COVID-19 and the Scouring of the Shire
Blazing Reader,
The second-to-last chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings — "The Scouring of the Shire" — never made it into Peter Jackson's epic movie adaptation.
A true tragedy, because it served as such a satisfying addendum to the novel.
Despite being set in a time long before viruses and vaccines and virtue-signalling, Tolkien somehow captured the exact flavour of oppression that we endured under the COVID-19 mandates... and even showed us how to resist it.
In the following two-minute audiobook excerpt from chapter 94 of my novel Much Ado About Corona, AJ explains what I mean. You can watch it now on...
And for the love of Middle Earth, please share it with family, friends and anybody you know who (like me) has read The Hobbit more than five times.
John C.A. Manley
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.
