Gush away, Peder - I can take it
I’ve been temporarily diverted from my orcses by a strange urge to extend my Tolkien kitbashing to other races, starting with the Haradrim.
The Haradrim are men in the service of the Dark Lord, Sauron - basically stereotypical rascally Middle Eastern types (although they come from the south, ‘Southrons’, rather than the east). There are ‘Easterlings’ as well, in Tolkien’s landscape of races and cultures, but none of these bit-part races are well described in the books. In fact, apart from hobbits and elves,
none of Tolkien’s races are that well described in his writings. He’s much more interested in their languages, literature, and genealogies, than important things like their clothes, armour, weapons, customs, etc. All this is sketchily described for the most part.
In the case of the Haradrim, all he really tells us is that they’re brave fighters - tall, dark-skinned, with braided black hair and dark eyes. They wear scarlet and black with golden ornaments, including (shock, horror!) earrings. Corsets of overlapping brazen plates and scimitars get a mention. Shields are round, yellow with black designs. One of their chieftains has a black serpent motif on his scarlet banners. They have war elephants called Mûmakil (‘oliphaunts’ to the hobbits) also bedecked in scarlet and gold trappings, with fighting towers on their backs for spearmen and bowmen. And… that’s about it.
Based on this, I’ve gone for a more or less ‘Arabian Nights’ look
I used parts from around 20 different plastic kits to make up this small force…
Forgive me while I bore you with some of the details. (For those who don’t like reading lots of words, just enjoy the pictures
)
These first three Haradrim all have heads from the Fireforge Russian Infantry set. The heads, sporting a variety of Eastern spiky helmet styles, are perfect for this pseudo-Eastern melange.
The Russian bodies aren’t bad – lamellar armour or mail. Except that they have
really badly sculpted swords moulded-onto their sides. Why? Most of the other FF sets have separate swords in scabbards, which is a much better idea. (I couldn’t be bothered to cut them off and make good, so I’ve just left them where I’ve used these bodies. Mostly they’ll be covered by shields anyway). The Russian arms are also a mixed bag – very crabbed looking, and some with open hands. Not great. But the heads alone are worth the price of entry.
For kitbashers who care:
- The L/hand figure is one of the FF Russian bodies with a pair of Perry HYW French knight’s arm with axe.
- The middle figure has a Gripping Beast Arab Infantry body (the bodies aren’t too bad if you’re just after plain robes – but IMHO the heads are Godawful: comical cartoon bazaar characters). Arms and mace from the FF Russian set.
- R/hand figure is a FF Foot Serjeants body with Frostgrave cultist arms.
The next three figures (below) also have heads from the FF Russian set, but to these I’ve added Green Stuff puggarees, and puggaree tails from the Perry Afghan set.
- The L/hand figure has a FF Russian body with Perry HYW French arms and a Perry Afghan shield.
- The middle figure is another GB Arab body, and the R/hand figure a FF Byzantine spearman body.
I think the Byzantine set was the first Fireforge set where they changed to digital sculpting, and it shows.
I’d hoped to use some of the Byzantine heads (slightly pointy, near eastern-looking helmets with lamellar aventails) but unfortunately the heads in this Byzantine set are weirdly deformed - way too long, front to back - so I decided against. Pity. The Byzantine bodies however, are very nice.
The two figures on the right both use arms from the Frostgrave Knights set. The shield on the centre figure is from the FF Steppe Warriors set. The r/hand figure has a Wargames Atlantic Irish shield.
Now I confess I’ve been a bit sniffy about one or two of the early Wargames Atlantic offerings, but I freely recant as far as this Dark Age Irish set goes, because it's very nice indeed. It has only six different bodies (boo!) but a cornucopia of lovely shields in different shapes and sizes, plus a lot of attractive arm, weapon and head options. It’s also
very sharply moulded.
The next three (above) all have Perry Afghan heads. L-to-R:
- FF Byzantine body (excellent crisp detail, which seems to be common to all the digitally sculpted plastic sets), Victrix Saxon shield, FF Foot Serjeant arms.
- FF Foot Serjeants body, GB Arab shield, Perry HYW French arms and falchion (scimitar)
- Frostgrave Cultist body, Perry WOTR infantry arms with another HYW falchion swapped onto the end of the right arm. Wargames Atlantic Irish buckler. Plus Green Stuff dreads…
The last three, above, L-to-R:
- FF Russian body, GB veiled Arab head (there are a couple of these veiled heads on each GB Arab frame, and they’re the only worthwhile heads in the set IMHO), Perry Afghan arms, Oathmark goblin shield.
- GB Arab body, Perry Ansar head, Perry Afghan arms and drum.
- FF Russian body, Frostgrave soldier arms, a very nice big convex shield from the FF Russian set, and the head… not sure. Might be GW from the bits box? Looks suitably Turkic, in any event.
Here they are all together…
And from behind…
The paint scheme will do the heavy lifting to tie together all these many and various elements into a cohesive looking company of fierce Haradrim.
Onto the pachyderms…
These are the Victrix African War elephants.
This is a great kit, although apart from the mahouts, a couple of javelin arms, and one set of pike arms, I haven’t used any of the 16 beautiful crew figures that come with the set (providing Roman, Carthaginian, Ptolemaic and Numidian options – none of which are any good to me for this project, nice as they are).
The mahouts have been doctored with new heads and shields.
The fighting crews are kitbashed like the infantry, from similar sources. There are a couple of other kits involved here though, including a Frostgrave Barbarian head, a heavily doctored FF Templar knight head, and a GB Saxon thegn body!
The elephants themselves are straight builds from the kit – you can make slightly different versions depending on which halves you pair, and which trunk you add.
I have however added a shitload of random stowage from the bits box to the howdahs, treating them in much the same way as my WW2 AFVs
Here’s a stowage option I felt I had to just try out
And here’s the whole rascally gang together.
It will be a while before this little lot gets painted, as I have a lot more orcs to finish first - amongst many other things
I also have trolls and warg riders underway… Watch this space!