Flight to the Ford

Continuing along the Journey of the Fellowship, Tyler Halliwell also made the Flight to the Ford.

At the sign of the Prancing Pony

Continuing on with the Journey of the Fellowship group build, Frodo and friends come to Leda Kat's Bree.

BrickWorld 2011

Last summer in Chicago, a group of builders got together to make a huge Journey of the Fellowship display. The journey begins with Tyler Halliwell's Bag End (hmm, it doesn't seem to be on his personal MOCpage.

What will be the next poster?

We've seen a couple of teaser images for the upcoming Tolkien theme, and as others have pointed out, these are basically LEGO versions of some of the Peter Jackson movie posters:



This, of course, raises the question of what will be the next poster. These seem pretty obvious candidates. BTW, was there a movie poster for any of the three movies that focused just on Sam? I can't find any, which is, IMO, a pretty good indicator that Jackson largely missed Tolkien's point. Okay, I'll save a movie rant for another day.



If they break away from the pattern of character close-ups, these are some others that I'd love to see in LEGO. Of course the third one would answer the question I asked before about how they will do the Ring.



I've shared this image before, but this is a good time to describe it in detail. Back in 2004 there was a movie poster contest on Lugnet. Here was my entry. There were several movie posters that were collages of images, and LEGO could do something like I did here. BTW, in case you're wondering, the faint image of the Ring in my poster is the top of a LEGO key, faded out in Photoshop.



One last, that would be fun and old school:

Aragorn

It looks like LEGO is going to be periodically releasing these movie posters to build excitement about the upcoming line.

How will they make the Ring?

In this thread on Classic-Castle we've been speculating a bit on this. Athos noted that the announcement poster looked "more like Lord of the Bracelets." There are various possibilities for existing LEGO elements that could stand in for the ring, like a gold 1x1 round plate, the new version with a hole, the new 1x1 round tile (perhaps printed), or the Clickets ring. These could all be clipped onto a minifig hand, or even (somewhat) grasped.



As noted above, though, those are huge. On the other hand, a truly fig-scaled Ring would be unmanageably small. Of course, the Ring spends most of the Lord of the Rings on a chain around Frodo's neck, so perhaps it might simply be a printed detail on Frodo's torso, like these examples of the amulet worn by the KK2 Guardian, or Yoda's little flute. There's also an existing 1x2 printed tile that would work perfectly as the Ring on a chain.



Anyway, that's all just speculation. What are your thoughts?

Edit- Some additional thoughts that came up in that discussion thread. There is a Harry Potter torso where Hermione is wearing the time turner. Also, Captain Jack's compass was suggested as a comparison of a small important object for minifigs to handle, and there LEGO used a printed 1x1 tile. Two-face's coin is another great comparison.

Rivendell

Last year people came together at BrickWorld to make a "Journey of the Fellowship" display. I'll try and get all of those posted, here. Let's start with a look at Dave Kaleta's great Rivendell.





Quick note - I'm using the tag for Fellowship here rather than Hobbit. Yes, this location first shows up in the Hobbit, but the description there is really sparse. Plus this particular setup does have figures there from Fellowship, though I've focused more on the location shots than the figs in them.

Figures

Here's another blast from the past. Several years ago, Saber Scorpion (aka Justin Stebbins) made a number of Lord of the Rings creations, primarily custom minifigs. I think my favorite of the bunch is his clever Gollum (I took the easy route and just used Dobby). He's got a ton, but I'll show his Gandalf and Frodo, his Gimli, and his interesting take on Sauron.

Speak, friend, and enter

Last June Julien Andries made this great rendition of the Doors of Durin. I love how the interplay between gaps in the bricks and transparent elements implies the inscription.

Brick Tales

In my last post I alluded to my LEGO illustrated Lord of the Rings, so let's go into that a little more. When I emerged from my Dark Age my first thing was telling stories in LEGO form. After a Robin Hood story and another short castle story, my roommate suggested I take a stab at my favorite book, the Lord of the Rings. Over time I did about 30 chapters worth. Maybe someday I'll go back and finish this, but I've got other things on my plate now. Anyway, I'll try and do one of these a week here, so that will take most of a year.

