Mordor in England

The Scouring of England would begin by getting rid of Saruman, oops, I mean Starmer, and restoring the Constitution to pre-Red Tony. 

From The European Conservative

By Michael Locke

Tolkien can teach the English a lot about how to make their country their home again.

One of the most surprising things about reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time is the ending. After spending many hundreds of pages fighting terrifying monsters and vast armies, the protagonists return to their home to find it overrun with a nondescript band of ruffians. The penultimate chapter is spent recounting the struggle to return the Shire to its previous condition, a process that involves rousing the demoralised hobbits to overthrow the rabble who have taken control of their land. 

On the face of it, the small-scale episode is something of a comedown from the sweeping drama that occupies most of the novel, and many readers have found it a puzzling or anticlimactic resolution to the story. Tolkien himself claimed that it was integral to the plot, foreseen from the very start. As this reader gets older and returns to the book from time to time, I find myself in agreement: far from being an unsatisfying addendum to the real action, the Scouring of the Shire is the very heart of the book, and it offers a sobering insight both into the post-War country Tolkien inhabited, as well as the deep corruption of contemporary England.

Some themes are particularly resonant. Rather than being occupied by a foreign army, the Shire’s corruption is sustained mainly from within. Although we discover that the origin of the rot lies in the meddling of the wizard Saruman, it is primarily the hobbits who operate the institutions of the revolution, something that appals the returning heroes. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” says Sam to a hobbit working for the regime. “You can give it up, if it has stopped being a respectable job.” “We’re not allowed to,” comes the miserable answer. A kind of madness has descended over the land, compelling ordinary people to engage in organised oppression of their own kind. Some of this is due to fear, but perhaps the greater motivation is simply a kind of numb shock: no one knows precisely why or how the Shire has changed, but suddenly it has, and once all the light and song has drained out of it there is no resisting the new dispensation.

The most obvious imposition of the regime comes in the form of the Rules. The previous governance of the Shire, we understand, was organised around informal social convention—the archetypal ‘high trust’ society. The New Shire overflows with written, formal Rules, pinned to the wall of every building, which are enforced by the office of Sheriffs. Many of the Rules are vague or petty and are thus able to be interpreted arbitrarily by the new policing institutions. In a typical instance of anarcho-tyranny, serious crimes such as murders of officials and the destruction of the environment go unpunished whereas trivial infractions are heavily punished: “There’s no longer even any bad sense to it,” says Farmer Cotton. “They cut down trees and let ’em lie, they burn houses and build no more.”

And that is the other main pillar of the regime: the destruction of the old. Trees are uprooted, ancient buildings are demolished, festivals are abolished. Pride or attachment to the familiar, the settled and the customary is erased. The things that replace them are mean and cheap, partly because much of the wealth of the old Shire has been exported abroad: “Everything except the Rules got shorter and shorter, unless you could hide a bit of one’s own when the ruffians went round gathering stuff up for ‘fair distribution,’” Cotton laments. A few individuals become very rich from this trade, but the bulk of the populace is impoverished. As a counterpart to this, the boundaries of the Shire are no longer enforced—more ruffians arrive and naturally become the most enthusiastic foot soldiers of the new dispensation: “And more came. And before we knew where we were they were planted here and there all over the Shire, and were felling trees and digging and building themselves sheds and houses just as they liked.”

The target of the satire is of course the post-war austerity Britain of Tolkien’s own time, in which the administrative state is born, and the institutions of the socialist New Jerusalem are founded. The rebuilding programmes of the 1950s and 1960s in particular are very consciously echoed here, the scars of which still lie across every cathedral city and market town in the land. More deeply, though, the pain of the older Great War resonates in these passages. Tolkien wrote consistently of his pain at the way the countryside of his youth was being “shabbily destroyed” even before the brutalist post-Blitz remaking of Gloucester, Coventry, and Exeter. The New Shire is the land of Beeching cuts, of rationing boards, of planning inspectorates, and the demolition of the country houses.

