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Hobbit poster '100% Northumberland'

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Hobbit poster not-so '100% Pure NZ'

3News NZ

The Northumberland Gazette is reporting the Hobbit might not be as 100% Kiwi as advertised

The Northumberland Gazette is reporting the Hobbit might not be as 100% Kiwi as advertised

The film industry's version of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth is being touted as "100% Pure New Zealand" but there is also a slice of English countryside.

The Northumberland Gazette reports a teaser image for The Hobbit shows the wizard Gandalf striding through countryside which is actually local landscape north of Newcastle.

The Hobbit movies have been filmed in New Zealand and Tourism New Zealand is spending the bulk of its $65-million budget piggybacking on the shooting locations, with a "100% Middle Earth, 100% Pure New Zealand" campaign.

However, the English detour did not concern Tourism New Zealand chief executive Kevin Bowler.

It would not detract from the campaign, which was "going from strength to strength", he said in a statement.

"Fans and travellers across the world know that New Zealand is home of Middle Earth."

That's despite Tolkien, an English scholar, basing his Hobbit book and the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Norse, Anglo Saxon and German mythology.

Meanwhile, The Hobbit's director Sir Peter Jackson has announced that as part of Tolkien Week, the 75th anniversary of the book's publication, that a new Hobbit trailer will be released on Wednesday.

The Hobbit, which is being released in three parts, has been shot in 3D and at 48 frames a second, twice the speed that has been the standard since the 1920s.

The first movie will have its world premiere in Wellington in late November.

NZN

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17/09/2012 10:08:04 p.m.

Brian Boru wrote:

The only way that New Zealand can really claim to be Middle-earth is through the different scholars its universities have produced that have added to the scholarship in Old Norse, Anglo Saxon and Germanic mythology that made up the programme that Tolkien taught at Oxford University from where he said that his idea of Middle-earth came from. The best and the most important connection he had with any NZer in regards to this was his tutor Kenneth Sisam who was born in Opotoki NZ in 1887, and graduated from Auckland University and went on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1910. Sisam first taught Tolkien in 1913 and Tolkien said in 1970 that he owed Sisam a big debt for teaching him to read the texts that made up the mythology, which helped him develop his ideas for his legendarium. Sisam also went up against Tolkien for the professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University in 1925 and because all the voting came out equal between them across the faculty the Vice Chancellor of Oxford had to cast his vote to break the deadlock, which went in Tolkien's favour. I note that neither the film or tourist industry has picked up on any of this.