The ultimate guide for Tolkien junkies

By MIKE HOULAHAN

Every morning Ian Brodie looks out of his window at Middle-earth.

The locals generally refer to it as Skippers Canyon, a scenic spot off the road to Coronet Peak in the Southern Alps, but Brodie knows it as where film director Peter Jackson recreated the Ford Of Bruinen for The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Brodie has written The Lord Of The Rings Location Guidebook, so Rings junkies can visit the ford, the River Anduin, the Misty Mountains, the Shire, Mordor and the other landscapes transformed by Jackson from the prosaic Hutt River, Wanaka, Matamata and Whakapapa to the fantastic places imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Released just before the New Zealand premiere of the second film The Two Towers, the guidebook has been flying off the shelves.

It's the number one-selling New Zealand book and is into its third reprint in just three weeks of release. Its publisher, HarperCollins, reports the book is doing a roaring trade with backpacking tourists, and tour companies are buying it in lots of 100.

Brodie is the curator of the Wanaka-based New Zealand Fighter Pilots' Museum, and a self-confessed Lord Of The Rings nut. The surrounding Otago landscape was used extensively by Jackson - especially in The Two Towers - and while the Fellowship of the Ring was in post-production it occurred to Brodie that some of New Zealand's most scenic countryside would be seen on the big screen and people would want to find it afterwards.

"I sat on the idea for a while, and contacted New Line after the movie was released," Brodie says. "They said to contact HarperCollins in London. I made up a dummy page, fired it across in January, and a couple of weeks later a letter came back saying, 'Great idea, HarperCollins New Zealand should publish it'. The approvals came through from New Line at end of January, and I was away."

What Brodie didn't realise was quite how overwhelming a task he was taking on, and how it would grow to take over his life once the book was released.

He had to travel to the United States to examine still photographs for the book, and he is about to embark on a few more international trips as Tourism New Zealand are picking up Brodie, his guide and the Rings phenomenon as part of a push to entice more fantasy-inspired visitors.

"It's been an amazing nine months," Brodie says. "I approached the book as a fan and completed it as a fan. I never had any thought other than to do it as a fun project. What's happened next has been just overwhelming - for example, I'm in Germany next March for a Tourism NZ dinner - and it's just something I did because I thought it would be fun."

Brodie says he wanted his book to reach people on different levels, from Lord Of The Rings enthusiasts like himself, to people who had seen the movie and wanted to add something extra to the experience, to people who might not even have seen the movie but wanted to see the countryside.

So, as well as explaining each location's Rings significance, Brodie offers something of its history and the other attractions in the area. For Rings buffs, there are introductions by Jackson and conceptual artist Alan Lee, plus recollections and anecdotes from cast and crew.

"It was an honour to get Peter to write the introduction," Brodie says.

"I think it's probably the first book introduction he's done, and he wouldn't do it until he'd seen the final manuscript laid out. That arrived to him in Britain in September while he was working 18-hour days, seven days a week, getting the score of the second movie completed. He took the time and did the foreword, and I was really pleased to get that.

"I met Peter once, at an airshow in Blenheim in April last year. His aeroplane [Jackson owns a replica of World War I fighter the Sopwith Camel] was flying and I thought, 'This poor guy is up to his neck in LOTR, I'm not going to tell him I'm a fan', so we talked about aeroplanes.

"On the last day I just had to tell him I was a fan. A couple of weeks beforehand I'd spent $800 on e-Bay buying one of the crew vests. I told him and he just laughed. Two weeks later another one turned up in the mail."

- NZPA

Herald feature: Lord of the Rings