Day 5 – Hobbiton

Today was great.  Bella Brambleberry reporting.  Our private driver, Camilla, picked us up at the hotel and drove us 2 hours south to Hobbiton.  We got hobbit names – Bella and Marroc Brambleberry.  Our tour time was 12:10, but we arrived quite early so she unsuccessfully tried to get on an earlier tour.  They were all booked up.  So, instead of eating lunch after the tour (around 2:40 – at which point we would have been starving), we ate an “early” lunch.  Worked out great in my mind. 😁

On to the tour…They took us by bus through the Alexander sheep farm to the Hobbit set.  This is basically going to be a photo dump, but I will just talk a little bit about some of the things we learned.  Almost everything was made twice – once scaled to a hobbit and once scaled to Gandalf.  There were tiny hobbit houses for Gandalf to look huge in, and huge hobbit houses for Frodo to look tiny in.  And there was one young man on our tour who had studied cinematography, so our guide told us specifically about the scene with Gandalf and Frodo on the wagon.  They had to make three wagons.  One was tiny with a Shetland pony so Gandalf looked big.  One was large with a Clydesdale so Frodo looked small.  And one was stretched out so Frodo could sit 3 feet behind Gandalf and they could angle the camera so it looked like they were sitting together.

And they really burned down the Green Dragon Inn in the scene where the fairy queen showed Frodo what would happen if he didn’t destroy the ring.  (Most people would have built a tiny version to burn, rather than the full size. 😂)  Then Peter Jackson recruited the big-muscled firefighters to be Orcs. 😄

We got to go inside a hobbit house, but that was just built a couple years ago.  All the houses and inns in the movies were just facades.

After the tour, we got to go to the Green Dragon Inn for an ale.  Great tour!

I'm probably forgetting a lot of cool facts I could share, but enjoy these pics of Hobbiton.





















































(Posted Feb 1 6:22PM)


Comments

  1. PriceFebruary 2, 2025 at 11:36 PM

    That is definitely on my bucket list. Thanks for sharing such great pictures.

    ReplyDelete

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