There is also the case of Livreria Lello, in Porto, Portugal, who spent years claiming JK Rowling visited it and got inspired for Hogwarts (they seem to have a similar staircase). They even held a Harry Potter event with signed books (most of them fake, probably the bookshop didnt know it, but they didnt do their dilligence).
Fortunatelly, Rowling denied knowing that place at all on Twitter [1], but as far as I know, the Livreria keeps telling its visitor about Rowling connection.
The same happens in Edinburgh (JKR city for the last 30 years), where if you do a tour, the guide will try to make a Harry Potter connection on every corner. Which is not completely true.
[1] https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1263377779338481665
Hmmm. Not heard this one. That said, I've read quite a lot of Tolkien biographic material, and I'm not aware that he ever visited southern Poland before writing the Lord of the Rings. He wasn't particularly well travelled before he became famous, and as far as I know he had only visited South Africa (where he was born and left as a very young child), Switzerland (walking holiday) and France (WW1) before the bulk of the LOTR writing occurred. After 1939 a trip to Wieliczka would have involved him entering a WW2 war zone or crossing the Iron Curtain, something I'm certain he didn't do before LOTR was published in 1955.
Again, I don't think so. I just re-read the relevant chapter in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien. The 1911 Switzerland trip (when he was aged 19) was just that; and the group of 12 returned to England as soon as the walking was done.
But there is AFAIK no record of JRRT himself visiting there and Poland would be a very untypical vacation destination of a British guy in the interwar period.
14 years later, the graphics are a bit dated, but still very pretty. Moria remains my all time favorite zone in an MMORPG. The atmosphere, the scale ... its just _is_ Moria.
If you're a Tolkien fan, I highly recommend at least checking out some of the youtube videos - or even better, give the game a try (it has a free to play option).
If this is accurate or not is another question, but a google of "Tolkien Drakensberg" certainly shows that it is widely known.
Tolkien returned to England with his mother aged 3 and never went back. Tolkien himself claimed "to have few memories of South Africa, except for a vivid encounter with a large spider, an experience he put to good use later in his writing. The grave of his father, Arthur Tolkien, is still identifiable in Bloemfontein’s President Brand Cemetery" [0] So probably not a big influence, if any.
[0] https://www.southafrica.net/gl/en/travel/article/jrr-tolkien...
Incidentally, I have lived in two of the cities that Tolkien did: Leeds and Bournemouth. As a post grad at Leeds University, the small office (just east of the current Student Union building) that I shared for a while had reputedly been used by Tolkien long before I was born. We joked that it was the inspiration for the damp, dark, twisty caves of the goblins in the Hobbit.
[Edit - just checked - Tolkien explicitly references his Swiss walking tour as an inspiration for parts of the Misty Mountains]
[0] https://www.headingleyleeds.com/parks-hollies
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien#Youth