When the Search for Enchantment Is Bent: "The Scouring of the Shire"

Abstract

When the Search for Enchantment Is Bent:"The Scouring of the Shire" John Rosegrant (bio) The Scouring of the Shire" confronts the reader of The Lord of the Rings with an abrupt change in content and style, from evoking enchantment as Tolkien conceived of it in "On Fairy-stories" to the brutal realism of totalitarianism. On one level this loss of enchantment is an extension of a central theme of the book—the effort to maintain enchantment in the face of disenchantment. But I shall argue that Tolkien's depiction of realistic totalitarianism warns us of another vicissitude of the search for enchantment: that it can lead to a state of mind that is like a perverse caricature of the enchantment Tolkien creates in the rest of the book. This warning is accomplished not by showing characters experiencing this vicissitude, but by creating for the reader an enchanting path that winds to an authoritarian state that shares some features of enchantment. Tolkien did not precisely define what he meant by enchantment. After describing "Faërian drama" in "On Fairy-stories" he wrote, "We need a word for this elvish craft." He rejected "magic" because magic "is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills." Instead, "the more potent and specially elvish craft I will, for lack of a less debatable word, call Enchantment" (OFS 63–64). But this is vague, because as the editors of the expanded edition point out, "no definition of what the faërian version [of drama] consists of is given" (OFS 112). Dictionary definitions of enchantment are not very helpful either; the editors give "'to cast under a spell, to bewitch'" (OFS 112), but this does not capture the breadth and depth of Tolkien's project, and could encompass what Tolkien names magic as well as enchantment. I think Tolkien comes closest to limning what he means by the concept in a description of Faërie as a whole, "The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords" (OFS 27). To further define this "debatable" word as it applies to Tolkien's oeuvre, it is important to put him in conversation with Max Weber's concept of the disenchantment of the world. Weber stated that in traditional society "the world remain[s] a great enchanted garden" [End Page 171] (Sociology 270) imbued with meaning and with mysterious spiritual powers. The process of rationalization that defines modernity, on the other hand, "means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world" (Weber, "Science" 12–13). Curry has argued that Tolkien provides a re-enchantment of the world; in light of the ongoing losses of enchantment in The Lord of the Rings, pointed out among others by Senior, Hannon, and Parker, I have proposed that Tolkien's work is better understood not as providing re-enchantment but as depicting enchantment and disenchantment in a dialogue wherein each undoes the other, with neither reaching primacy. "Tolkien reinstates enchantment to create feelings of wonder and relatedness, but simultaneously alerts the reader that this enchantment is at risk for loss. Tolkien never establishes that either enchantment or loss is 'victorious,' instead leaving them in a conversation that maintains this fundamental uncertainty" (Rosegrant 15; emphasis in original). I think that at the intersection of Tolkien's dialogue between enchantment and loss and Weber's concepts of enchantment and disenchantment we can recognize the essential aspects of enchantment as being a sense of wonder, meaningfulness, and connection to an Other. What Tolkien shows playing out in his dialogue between enchantment and loss is the basic psychological need in modernity to find ways to experience enchantment in the face of disenchantment, lest one dwell in the bleak iron cage Weber described. In what follows I will discuss how...