Cosy Bag End was taken as Saruman’s headquarters the garden ransacked, the door marred, the rooms stinking and in disarray. The idyllic countryside of the hobbits has been marred by exploitation the old watermill replaced with a coal-powered one belching smoke, hobbit holes destroyed so that quarries and ugly new houses could be built, fields flattened to park carts in, elder trees wantonly hacked down to their stumps - including, most devastatingly, the “party tree” that featured as the meeting site for Bilbo’s birthday in the series’ opening chapter. In Tolkien’s Return of the King, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive back in the Shire to find their home and its people have been conquered, oppressed, and in some cases literally enslaved by Saruman, his lackey Wormtongue, and a small group of local humans. OK, OK, what is the Scouring of the Shire? And without the Scouring, the movies are fundamentally not the same story as The Lord of the Rings novel. They still captivate audiences, spreading Tolkien’s legacy farther than it ever could have gone from the books alone. The Lord of the Rings movies still work, without the Scouring. The Return of the King already has four or five different endings, why on Middle-earth would you want another one? And it’s true that it would take an enormous restructuring of Jackson’s Return of the King - and probably The Two Towers as well - to fit the Scouring into the film trilogy.
#LORD OF RINGS RETURN OF KING MOVIE#
It’s essentially another adventure into itself, a repetition in micro of the last several hundred pages we spent reading.Īnd speaking from experience, when you advocate for its inclusion to a movie viewer, you sound like you have fully lost your mind. It complicates the themes of The Lord of the Rings, interrupting the flow of the happy homecoming we feel our heroes deserve. And while fans will argue Tom Bombadil should be included because he’s fun, even if he doesn’t really have an impact on the story, the Scouring of the Shire is the opposite. This is Polygon's Year of the Ring.įilling two entire chapters of The Return of the King, the Scouring of the Shire is one of the largest omissions Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh made from J.R.R. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.
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