[Fordim Hedgethistle]

In an odd way this chapter has always been one of my very favourites. It provides so many satisfying resolutions – in a way, I’m more disappointed by the film’s exclusion of this movement toward home than the loss of the scouring itself. I think it makes perfect sense for Tolkien to spend so much timed detailing the return home as a journey insofar as it reinforces how ‘far’ the hobbits have traveled in far more than mere geography. Every time I read of Frodo’s re-encounter with Weathertop, or the conversation with Barliman, it really does feel as though a year of my own life has passed, even if in terms of the reading time it’s only been a few days. Testimony to the power of narrative indeed.

But to get back on point: it seems that to regard these chapters as transitional is to perhaps miss the point, for it assumes that they are ‘in between’ states or times – incomplete even. This would be to assume that the ‘real’ events or states of being are represented by those high points of adventure and excitement and joy which come before and after them: the Fall of Sauron, the Marriage of Arwen and Aragorn on the one side and the Scouring and rebirth of the Shire on the other. But of course, life is not lived in these high moments, but in the spaces between them – and these chapters of moving slowly away from the events of the War and toward the Scouring really reinforces that I think. In a real way I think we can see those great events on either side of this journey as bookends rather than defining centres: that is, the Return of the King and the Scouring of the Shire are striking moments of joy and terror that interrupt the usual course of life. For the most part, life is about traveling down the Road with one’s friends and family, saying goodbye, saying hello, seeing things again, realizing how far one has traveled, looking ahead to how far one still has to go, talking about the future, remembering the past, looking for a place to sleep, food to eat, telling stories, waking up, mending shoes, and on. It’s like the man said: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

One of the hobbits, I can’t remember which (shame upon me), makes this point himself: “We were not meant to live upon such heights” (I think it was Frodo to Sam). And these chapters are the best dramatization of that. Hobbits properly do not ‘belong’ either at the Return of the King, nor at the Scouring (the former being too high for them, the latter being too low) but somewhere between these states: somewhere that is comfortable but not indolent, safe but not stagnant, aware of the greater world beyond the Shire but firmly pointed toward Home.

The other thing I would like to say about these chapters is that in addition to being the end of one Story, they mark the beginnings of a number of other, new stories. In a way, the near-obsessive attention paid in them to story-telling and narrative highlights how Middle-Earth is finally emerging from the tyranny of a single Story. For far too long, the West has been in the grip of the story told in the Silmarillion, of the struggle between the Dark Powers and the Elves. Sure, there were lots of little stories along the way but all of them found their place within this larger fabric. But with the defeat of Sauron and, just as important, the passing of the Elves that Story – Ages old – is coming to an end and for the first time in Ages there’s the chance for other stories to begin, free of that overarching narrative: the Fourth Age of Men; the hobbits in the Shire; the Rohirrim, etc.