Err this is going back a long way in the thread... but I am a Brit who has travelled faily widely and I think that New Zealand was a great choice for MiddleEarth.... it has the geography and parts are very English... but an England of an earlier age... I wasn't alive in the fifties but it is how you imagine it..... a much safer, friendlier place... I mean I know the midlands and Oxford well through family links and education and teh countryside is the shire... and I live near "Mirkwood" but NZ has it all ........
BTW if we are showing off about ancestors ...Shakespeare is my manyx great-uncle by marriage
lol