From The Guardian: Campaign to buy JRR Tolkien‘s house backed by Lord of the Rings actors… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

A quest to save the home of JRR Tolkien has begun, with Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins – or at least their earthly counterparts – joining the bid to turn the house where he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings into a museum.

Tolkien and his family moved into 20 Northmoor Road in Oxford in 1930, and lived there for 17 years while he was professor of Anglo-Saxon at the university. It was there he wrote The Hobbit, a novel that began as a bedtime story for his children, and followed it up with The Lord of the Rings.

Author Julia Golding has launched Project Northmoor, a charity that has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $6,000,000 to buy the house and turn it into a literary centre before it is put on the market. The project has been backed by actors including Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien’s books, Martin Freeman, who plays Bilbo Baggins, and John Rhys-Davies, who plays Gimli.

The seven-bedroom house, which has a large garden, would be renovated to show what it would have been like when Tolkien lived there, with plans to run a series of retreats and cultural events in the building and online. The house, which is Grade II-listed, does not belong to the Tolkien estate – the author moved out in 1947 – and the estate is not involved with Project Northmoor.

“Unbelievably, considering his importance, there is no centre devoted to Tolkien anywhere in the world,” said Rhys-Davies. “The vision is to make Tolkien’s house into a literary hub that will inspire new generations of writers, artists and film-makers for many years to come.”

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