Ever since I had my first experience with miniatures through the Hero Quest game, I've been wanting to marry this hobby with my love for Tolkien's seminal work, Lord of the Rings. The medium of miniatures created a freedom to recreate all the battles and adventures I had running around in my teenage (at the time) head, that was unsurpassed.
Mind; this was decades before the advent of Peter Jackson's cinematic masterpiece, and all I had to go on was my own imagination and the rereading of 'the book' about once a year. So I was well versed in the descriptions of the characters and events, and with the wonderful way the mind works, all of the blanks were easily filled in with all the accumulated references of my youth.
This way Aragorn, for instance, took on the shape of the dean at my highschool, him being a figure of authority, protection and a mentor. It was only years later that I managed to figure out that my young mind had put that face there, probably because I identified myself with Frodo at the time. Him, on the surface, being the main hero of the story (Nowadays, I see myself more like a Sam though, with my adventuring days over, being a father myself, and having a fondness for good food
).
Eventually, I bought myself the ICE Middle Earth roleplaying game, hoping to get my friends into gaming that setting. But not all of them had even read LotR (*gasp*), and the group prefered to stick with our casual games of Oog des Meesters (Das Schwarze Auge in German. I can't imagine it was called The Black Eye in English though).
So I got stuck with a very nicely illustrated book that, in a lot of ways, augmented my own visions of the setting, and did not clash with them where there was overlap. In fact, the aforementioned Aragorn did actually bear a passing resemblance to that old dean in Angus McBride's artwork on the cover of the book. And to this day, his illustration of Galadriël is the best one, as far as I'm concerned.
I never got as far as to buy into the Mithril miniatures though, as I was further sucked into all the 40K and WHFB games, from which I only emerged two decades later.
By then, I had seen the Peter Jackson movies, and even though I loved (almost) every minute of them, and I recognized and respected the grand vision of mr. Jackson, it was clear to me that it was not
my vision. In a way, I almost regretted that I had seen them, because they now inadvertedly started to influence my own, carefully built, vision of Middle Earth.
Even though I fought it, it did gradually erode my own imagination because, especially at the time, one could not look anywhere without being bombarded by stills, artwork, miniatures, etc from, or inspired by, the films. Jackson's trilogy was everywhere.
But it has been over a decade since I've seen them now (even though I own them on DVD), and ever so slowly, I found that my own interpretation began to push aside the Jacksonesque imagery. Not everywhere, obviously, and not everywhere as strongly, but I did find that my vision has re-emerged. It has evolved though.
My Aragorn has matured away from that dean. Maybe he picked up a bit of Viggo Mortensen along the way, but he's largely the result of my own musings again, and reflecting my own journey, just like all the other characters, locations and proceedings.
And now, close to fourty years after I first read my first copy, I am finally ready to translate my own vision of Middle Earth into miniature. Hopefully to at some point game with them too.
'My' Gandalf started this whole thing off. Searching for something entirely different some yeara ago, I stumbled upon an image of this miniature and immediately knew that this was him. So I tracked down where it came from, and bought myself one. Turns out it was a bit of limited edition by Reaper.
The Hobbits were another lucky find, when I chanced upon the, now defunct, Sergeant Major website, where they offered the old Vendel fantasy ranges (amongst others). One set in particular though caught my eye; it had the four hobbits, two wizards and one or two humans. It was the hobbits I was after, but them being located in the US, and not reacting to any of my emails, combined with the quite ridiculous postage kept me from pulling the trigger on that one. Until some years later, I saw them come by in the Bazaar here on the LAF and quickly scooped them up.
Aragorn came about when I first saw the Rangers of Shadowdeep miniatures. They had one in particular that perfectly met my requirements, so when I ordered him, I checked the rest of the range, oly to find that, with a little work, one of the miniatures in the range could work really well as a Boromir too. In particular, the addition of a horn on his belt is required, but an easy fix.
So that left me just a dwarf and elf short of a full nine walkers.
And browsing through all my bookmarked miniature stores (I have a LOT of bookmarked miniature stores
), I inadvertedly ended up on the Reaper site again, and this time I found the perfect elf. I then also picked out a reasonably OK dwarf, and they are on their way to me now. Once they arrive, I will prep the elf, and check if the dwarf is usable. Worst case, I will have to prowl around for that one perfect dwarf some more.
In fact, I'm so close to rounding out my perfect Fellowship of the Ring by now, that I've tentatively begun to look around for additional miniatures for this project. I figured that assembling a small band of Orcs might be a good start to that.
And since his images have been just about cemented into my brain all those years ago, I will be going for a strong Angus McBride vibe with them. In fact, I got myself some Wargames Factory ones (before they closed down and emerged as Wargames Atlantic), to combine with Oathmark Goblins, Dark Age Warriors, and even Roman Auxiliaries. This will be quite the enjoyable kitbash, I reckon.
But first, I am going to assemble all the possible 'official' descriptions of the Fellowship's members (colour of hair and clothing, specific symbols and attributes, etc) so I can, where possible, strictly adhere to Tolkien's own writings. One enjoyable way is to re-read the book yet again (it has been a while), but that's also a quite slow one.
So I'm hoping that some of the well versed in Tolkien lore forum members, such as Hobgoblin or Ethelred perhaps, might point me in the direction of an internet repository of knowledge on this topic. I can't be the first one to want this type of specific information after all...
22 March 2008, 08:39:49 PM
