and a journey home for the Shire quest, was "foreseen from the outset". Another critic, Nicholas Birns, notes approvingly David Waito's argument that the chapter is as important morally as the Fellowship's main quest to destroy the One Ring, "but applies [the morals] to daily life". Birns argues that the chapter has an important formal role in the overall composition of The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien had stated. The Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher writes that Frodo, having thrown aside his weapons and armour on Mount Doom, chooses to fight "only on the moral plane" in the Shire. Reversed quests The Tolkien scholar Richard C. West writes that the story of The Lord of the Rings is basically simple: the hobbit Frodo Baggins's quest is to take the Dark Lord Sauron's Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. He calls the quest "primary", along with the war against Sauron. The critic David M. Miller agrees that the quest is the "most important narrative device" in the book, but adds that it is reversed from the conventional structure: the hero is not seeking a treasure, but is hoping to destroy one. He notes that from Sauron's point of view, the tale is indeed a quest, and his evil Black Riders replace the traditional "errant knights seeking the holy of holies", while the Fellowship keeping the Ring from him cannot use it: thus there are multiple reversals. Other authors such as Jared Lobdell and Lori M. Campbell agree that it is a "reverse quest" or "inverted quest"; Campbell wrote that "the mission is to destroy rather than to find something, what [Michael N.] Stanton calls an 'inverted quest' in which 'Evil struggles to gain power; Good to relinquish it'". The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey concurs that it is "an anti-quest", a story of renunciation. He writes that Tolkien had lived through two world wars, the "routine bombardment" of civilians, the use of famine for political gain, concentration camps and genocide, and the development and use of chemical and nuclear weapons. Shippey states that the book raises the question of whether, if the ability of humans to produce that kind of evil could somehow be destroyed, even at the cost of sacrificing something, this would be worth doing. Mason Harris, in Mythlore, contrasts Frodo's "renunciatory" quest with Bilbo's. In his view, The Hobbit represents Tolkien's ideal journey as Bilbo's "curiosity overcomes his