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…