ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of Hobbiton – the village featured in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies – located in the community of Matamata, Aotearoa New Zealand. Hobbiton, a screen tourism site offered as both a landscape and an “authentic” relic of film production, is maintained, packaged, and deployed to engage affective responses from those who visit and interact with it. Presenting a longitudinal case study derived from more than 30 participant observations onsite from 2006 to 2019, we engage with Hobbiton’s two iterations. The first was constructed in 1999, started receiving tourists in 2002, and by 2004 was a site of significant visitor interest despite being only partially recognizable. The location was then closed for several weeks in 2010 and reconstructed for the filming of the Hobbit trilogy, this time with the intention that this second iteration would remain as a resplendent, fully interactive simulacrum of the fictional village portrayed in the films, complete with a functional Green Dragon Pub. The guided nature of the tour troubles its immersive character and raises questions about the typology of affective themed space. Additionally, we reflect upon Hobbiton’s possible futures. Tolkien’s own writings on subcreation and world-building – whose prescience underpins modern transmedia storytelling through themed spaces – provides an avenue for imagining what form a place like Hobbiton could assume. Hobbiton’s longevity and trajectory provide a critical case study, and our analysis charts the evolution of a space that is simultaneously film location, landscape, theme park, and museum.
