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Originally Posted by Morthoron
Therefore, only 19 Hobbits dying, although grievous, was a small price to pay for freedom, and inordinately small compared to the actual wars that occurred in Rohan and Gondor.
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The related thought occurs to me here--and I feel I might be harping a bit on the free will theme a bit--that those 19 Hobbits, though actually killed by the ruffians, may have, for all we know, been more responsible for their own demise than Gandalf, or Frodo, or Saruman might have been. My thought therein is not so much to remove potential culpability from those mighty agents, but to remember that the Hobbits all involved themselves in the battle voluntarily, and presumably wanted to play their part in the eviction of the ruffians. In a sense it denies their deaths value to say that they were completely unnecessary and avoidable.
And, indeed, we really can't say they were avoidable. Indeed, it is fine to speculate that Gandalf's presence in the Scouring of the Shire would have lowered the casualty rate even more than its already low actual count, but there is no reason to assume this is so. Again, I point out that Gandalf is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and although a powerful being, it is possible that drawing too powerful a being into the conflict might have resulted in greater bloodshed.
To speculate, for example, Gandalf's presence might have meant no Hobbit casualties at Bywater, or he might have been recognised as soon as they crossed the High Hay, and thus alerted Sharkey to his presence, rousing all the ruffians into much better martial order than the lazy lot that was trounced at Bywater. Indeed, a larger, better-gathered ruffian force expecting to fight a wizard might have given a better account of itself in battle, or (being cowards) they might have taken to slaughtering civilians. We have ample evidence, after all, that Saruman was not so much intent on changing and ruling the Shire as on ruining it, and his last ditch effort if Gandalf were to arrive might have been the wholesale massacre of the inhabitants of Hobbiton.
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Originally Posted by Morthoron
Context, we must have context!  |
I so desperately want to make a quip about Biblical exegesis here, but there is no relevance to the topic and we have plenty of real world digression in the WW1 tangent.