Hollywood producers against the arrangement of hobby holes in the UK

Ian and Ed Lanjil, a UK couple engaged in outdoor recreation, organized a campaign on the famous Kickstarter crowdfunding resource to raise money for a new kind of weekend cottage. But instead of an influx of people willing to spend time in an unusual setting, entrepreneurs experienced the full force of the legal wrath of lawyers from Warner Bros. and the Tolkien Estate .

The fact is that the Lanjils involved in luxury campgrounds (which they call “glamping”, glamorous camping) decided to please their potential customers with the opportunity to stay in the house, at the same time reminiscent of an old Anglo-Saxon pit house (in fact, a dugout ) and ... hobbit hole! After all, J.R.R. Tolkien did not invent his universe of Middle-earth from scratch - the comfortable life and the life of the hobbits just resemble the old Anglo-Saxon way of life.
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The remains of these dugouts are often found in the UK. Although, if earlier it was believed that most people lived in such houses, now researchers tend to think that they mainly played the role of storage facilities and other non-residential premises.



In the video for funny music, stylized as the Middle Ages, Jan Langill and history consultant Alan Baxter show pastoral views and talk about how new buildings for luxury glamorous camping will take visitors to the unhurried authentic medieval. Of course, with the exception of all modern amenities.

But for a short time the music (which the businessmen borrowed from P. Jackson's films) played, and after the dissemination of information about the marching company, she was attacked by lawyers owning all the rights to Tolkin’s works. It is not surprising - after all, Langyles freely used names like “hobbit hole”, “hobbiton” and other references to the work of the Professor.

As a result, Kickstarter management decided to remove the campaign from the site before the end of the proceedings. But entrepreneurs rather quickly met legalists. They just had to remove all references to the Hobbits and Middle-earth from the commercials, the campaign and from their site. Now the dwellings will be called poddit hole, and the whole campsite will be called Podditon, and it will be located in the place “Center-Earth”.



The campaign contains prizes from £ 2 to £ 1000. Donors up to £ 80 will receive thanks and T-shirts, and more generous ones will have the right to spend one or several nights in a new campsite, which is due to appear in Suffolk County this October.

The campaign is back on Kickstarter, today it’s 10 days left. But her problems did not end there. Representatives of copyright owners were unhappy with the renaming, and require other names instead of “poddit” and “center-earth”, which should not rhyme with “hobbit” and generally overlap with Tolkien’s work. Lanjil insist that they are already quite strongly bent under the requirements of lawyers, and their further requirements are not reasonable.



This, of course, is not the first case of copyright problems associated with the work of the Professor . In 2011-2012, Hollywood owners of rights to the writer's works turned against small businessmen all over the UK, where pubs and other public institutions are abundant, with the word “Hobbit” in their names. However, some places have been wearing them for decades. In addition, the researchers note that the word and being “hobbit” was found in local folklore before Tolkien first used it in his works in 1937.

By the way, also in October of this year, a new work by Tolkien , which was found among his manuscripts, will appear on the sites, and has never been published before. It will be released on October 27 under the title “The Story of Kullervo”, edited by Tolkien’s researcher of Verlin Flieger.