When Middle-earth calls for help, Gandalf answers. Like the character he portrayed on the big screen in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sir Ian McKellen answered the call when the occasion arose to save British author J.R.R. Tolkien’s house. McKellen and many other actors from LOTR and The Hobbit trilogy — because Gandalf never walks alone — recently joined Project Northmoor, an initiative to buy 20 Northmoor Road in Oxford, United Kingdom, and transform it into a center devoted to Tolkien studies. The house is the same one Tolkien lived in from 1930–47.
Project Northmoor is currently kicking off a crowd-funded campaign to purchase the house. Besides McKellen, the project is endorsed by John Rhys-Davies, Martin Freeman, singer Annie Lennox, and many other actors and scholars.
You can watch the full video here below.
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The importance of that house is also dictated by the fact that the British author wrote The Hobbit and most of The Lord of the Rings while living there. Project Northmoor hopes to raise £4.5 million, which is roughly $6 million. The collected money will go to buying the house and making some necessary renovations, including restoring the garden “to a beauty of which the inventor of Sam Gamgee would be proud.”
The Project Northmoor campaign will start on Dec. 2.
Are you going to join the fundraising? Would you like to see Tolkien’s house as a literary center? Let us know in the comments section below.
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