When thinking of the Lord of the Rings, most fans think of The Shire first and foremost. The Shire, home to the four main hobbits Sam, Merry, Pippin and Frodo, and of course his uncle Bilbo before him, is a land of green pastures and rural bliss, where a simple life is valued above all else. The hobbits live in peace, undisturbed and almost entirely forgotten by the world outside their borders until the one ring comes into the possession of Frodo and the ring-wraiths are sent to retrieve it. Once the prologue has taken place in Peter Jackson’s films, The Shire is the next big thing that appears on screen, with the wizard riding through the narrow passageway with Frodo by his side on their cart full of Gandalf's famous fireworks. But this scene, and in fact, all of Hobbiton itself almost didn’t exist within the trilogy.
As a director who both knew the Lord of the Rings books inside out, having read them since he was a teenager, and as a native who loved the country of New Zealand, Peter Jackson had a very specific brief in his mind of what Hobbiton needed to look like. It had 3 key elements it needed to meet in order to qualify for the filming location: a hill overlooking the valley below where they could build Bag End (Bilbo’s home), a lake where the Mill and the Green Dragon could sit, and a large tree under which Bilbo could host his 111th birthday party, where he slips on the ring and disappears to the shock of everyone. And one of the only locations that they managed to find whilst scouting out the area was the Alexander Farm.
The Alexander farm is still used as a working farm nowadays but is more famously known as being the home of the Hobbiton Movie Set Tours. That is because the set was first built (temporarily) before the filming began for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and then was solidified and made more permanent before the filing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 2010. Peter Jackson first approached the Alexanders about using their farm for the films back in 1998, at which point Russel Alexander gladly agreed. But the story very easily could have turned out completely differently. Around 3 weeks prior to the film crew approaching the owners of the land, the Alexanders had organized and paid for someone to chop the tree down as it was the largest tree on their land, and it was taking up space from their sheep grazing paddocks.
Luckily for the Alexanders, the person who had been organized to chop down the tree was unavailable for the next couple of weeks and said that he would return with the proper tools for the job later that month. In the meantime, Peter Jackson approached, and thus Hobbiton was given its iconic location. Of course, if the tree had been chopped down, the farm would have no longer met Peter Jackson’s vision for the 3 things required to build The Shire.
In this case, the filming crew would have had a huge dilemma, where they would have had to have chosen a location that wasn’t right, and tried to artificially create the large-scale tree or the lake below the hill, or they would have had to have digitally created the entire set over at Weta Digital, like they did with other iconic scenes in the movie, like the approaching of Aragorn and the hobbits to the ruins of Weathertop. However, Weta Digital was still building momentum at the time, and it would have been incredibly difficult to build a set on as grand a scale as Hobbiton, and populate it with live actors.
In this way, their only other choice would have been to have made a scale model or miniature, so that they could do wide-angled shots of the location, but not had the close-up filming of hobbit life which so enriches the movies, or to have cut out Hobbiton from the films altogether, and have started the story with the hobbits already on the road to meeting Aragorn at the Prancing Pony in Bree. They might have been able to film some of the inside of the hobbit holes in sets in the studio’s in Wellington, and just not shot the outsides of the hobbit holes with their icon round doors, which is one of the best sets of the whole trilogy.
Either way, they would have lost one of the most magical and awe-inspiring landscapes in the trilogy, and the Hobbiton Movie Set Tours also never would have happened, which would have meant that thousands of fans would have missed the chance to see this beautiful place in the real world. It turned out to be a stroke of luck that the tree-cutter didn’t cut down the Alexander’s tree after all.
