignore the world, which seemed in the summer of 2020 to be spiraling towards something unknown. And she, well I, was packing for college. On an impulse that I cannot explain except to say that I had previously binge watched all the movies in my seemingly infinite quaran-time, I packed a large red volume of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with the intention to read it over the course of the semester.

What began as a simple personal challenge to read a chapter a night instead of doom scrolling on Twitter became a profound experience not only in terms of discovering that my parents were right in saying the book was actually really good, but also in realizing that the Hobbits, in their edenic Shire perched on the edge of a world about to enter catastrophe, were more like me, more like a lot of us, than Aragorn or the Elves or Dwarves or Men who people Middle Earth. And here is why the chapter at the very end of the last book where the Shire is nearly destroyed is so very, very important.

Tolkien takes careful time in his books to establish the attitudes and habits of his hobbits who live in pastoral harmony in near complete isolation from the rest of the world. They are content with what they have and don’t have the greed that drives Dwarves to dig, or the ambition that drives Men to war, or even the worship of nature that drives Elves deep into their forests to protect them. They build their hobbit holes, smoke what is definitely pot, and eat and drink heartily. They care little for news of the outside world and tend their fields instead. That’s it.

But the world does not cease to exist just because they want it to. It never does.

As Gandalf warns in Rivendale, “We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is growing dark.” (Part 1 Book 2 Chapter 1).

Regardless of how much the hobbits might ignore the coming of the Dark Lord Sauron and the existential threat that is his attempt to control the world, it will not go away. They will not be safe from the darkness just because they want to be and they have a supply of candles in the cupboard. And so, at the start of the story, evil comes to the Shire in the form of the Black Riders and Frodo, our hero, must leave to keep the Shire safe from the forces of darkness. Still Frodo is just a hobbit, albeit a brave one. So he laments to Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time” and Gandalf replies “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” (Part 1 Book 1 Chapter 2).

I feel this quote more deeply every year. A deep childish wish for things to exist as we expected them to be, but a solemn and more mature knowledge that Gandalf is right. That our time has already been given to us. All that we have left is what we do to make that time matter.

But back to Frodo, who takes a good seventeen years to heed this advice, but eventually sets off on an adventure to save the Shire which, spoiler alert, ultimately saves the world. Along the way people despair and seem to lose hope. Theoden, recovering from a spell that robbed him of agency and clearsightedness, cries “Alas! That these evil days should be mine, and should come in my old age instead of that peace which I have earned” (Part 2 Book 3 Chapter 6). Even Sam, in his darkest hour thinking he has lost Frodo for good, groans “I wish I wasn’t the last. I wish old Gandalf was here, or somebody. What am I left all alone to make up my mind? I’m sure to go wrong” (Part 2 Book 4 Chapter 10).

Yet despite it all the One Ring is destroyed and the King returns and good wins. Everything is set right and our heroes get a chance to rebuild the world rather than watch it crumble. They get to go home.

Now this is a fine story and one I desperately needed amongst all of the *everything* going on in 2020. However it is not the ending that stuck with me. For you see once Frodo and his companions return home, the Shire is not the same place they left it.

The Shire, in their year long absence, has descended into a despotic police state run by a wealthy, privileged hobbit who stays in his hole rather than try to help his people as Men, who tower over the hobbits, and are specifically and on multiple occasions called bullies, abuse their power. They use their strength to take food and (let’s face it) weed from the hobbits, desecrate their land with deforestation and pollution, and create a state of fear and paranoia that anyone could be taken at any moment to prison without trial after only a mere whiff of seditious behavior. The world has come to the hobbits and they are so paralyzed with fear that they are unable to do anything other than sit in their hobbit holes and keep their heads down, hoping that they and their families will make it through.

Now, Frodo and his companions, having seen the change that can be wrought from people who stand up to bullies and fight to make a difference, see the state of their home and immediately understand the despair their friends and neighbors have fallen into because they too have felt it. These are the hobbits who faced thousands of orcs and rode in battle and walked to Mount Doom with only each other to lean on and they know how deeply despair of impossible odds can affect someone. But they have also learned that that despair is not inevitable. They saw the Ents on their last march when Treebeard said it was “likely enough that we are going to our doom… But if we stayed at home and did nothing the doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has been long growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now” (Part 2 Book 3 Chapter 4). They saw the Rohirrim ride to battle against impossible odds because it was the right thing to do. They saw even the most pitiful Gollum play his part in saving the world. And they saw the Eagles fly in to help carry the day.

There’s always hope if there’s something worth fighting for.

And so, back in the Shire which was not the Shire they knew but still the one they love, the four heroic hobbits do what had once seemed impossible: they get the hobbits, in their apathy and terror and existential despair, to stand up and fight. And it’s hard, and people die, and it gets worse before it gets better, but in the end the bullies are run off and the hobbits are victorious and they begin to rebuild, not just their homes but their forests and their relationships with each other too.

The hobbits, and me really, wanted to curl up in their holes and hope the world would go away. And sometimes, God, that seems like it’s the only thing you can do when darkness is spreading far on the horizon and it keeps creeping closer but isn’t here yet. But Sauron is not the scariest thing in this book. Tolkien’s real villain was the fear and despair that can paralyze you to stay in your hole until the Shire is burning around you. Yet even the most comfortable and secure hobbits have to stand up and face the world because if we don't, no one else will.

There is a reason Frodo is able to see the mission to the end. And it’s not that he’s exceptional in the way other heroes are. No. In fact it is because he is unexceptional and unambitious and also uncompromising that the deed is able to be done. He, like the hobbits he helps at the end of the series, has to get up and work to fight the evil that hurts people every day. And Frodo doesn’t save the hobbits of the Shire; they save themselves. Then they rebuild. They grow things again, not better, not the same, but they have to go on living. And, I don’t know, I needed to realize that.

We aren’t Aragorn with a throne and a legendary sword and a destiny to be king, we aren’t the Elves with their centuries of knowledge and skills, we aren’t the Dwarves with their mountain holds to hide in. Heck, we’re not even Frodo, or at least I’m not. There’s no way I could handle a walk that long. We’re the hobbits. We see the existential wave of dread and terror that is coming and our instinct to hide from it, to hold it off as long as we can and then silently accept it when it comes. Because what can one little halfling do against a thing like that?

But even the hobbits of the Shire stand up eventually. Even hobbits can take that dread for a bleak future and turn around and create new life. There’s a reason why the symbol of the Shire returning to peace and throwing off the yolk of oppression is a tree. The bullies cut down Bilbo’s old one and it can’t come back. But Sam plants a new one anyway and hopes it will grow.

I’m reading the Lord of the Rings again before this election as I did last time. But this time I’m not alone. I’m reading it with friends. I marked passages like the ones above that made me think but also ones that made me laugh because there is joy in amongst the shadows and if we cannot find those moments it’s hard to keep looking for the light. In rewatching The Two Towers film the other day I was struck, as I usually am, by Sam’s speech at the end of the movie, based on one he gives in “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol.” I think it bears quoting in full.

Sam: It’s all wrong By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Hobbits are remarkable people, Tolkien says, and I hope we are too. I hope we can get through this by raising up our own Shires full of hobbit warriors to face the world and not lie down and give up. Because if everyone did that there would still be a One Ring and Sauron would rule forever.

But we have to save the Shire. It’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. We have to believe that. I have to. I will do my part to make sure it does, but first I have to believe it’s possible. We have to take that existential terror and turn it into righteous fury because we have seen what a shadow can do and we cannot let it spread again. We have been there. But we will not go back again.