I'd hesitate to assign "The
Scouring of the Shire" to political allegory, especially given the author's explicit statements in the Introduction. Although
Tolkien despised what he viewed as "Socialism", we have to be careful about linking a author's personal views with his work as a fiction writer; he appears to have despised democracy just as much.
The "Rules", and the overcoming of them, go back at least to Aristophanes.
here in the book it's lumped in with orc-mischief.
Case in point. Although
Sam does grumble about "a lot of rules and orc-talk", the initiative for the situation in
the Shire, including the "Rules", began with
Lotho.
Several threads of the story come together in this chapter, but looked at structurally, it is comedy.; that is, it follows the comedic theme of a hero overcoming the obstacles in the way of obtaining his desires, and in the process creating a new society.
The obstacles to be overcome may be personal, as it is in domestic comedy -- for instance a "heavy father", blocking the hero from taking the bride of his choice -- or it may be social, as it is here, with a usurper-figure setting up a false society of despotic rule. One common feature of this is the issuing of arbitrary or absurd law. This is not to imply the law itself is "funny" or comedic: it is often cruel and deadly. The failure to overcome it creates tragedy; I mentioned in another thread
Rohan and
Gondor as examples of absurd laws that held the potential for tragedy: we can imagine the consequences if
Theoden hadn't been "healed" by
Gandalf, for instance.
In the case of the Shire, the emphasis is thrown, as it is in most comedic structures, on the absurdity, of both the law and its author. The question arises of what makes the blocking character absurd, rather than simply
evil. The answer lies in the concept of the "humor", to use Ben Jonson's term: a ruling passion or obsession which he follows to absurd lengths. The obsession of the Sackville-Bagginses with possessing
Bag End is absurd in this sense; after all, it is far from their "power-center" in the
Southfarthing. It's notable that this obsession is treated humorously, in both this and our normal sense of the word, in The
Hobbit and the first chapters of LOTR; it's only after
gaining the object of the obsession that its dark side begins to manifest itself. We, of course, don't see the process at work, as we are with the heroes of the quest; we find out about it as the
hobbits do, in retrospect, and see only the final product.
That product, in the case of the Shire, is a sort of sham Utopia, a society of, to use Northrop Frye's term, "ritual bondage", enforced by the Humor's will, and absurd and arbitrary rules and laws are an integral feature of it.
The opposite of this is the society that emerges at the conclusion of the comedic structure, one of a kind of moral norm we expect in an idealized free society. Its "rules" are not externally imposed, but internalized, and aren't really defined; definition and careful formulation are characteristics of the humor. This demonstrates the soundness of Tolkien's instinct in dropping Gandalf's original explanation of why he couldn't force
Bilbo to give up
the Ring: that it would be "against the Rules". "Rules", and behavior restricted and defined, are part of the sense of arbitrariness associated with both false, "humorous" society, and with nightmare. The action which resolves the story causes them to dissolve, to vanish like smoke, which is why we often have the feeling, at the end of a comedy, of awakening from a dream.
