Practising resurrection in the Shire
Somewhere in the middle of ‘The Passage of the Marshes’, i began to wonder why the Sauron i’d decided to re-read The Lord of the Rings1. I’d forgotten how bleak and sluggish Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor was. Even though i wanted nothing more than to wring Gollum’s neck, i decided to plod through, knowing i was bored senseless because Tolkien wanted me to experience Frodo’s anguish deep in my bones. The gamble paid off — i’d also forgotten that The Return of the King doesn’t end with Aragorn’s crowning, but only after ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, a thinly veiled commentary on post-war England that can be read as an environmentalist parable. I knew i wouldn’t forget reading it during this summer’s fifth heat wave; now i know i won’t forget reading it days before the death of Wendell Berry at the grand old age of 92.
Tolkien has always denied that ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ had “any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever”, stating in his foreword to the second edition that “it is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset”. Are we really supposed to believe that the Chief isn’t a Führer, the Shirrifs aren’t the Gestapo and the ruffians aren’t the SS? That the “gathering” of produce so that equal “sharing” can’t occur isn’t a jab at communism? That the felling of the Party Tree and the building of “new mean houses” have nothing to do with Britain’s rampant urbanization?
“An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience”, he admits, “It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back.” The mill that grinds nothing directly relates to Tolkien’s childhood at Sarehole, “a kind of lost paradise” that was taken over by the industrial growth of Birmingham, at which point its old mill fell into disrepair. ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ might not have any contemporary political reference whatsoever, but right until his last story, Tolkien would write about that little village that existed once “not very long ago for those with long memories nor very far away for those with long legs.” This is solastalgia forty-odd years before the term was coined.
Sauron fell in a single paragraph, but the last battle of the whole trilogy takes an entire book. It isn’t won in the field, because evil isn’t a single entity, not even the fearful necromancer. It’s won in the fields, because evil is an idea, our “dominion over the earth” that we twisted into systematic exploitation and death. “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all”, wrote Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America, “it is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” Sauron lost because he poisoned Mordor, and in doing so, poisoned himself.
Even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t have won, because he “let a great part of his own former power” pass into the Ring. “The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised”, wrote Tolkien in his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, both being a way to exert power without cultivating relationships. The pits and furnaces of Isengard produce nothing more than smoke and waste, but they embody Saruman’s might, to the point that their destruction is a tremendous blow to the white wizard. Evil arises when machines become an end in themselves — “you’ve got to have grist before you can grind”, says Farmer Cotton of the Shire mill, you’ve got to have the fruits of nature before you can have the fruits of your externalized labour.
In a favourite of mine, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, Berry gives nine criteria for technological innovation. A new tool “should be cheaper than the one it replaces”, smaller, easier to use, “use less energy”, and “some form of solar energy” if possible, “be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence”, “be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible”, come from a small shop that’ll take it back for maintenance and repair, and finally “not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships”. Saruman’s machines fail all nine, and the ninth by design. Unfortunately, we could say the same about most of our ‘modern’ technology.
The machine is a way to govern by rule and proxy: you could follow the machine’s rules for years before realizing the machine had to be designed by someone whose rules you’re actually following. When the hobbits decided to sell their leaf to a buyer they never met, they lost their land without being invaded. The Chief, the gatherers, the sharers, the ruffians and the machines were brought to facilitate trading, all believing they were in charge, all being kept in the same bondage. By coincidence (or not), Berry’s father was a tobacco farmer. When the American Tobacco Company eliminated all competitors, they began to squeeze farmers until they were forced to sell their crops for no profit.
Berry tells this story in his 2012 Jefferson lecture, titled “It All Turns on Affection”, where he quotes his old teacher Wallace Stegner. “He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds”: boomers are “those who pillage and run”, who exploit the land without ever giving back, while stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in”, who nurture the soil so it keeps on giving. Boomers, of course, govern by rule and proxy. The hobbits fell into Saruman’s trap because they had let themselves be kept ignorant of anything beyond the Bounds — they’d heard of the existence of boomers but didn’t want to learn anything about them.
Their failure is epistemic, but you know what? So is ours. “Virtually all of us now share with the most powerful industrialists their remoteness from actual experience of the actual world”, says Berry, “like them, we participate in an absentee economy, which makes us effectively absent even from our own dwelling places.” You might have no money and no power; you’re still living a life your grandparents could only dream of. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers”, we’re all Lothos doing Saruman’s deed without ever stopping to ask why.
The consequences are obvious: our world is becoming more Mordor than Shire. But repair runs on a different clock from ruin. Sam replanted a single mallorn in the Party Field, but not all trees are magic, and most won’t bear fruit before generations have come and gone. And even when the trees are magic, once knowledge and culture are lost, everything is lost. Just ask the Ents. Just like Sam put his faith in the “earth from [Galadriel’s] orchard”, you need to “put your faith in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years”, as Berry says in his Mad Farmer manifesto.
Restoration comes from our ability to decentre — literally and figuratively. Frodo saves a place he knows he’ll have to leave. Sam stays: he’s not a Baggins by blood, but by being a faithful friend, a good husband, a dedicated mayor and, most of all, a thoughtful gardener, he became the true heir to Bag End. Berry left us at Jack Beechum’s age, and in The Memory of Old Jack, Jack leaves the farm to Elton Penn, his tenant, rather than to his daughter, who married into the city. Stewardship is a choice about competence and care, not a God-given right from birth. We have to have the courage to plant the seeds of the trees that’ll rot into two inches of humus, knowing full well that we won’t be there to enjoy them.
Of course, the Shire is an insular little society that stays suspicious of the Big Folk beyond the Bounds. Tolkien’s faith was more parochial than Berry’s, who might have been the last American unable to preach a religion and live by the precepts of another. “Whoever strikes me shall be accursed”, Saruman says in his final moments, “and if my blood stains the Shire, it shall wither and never again be healed”. But his essence “dissolved into nothing”, with no possibility of respite or return, while the Shire was able to grow back. Like Berry said, you have to “practise resurrection.” But like Sam said, “that’ll take a lot of time and work.” Practise resurrection. Even if, especially if, that’ll take a lot of time and work.