During the recent Blog Tour, the question of ‘influences on story’, particularly in relation to world building, came up a few times. And there is at least one interview still ‘out there’ (ie not published yet) where I specifically get asked about living in the country that has, as  result of the Sir Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings (and now The Hobbit) become synonymous with Middle Earth.

For any fan of epic fantasy, Tolkien’s Middle Earth has to be one of the definitive fantastic worlds. As a fan of epic fantasy growing up in New Zealand though, I always conceived Middle Earth, especially the Shire, but also regions such as Rohan, as very much rural England. A far cry from New Zealand’s alpine South Island and a North Island that ranges from the arid central desert to the semi-tropical north—or so I thought until The Lord of the Rings (LoTR) films were made here.

Given that New Zealand is a fairly small country, there are now very few parts of the country that cannot lay a claim to being part “Middle Earth,” from Hobbiton to the Black Gates of Mordor.

And recently, a friend passing through town said (something like):  “You know that part in Heir, where Malian and Kalan cross the river into Jaransor and there’s rose briars and thorn scrub on the hillside, and thyme growing wild beneath their horses hooves? I couldn’t help thinking, ‘that does seem a lot like Central Otago.’”

And, of course, it is—although not the part that filmgoers will immediately recognize as Rohan from the early sequences in The Two Towers (LoTR2). But fairly close by, all the same. “So”—my friend then demanded—“does this mean that all of the Jaransor landscape is pretty much Central Otago?”

To which I had, reluctantly, to say “no.” There were several other real-world landscapes that influenced my concept of Jaransor. For example:

“She walked on alone to the edge of the trees, staring out over wild terrain to the west and the steep, bush-clad heights bathed in evening amber, and was struck again by the immensity of the land, and a sky that held nothing except the falcon’s hovering speck.”

In this scene, what Malian sees is very close to the view from the heights of Australia’s Great Dividing Range—a very long way from both both Central Otago and Rohan, in Middle Earth. But all world building in my fantasy is an amalgam: of real places that I have seen; of places I have not seen but imagine from written descriptions, still photos, and film; as well as places from history that I can only visualize as they may once have been.

Sometimes vision may be inspired by an account, but more often it is simply by the idea of what a place was or might have been.

Jaransor by PJ Fitzpatrick

Ultimately there is the purely fantastic—the leap of imagination that can springboard from the wild thyme underfoot of Central Otago, to vistas seen from the Great Dividing Range, to ruined towers which have shadows that exist out of time, in a chain of hills that may themselves be sentient and drive the unwary mad…

I suspect that Tolkien’s Middle Earth evolved from a similar amalgam of the real through to the purely imaginary. But it is undoubtedly very special, as a writer of fantasy fiction—and epic fantasy, what’s more, in the case of The Wall of Night series—to live and write within the landscapes in which the film versions of The Lord of the Rings were so vividly imagined.