Lord Of The Rings actors encourage Italian man's quest to live as a real world hobbit

A 37-year-old man named Nicolas Gentile has been hard at work, literally trekking across mountains and rivers, as part of his heroic quest to become Italy’s first real-life hobbit and to build his own version of the Shire. Now, perhaps because they’d all like to one day retire there, The Lord Of The Rings’ hobbit actors have lent their support to Gentile’s project on Instagram.

We first learned about Il Hobbit from a Guardian article published last week, which described (and provided excellent photos showing) Gentile’s efforts to prove his immense devotion to Tolkien’s fantasy world by dressing up as a hobbit and building his own version of the Shire in order to, he says, “live my hobbit life to the fullest.”

Gentile lives in a town called Bucchianico in the Abruzzo region of Italy and works, in suitably hobbitish fashion, as a pastry chef. To become a hobbit, he hangs out “in hobbit clothes” with his family on a tract of land in the countryside where he’s built a house and plans to construct “the caravan of the dwarves, the Green Dragon Inn, [a] large version of Bilbo Baggins’ house” and, eventually, a full-on “hobbit village” that runs on solar power.