ABSTRACT
The Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics presented two distinctive images of industry and cultural heritage in Britain. The first represented the Industrial Revolution. This chapter explores messages of transformation in fantasy fiction. This is a medieval fantasy world of knights and battles. It could be Europe with some fictionalised geography. Certainly the interplay between warring factions is partly based on real conflicts such as the Wars of the Roses. The conventional view of media and tourism is that readers and viewers are inspired to travel to places represented in the media they have consumed. The creative industries of film and literature then beget spin-off tourism operations. In the cases considered here, this leads to the Hobbiton attraction in New Zealand, the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff and the Game of Thrones Tours in Northern Ireland.
