THE SHIRE - THE HOBBITON MAP

© www.lotrscenerybuilder.org 2010

"I gave a little speech to the design crew very early on […].
I said: 'Look, we've been given the job of making The Lord of the Rings
but, from this point on, I want us to think that The Lord of the Rings is real,
that it was actually history that these events happened.
And, more than that, I want us to imagine that we've been lucky enough
to be able to go on location and shoot our movie
where the real events happened […].
Hobbiton still exists, it's overgrown with weeds, and it has been run down
and neglected for the last three of four hundred years,
but we gonna go back in there and clean it up.'"
(Peter Jackson in the FOTR Appendices, Part One: 'From Book to Vision')

I. There and Back Again

Two years ago, when we were working on our miniatures of the Green Dragon and Sandyman's Mill, we did a bit of research into the real Hobbiton set in New Zealand. With the aid of a satellite we were able to locate the exact spot where Peter Jackson had built his Hobbit village in 1999: near a little lake about five miles to the south-west of the farming town of Matamata, just north of Buckland Road, on the North Island. We spent a happy afternoon drawing a map of the area which had to help us with the correct arrangement of the Bywater buildings. For fun, we also added the layout of the village itself which was still perfectly 'readable' from the tracks on the ground.

Now, with the long anticipated 'Hobbit' movies in production at last, the Shire village is being reconstructed on the same spot - and pretty much in the same format as it was eleven years ago. Photographs of the resurrected village, posted regularly on theonering.net, have rekindled our interest in the topographic layout of the Matamata movie set. Undoubtedly the upcoming movies will provide us with an even better understanding of lock, stock and barrel in the Shire village than the LOTR movies did. But some of what once was, might get lost. That's why we made this Map of Hobbiton: to create a Mathom-house for all Hobbiton-related facts, assumptions, presumptions, riddles and guesses that we have collected and cherished for years. Lest we forget when the Clouds Burst… at the end of 2012.


Note on Hobbiton Records

Information about the Matamata Movie set was mainly found on the Internet. We also used a few books for background information:

Peter Jackson - A Film-Maker's Journey, by Brian Sibley;
There And Back Again - An Actor's Tale, by Sean Astin (with Joe Layden);
J.R.R. Tolkien - The books, the films, the whole cultural phenomenon,
by Jeremy Mark Robinson;
The Lord of the Films, by J.W. Brown.

Many pictures of hobbit holes were found in the next documentaries:

From Book to Vision: Designing Middle-earth (The FOTR Appendices Pt. 1);
Welcome to Middle-earth: Houghton Mifflin In-store Special;
Quest for the Ring: FOX TV special;
A Passage to Middle-earth: SCI-FI Channel Special;
lordoftherings.net Featurettes:
- Finding Hobbiton
- Hobbiton Comes Alive

The itineraries and the Gamgee/Proudfoot hypothesis are entirely ours; if the official film location guides tell you a different story, you'd better believe them.


Amor Terram Mediam fecit