A team of architects and structural engineers have launched an ambitious crowd-funding campaign to build a city inspired by the Gondorian fortress Minas Tirith. They hope to raise £1,850,000,000.
The project aims to build a fully-functioning city in the south of England based on the design featured in Peter Jackson’s film The Return of the King. The organisers have calculated that they will need the £1.84 billion to pay for the expected costs of land, labour, and building materials. The terms of the crowd-funding campaign mean that they have to reach their target within 60 days. If successful, they hope to begin construction next year, with a view to completion in 2023.
As of today they have raised just under 0.0013% of their target with only 48 days left.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Minas Tirith was built on the Hill of Guard, adjacent to Mount Mindolluin (the easternmost peak of the White Mountains), which formed the basis for the city’s seven levels.
For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. […] And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the third part of The Lord of the Rings, “Minas Tirith”
“Minas Tirith” by Abe Papakhian
About the Author: Daniel Helen
Daniel is an Officer without Portfolio and Trustee of The Tolkien Society. Elected in 2014, he is mainly responsible for the Society's digital operations, including this website.
