A real-life hobbit village will soon be nestled in the lush forests of a Swedish island, a whimsical housing scheme billed as the first of its kind — but behind the fantasy gimmick lies a genuine interest for sustainable development.
The hobbits, small characters with hairy feet in novelist JRR Tolkien’s fantasy classics, are a model of environmentally friendly living, British hobbit-house architect Simon Dale said.
“Hobbits portray people living a peaceful life in harmony with nature,” Dale, 35, said during a recent visit to Stockholm.
Photo: AFP
He was in town to plan for the cluster of 30 houses on Muskoe, an island about 40km from the city center amid Stockholm’s picturesque archipelago.
The island’s first hobbit house is scheduled to be ready in the middle of next year, with the village completed within a few years.
At first sight, the huts resemble Bilbo Baggins’ dwellings in Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” Tolkien’s tale begins. “It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.”
In Tolkien’s idyllic agrarian setting, the hobbits live in tune with nature — in stark contrast to the author’s era of mature industrialization.
The Swedish hobbit village will keep the notion of natural materials and soft, round shapes: the windows, doors and walls will all be curved.
Yet the houses will be slightly more up-to-date, built for city-dwellers longing to retreat to nature on weekends and holidays.
An induction hob, beside a wood-burning range, will be the “most high-tech thing integrated,” said Dale, whose design promises airy ceilings up to 3.5m high.
Energy efficiency will be a primary goal, so heating will come from solar power and wood-burning.
Natural building materials from the area will also be used, such as timber, stone, sand, clay and grass.
Dale himself has lived in a hobbit house for the past decade with his wife and two kids.
The family now resides in the West Wales community of Lammas, the first British low-impact eco-village of its kind. Building the earth houses has become a passion, said Dale, who was originally a photographer.
The village is not targeted at fans of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — rather, it is intended to appeal to those who care about the environment and want to live close to nature.
“It’s a transition in lifestyle and values,” said Dale, who bears a faint resemblance to Bilbo as played by Martin Freeman in the new Hobbit film trilogy.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS