Tolkien house on the market for €2.25m

LORD OF THE RINGS fans are being offered the chance to buy their own corner of Middle Earth, as long as they have €2.25 million to spare.

The house in a leafy corner of North Oxford, where author JRR Tolkien is believed to have written The Hobbit and begun the Lord of The Rings, is to go on the market this week.

The house in Northmoor Road was Tolkien’s family home for 17 years during his time as a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford University.

Although the six bedroom property, complete with blue plaque, is a far cry from the Hobbit’s hole in the ground, the buyer will be able to read the books in a drawing room which was once the author’s own study.

When the author first moved to the street he lived in number 22, but after Basil Blackwell, a member of the famous Oxford publishing family, moved out of number 20 in 1930 Tolkien acquired the lease, living there until 1947. It was then taken over by an academic who died recently.

The house’s long quarry-tiled corridor has been seen by some as the inspiration for the dwarves in the opening chapter of The Hobbit who sing of cracking plates and rolling items down the hall.

And the house was even thought by some children to be home of Father Christmas.

Each advent Tolkien’s own children would write to Father Christmas receiving detailed replies penned by the author.

The replies were later collected together and published prompting a trickle of letters to Father Christmas at 20 Northmoor Road.