New Zealand as Middle Earth

This is a very belated entry to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Mythic Place.

I doubt whether J.R.R. Tolkien ever visited New Zealand but Peter Jackson has ensured that it is now on the global mythic map of the 21st century. It is said that Tolkien was disappointed that England had no native myths, so he set about writing one—about an England that had long disappeared first into Enclosures and then into the Industrial Revolution. (The Arthurian legends are all of French origin.) The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion read like the Icelandic sagas that were the professor’s day job.

Claude Lvi-Strauss insists that myths are a language because they only exist in language; that they must be retold. Jackson’s retelling must count, in part because of the introduction of this landscape into the contemporary consciousness.

A quick rereading of parts of Tolkien has struck me in its almost obsessive avoidance of the latinate. Use an Anglo-Saxon word where there is one, he seems to say. Perhaps the latinate in English is less able to evoke myth than the language of Beowulf.

I wonder whether Maori New Zealand is as excited about the success of the films as everyone else seems to be. Ideas, anyone?