A warg by any other name... Help with wolf miniatures????

[Ethelred the Almost Ready]

WOLVES, WARGS AND WEREWOLVES. In the First Age Tolkien mentions wolves and werewolves. In the Third Age it is wolves and Wargs. The terms are fairly interchangeable. For me, I want natural or "normal" wolves (easy to find), werewolves (also easy to find as many of the wargs sold commercially are very large and fit my concept of a werewolf). What I can't get is something in between - i.e. something bigger than a wolf but smaller than a werewolf. I have a single Thunderbolt Mountain wolf, this stands at a little over 2cm tall and just over 5.5cm in length. This is perfect for how I see a warg.

Are there any wolf miniatures out there that will fit in with my Thunderbolt Mt one? I am wondering about Otherworld, Game Zone, Red Box (although the heads look a little small) and the Dire Wolves from Dark Sword.

Can anyone help with this?

[Historiker]

Maybe the Otherworld Miniatures "Dire Wolves" are what you are looking for?


PS: Sorry, I did not notice that you had already mentioned the Otherworld miniatures. Unfortunately I don't own them myself so I cannot say anything based on first hand experience with the models. They do look very nice though.

[Loop]

In The Hobbit when the dwarves are hiding in the trees with Gandalf, the wargs call up to them and the party understands them. Later the warga make an alliance with the goblins (so an agreement between them rather than the goblins using them as mere beasts).

I would say that this means that wolf and warg are not interchangeable terms. I accept that I may be alone in this and that The Hobbit is a children’s story with talking animalss but.... meh.

Sorry this doesn’t help any with your miniature search, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

[Ethelred the Almost Ready]

In The Hobbit when the dwarves are hiding in the trees with Gandalf, the wargs call up to them and the party understands them. Later the warga make an alliance with the goblins (so an agreement between them rather than the goblins using them as mere beasts).

I would say that this means that wolf and warg are not interchangeable terms. I accept that I may be alone in this and that The Hobbit is a children’s story with talking animalss but.... meh.

Sorry this doesn’t help any with your miniature search, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

I agree that there are the two types of wolf, but Tolkien talks of wolf riders rather than warg riders.  I can't see a real wolf carrying an armed and armoured orc, which is why, in this instance, I think he is using "wolf" but referring to "wargs".  So warg means warg, but wolf may mean wolf or warg.  This is the beauty of Tolkien, at times rather vague......


To help:

Left to right
Wolves, warg, werewolf.  Orc and elf for some scale.

[Loop]

Now I know I’m really getting into the weeds here but...

Do you feel that a wolf-form werewolf needs to be at least man sized? Beorn is a skin changer. He is a bearlike man but (I assume) he can’t be literally be bear-sized, in which case his size must shrink and grow as he changes forms.

[Hobgoblin]

I agree that there are the two types of wolf, but Tolkien talks of wolf riders rather than warg riders.  I can't see a real wolf carrying an armed and armoured orc, which is why, in this instance, I think he is using "wolf" but referring to "wargs".  So warg means warg, but wolf may mean wolf or warg.  This is the beauty of Tolkien, at times rather vague......

I'm sure that's right. Tolkien loved using synonyms and overlapping near-synonyms. The wargs are often described simply as "wolves", although it's clear from the text that there are other, less evil and intelligent wolves in Middle Earth. In the same way, the Uruk-hai are usually described simply as "Orcs" (and sometimes as "goblins").

As far as your wargs go, might it be worth waiting to see what the Oathmark wolfrider mounts look like? I think they're coming pretty soon, and they might be perfect for this.

[Hobgoblin]

I'm sure that's right. Tolkien loved using synonyms and overlapping near-synonyms. The wargs are often described simply as "wolves", although it's clear from the text that there are other, less evil and intelligent wolves in Middle Earth. In the same way, the Uruk-hai are usually described simply as "Orcs" (and sometimes as "goblins").

An example of this is in The Hobbit, when Gandalf says "They ride upon wolves and Wargs are in their train!".

Now, to the casual reader (and perhaps specifically to the nerdy, systematising mind ), that seems to suggest that "wolves" and "Wargs" are different things. But it's pretty clear from the book as a whole that they're the same thing. When the Wargs are first introduced, they're described as the wolves that live in that area, and we're told about their alliances with goblins and goblins riding on their backs. So, given that, there's no reason to assume that the wolves ridden by goblins at the end of the book are anything other than Wargs. All Wargs are wolves, though not all wolves are Wargs, and Tolkien's simply indulging in the sort of 'elegant variation' that was common in ancient and medieval literature (in which rhetorical figures of repetition were a big thing).

You get the same thing in LotR, when Eomer says that Saruman has taken up with "Orcs and wolfriders". Again, to the casual contemporary reader, that suggests that there's a difference. But when we see the wolfriders, they're most definitely Orcs and no distinction is made between them and the ones on foot (the inference is that they're all uruks). So it's another case of Tolkien using archaic figures of repetition for literary effect.

[LeadAsbestos]

I really wish that Thunderbolt Mountain would release their minis again, so I could finally buy that goblin army I kept putting off.😞

[Ethelred the Almost Ready]

I really wish that Thunderbolt Mountain would release their minis again, so I could finally buy that goblin army I kept putting off.😞

At the risk of hijacking my own thread, I have wondered why no one has bought the molds and started producing these again. 
At the time they closed I decided to buy a lot of figures from Thunderbolt Mountain only to find that orders closed earlier than originally stated.  I had thought that Dark Sword Miniatures might produce them since Tom Meier is sculpting for them.