What exactly are we to make of an authentic prop replica? I suppose it can be seen as an attempt to produce a real version of a fake of a fake. The question popped into my mind as I was wandering around the gift shop at Hobbiton, the site of the set for The Shire from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film sequences. We visited the place near Matamata this afternoon and had a rather jolly time involving lots of photo opportunities.
The whole place is a fake, in a sense, being the real version of a fiction of a fiction, but it's so lovingly done that it seems inappropriate to be overly critical of the enterprise. The power, or powers, of the various imaginations at work is, or are, enough to convince the happy wanderer through the set that he or she has entered a better world for a couple of hours. It's a version of an England that never was, except in Tolkien's entirely English imagination.
Gazing at the beautifully realized version of Bilbo's hobbit hole I lost myself in a vivid memory of Miss Lowther, my wonderful primary school teacher, reading to us the opening of The Hobbit and little Brian wishing he had a house in a hillside to make merry in. I remember she showed us the illustration as originally drawn by Tolkien and in that moment I was in no fewer than three places: the New Zealand version of Hobbiton, a classroom at St John Fisher's in Haughton Green, and Bag-End itself. All versions of paradise. None of them quite real.
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