Seen thus, the Scouring of the Shire assumes its importance to the greater story, since it shows what the protagonists were fighting for. The great conflict in The Lord of the Rings is not simply that of rival powers squabbling over resources and prestige (as it is, say, in the contemporary fantasy epic Game of Thrones); it is rather the struggle of free peoples to maintain their own way of life in their own place. As Scruton observed of the English, “When your fundamental loyalty is to a place and its genius loci … loss of sovereignty bring a crisis of identity. The land loses its history and its personal face; the institutions become administrative centres, operated by anonymous bureaucrats who are not us but them.” The hobbits go to war not for riches or glory, but to save the land, the little place they till and cultivate. To return from their journeys to discover that it has all been thrown away is therefore the bitterest of poisons. “It comes home to you, they say,” says Sam, “because it is home, and you remember it before it was ruined.”

The soldier’s instinctive sympathy with the land is no invention of Tolkien’s. The contemporary writer John Lewis-Stempel in Where Poppies Blow has chronicled how common a sentiment it was with those fighting in the Great War, the love of nature and the wildlife-rich English field proving both a motivation to enlist as well as a comfort during the hell of the trenches. The poet Edward Thomas, when asked why he signed up, produced a handful of English soil and said “literally, for this.” The composers of the Great War era, Vaughan-Williams, Holst, and Butterworth (who died at the Somme) were all avid collectors of rural music and folk songs. England, for the men of this generation, was more than a random political unit; it was a place of cultivation, of attachment, intimately tied to the farmed earth and its settled rhythms.

But if Tolkien was dismayed by the erosion of this sentiment in his own time, we have it much worse now. All the grim aspects of the New Shire are evident in our own age, most notably the obsession with detached, formal Rules at the expense of informal social custom, the deliberate and unrelenting war on the old in favour of the new, the erasure of boundaries, the purposeful forgetting of place. Just as in the New Shire, our economies are dominated by the removal of assets overseas. Borders are thrown open, and attempts to enforce immigration laws are stymied. The recent jailing of a young mother in the UK for expressing intemperate opinions over a brutal child murder is set against the virtually legalised theft in our cities. Praying silently in proximity to an abortion clinic incurs harsh penalties while celebrating genocidal attacks by Islamists incurs only mild official disapproval. Officials relentlessly enforce rules over window-sizes in newbuilds and diversity targets in company employment while ignoring the demolition of the border controls by organised criminal gangs. We are ruled over by our own Shirriffs and ruffians, some of whom are deeply wicked, and others who are simply cowed.

It is no accident that, under these conditions, the countryside itself has become the target of deliberate attack. Numerous recent reports produced by activist NGOs and think-tanks have concluded that rural England is racist and requires decolonisation. The priceless jewel of England’s cultivated landscape, the very environment that inspired the Shire, is under assault both from industrial-scale farming and environmental activists, neither of whom (for different reasons) sees any value in the ancient human patterns of settlement and maintenance that Thomas and Butterworth were willing to die to protect. So vigorous is the barrage that Tolkien himself has been identified as a radicalising influence by the UK’s anti-terrorist Prevent programme, a state of affairs that ought to discredit the entire exercise but is somehow merely emblematic of the moral and intellectual poverty at the heart of the State.

In the fictional account, the Shire’s corruption is overcome and the rightful order reestablished. In the real world, such an outcome is far from certain. It is encouraging, perhaps, that the intellectual energy in contemporary conservatism is far closer to Tolkien than it is to the neoliberal consensus that has appropriated the movement since Thatcher and Reagan. For the first time in a generation, notable figures in the political Right are beginning to articulate coherent opposition to the programme of national self-abnegation that has dominated European discourse since the War. Italian premier Giorgia Meloni, of course, is a fan of both Tolkien and Scruton, as is U.S. Vice-President Elect J.D. Vance. It is unclear if any contemporary British politician shares similar instincts.

And this is a problem, for the hour is late. The state of England is already far more wretched than that of the Shire under Saruman, with far more formidable institutional obstacles to overcome before genuine national revival is possible. As Frodo says of his shattered home, “Yes, this is Mordor.” The governing classes of this country have created Mordor in England, too, and it remains to be seen whether its people have the moral courage to scour them from the land and begin anew.