Tolkien gesture
The Hobbit Boutique Hotel is one of surprisingly few links to the British author to be found in his South African place of birth, writes David Smith
Above the laminated breakfast menus in a guest house on President Steyn Avenue, Bloemfontein, South Africa, is an unexpected inscription: "John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was born on this site on 3 January 1892," reads an iron plaque engraved in English and Afrikaans.
The statement is, in fact, not quite true: Tolkien was born a few streets away, in a house that would be lost to a flood in the 1920s. Some remnants of that building, along with the plaque, are now incorporated in the structure of the Hobbit Boutique Hotel - one of South Africa's last visible links with the author, who left for Britain at the age of three.
Yet The Hobbit's much-hyped release is unlikely to bring legions of fans to South Africa. The country does little to promote its claim on Bilbo Baggins, while the Bloemfontein tourism website omits its most famous son from a list of local attractions.
Even the four-star Hobbit Boutique Hotel is coy. Although each of the 12 rooms draws on Tolkien's universe, don't expect Gandalf and Gollum salt and pepper shakers. The chandelier, crockery, fireplaces with bellows, framed illustrations of butterflies and flowers, pendulum clocks, wood cabinets and a mantelpiece decorated with golden angels are quaint but not necessarily Middle-earth.
"I'd almost say we're borderline Elizabethan," says the hotel's manager, Obakeng Marintlhwane.