Hobbiton, Matamata, North Island, New Zealand

August 2015

Hobbiton, a tour-able film set for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, is a bizarrely fascinating place. It is warming like an English cottage while reminiscent of Disneyland in its imagination. It feels completely authentic while you equally accept its fantasy context.

The set of Hobbiton is in the middle of the Alexander family farm, an expansive working sheep and cattle farm just outside of Matamata and centrally located in New Zealand's north island. As you could imagine from its depiction in the films, the farm is on mostly slow-rolling green hills with the occasional tree or patch of bush strewn here and there amidst a pond and few small creeks. The specific site of Hobbiton is a relatively small portion of the overall farm. A scout for the LotR found it in 1998 and it was built under the agreement that any structures would be temporary and the land returned to its original state. As fate would have it, a rain storm delayed the demolishing of the set and allowed the Alexander family time to rethink the removal of what could otherwise be a rather lucrative tourist destination. So after negotiations made and contracts rewritten, some key elements from the film set remained, earth work that had been done was decided not to be undone, and the beginnings of one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country took shape.

From my understanding, Hobbition as a tourist spot began as little more than a few white doors in place of the former ones, nestled into the remaining hobbit hole mounds. It was in this state that I had heard about Hobbiton when we first came to New Zealand in 2009 and consequently the reason I didn't have a huge desire to go. Now, however, Hobbiton has been completely rebuilt to look exactly like it was portrayed in the films. This is where it becomes bizarre. The temporal nature of the film set was all that existed when it was first built. After all, its sole purpose was to simply be a film set. Plywood, polystyrene, and untreated lumber made up the sleepy little town that appeared to exist, unbeknownst to human folk, for hundreds of years. But after Peter Jackson set out to make the three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, it was to be rebuilt once more. This time, however, the growing interest of the site for tourism reasons led to its rebuilding with permanent intentions. Permits were acquired for fifty-year structures, materials were chosen with this in mind, and, despite its inherent temporality, a film set was built to last. Resurrected in part as a set, but much more for others to come and live out their fan fantasies, Hobbiton lies in a strange state of playing pretend and living reality. 

What’s the joy of this Disneyland down under, where faux bricks make chimneys pop up from every hill crest and perfectly round doors lead to little more than closet space behind them? It's Hobbiton! And even if the lichen on the fence posts are wood chips painted green, my childlike self that has forever loved Tolkien's stories and their film adaptations was jumping up and down and my ear-to-elf-like-ear smile was hard to suppress. The strangeness aside of a film set rebuilt to be shot for twelve days and then remain for fifty years, there was something magical about walking along small pathways lined with yellow, red, and blue doors. We slowly made our way to the top of the highest hill and that perfectly round, green door under an oak tree. Bag End was for me the best, but each hobbit hole had its own identity and carried layers of complexity as fishing gear sat outside one, bee keeping boxes and honey outside another, all housing hobbits with clear professions as the little village came to life with each step. 

Though not typically a huge fan of tours, this one didn't seem so bad, and despite rolling my eyes a few times at people's comments, I quickly found myself distracted again by little details here and there. The tour ended in the Green Dragon—the local watering hole for all the hobbits. Though the beer wasn't the best, Marielle and I couldn't help but wish our own neighborhood pub could be just like this one. It was the end to what started out as a stormy day but instead brought with it parting skies, white cumulus clouds, and warming sun, making our Hobbiton adventure a lasting highlight amongst a growing reel.