The first chapter I did was At the Sign of the Prancing Pony. I want to emphasize how much I am not proud of the LEGO building here, so don't take this as a sign of things to come, hopefully. If I ever were to complete the whole book, I'd probably go back and redo some of my earliest stuff. So, with all that caveat, here is the Prancing Pony (exterior and interior):



BTW, note how I started this project before we had "stubbies", or short legs, so I used headlight bricks for my hobbits.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all. On December 25, of Third Age 3018, the company of the Ring set out from Rivendell at dusk. Here's how I illustrated this scene.

Lord of the Brick

If you like Tolkien and LEGO, you should also be reading Lord of the Brick. Will (who also runs Brick Heroes and HothBricks) started this blog a month or so ago in response to the growing rumors of the recently announced Tolkien theme.

Hobbit trailer

I'm sure if you read this blog you've already seen this, but the Hobbit trailer came out today. I have to say I'm pretty excited to see this. Some other time I'll give my extended thoughts on the Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. The thumbnail sketch is that I loved the look almost everywhere, but was upset by the MANY places Jackson sacrificed important thematic elements from the book for the sake of adding another action sequence. Anyway, this trailer certainly looks amazing. We get a few clues as to the content of the movie. For instance, it seems that we will see the gathering of the White Council that Gandalf left Bilbo and the dwarves to go join. Probably we'll see a little bit of the attack on Dol Guldur, which is a cool little addition. Plus there are other ways they will tie this in with the Lord of the Rings movies. For instance, instead of Rivendell just being a jolly place to stop for a meal and a chat (while singing tra-la-la-lally), it will be the much deeper location we see in the later book, with an allusion to the whole story of Isildur (we see Bilbo checking out the shards of Narsil). I loved the instrumentation of the dwarves' song from the unexpected party (though why!?!? did they edit Tolkien's words?). Anyway, I can't wait for the next year to go by.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Not a dirty, nasty, wet hole, but a beautiful MOC built of LEGO. This one goes back quite a while. Jon Furman was one of the first builders to really make a mark with Tolkien themed MOCs going back about ten years. Perhaps my favorite of his work is his gorgeous Bag End.

Great Hobbit Contest

I'm sorry, it's too late to enter, but over on MOCpages a group is currently judging the entries for the Great Hobbit Contest. I'll announce the winner when it comes out, but my favorite is Trolls, goblins and wargs, oh my.

I like how this scene captures all the essential elements - the trolls fighting, Gandalf and Bilbo in the bushes, the lost key, the treasure cave, but most of all, the dwarves tied up in sacks:

OneLug

I was going to start out looking at MOCs with some of the first Tolkien based creations I remember, but there's a problem with Brickshelf right now. So instead I'll jump to one of the most amazing MOCs of 2011. Remi Gagne, Brandon Griffith, Alyse Gagne and Bruce Lowell teamed up this year, calling themselves OneLug, and created the Last March of the Ents.

This collaborative effort deservedly won them Best in Show at this year's BrickCon gathering. As a community we are often easily won over by very large MOCs, but don't let that fool you. This is an amazing construction at every level. Each of the Ents, in particular, has strong characterization, and the flow of action is extremely well done. If you haven't done so before, be sure to look through all of the pictures in the Flickr stream.

Labels for posts (3 of 3)

See previous post for explanation.

Labels for posts (2 of 3)

See the previous post.

Labels for posts (1 of 3)

Just a quick post to help organize the labels I'll be using for posts. I'll actually have to break this up into pieces, since I can only have so many labels per post. Creations featured here will be organized in a few ways: By place: Shire, Eriador, Rivendell, Misty Mountains, Wilderland, Mirkwood, Lonely Mountain, Moria, Lothlorien, Fangorn, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, Lindon, Beleriand, Valinor. Yes, some of these are subsets of others (e.g. the Shire is in Eriador, Moria is in the Misty Mountains, a whole host of places are within Wilderland, etc.), but in those cases I will only use the smaller subset to designate a place. For instance, a Hobbiton scene would get the tag Shire, but not Eriador, while a Bree scene would be labeled Eriador. By subject type: Location (for those MOCs primarily focused on a building or an exterior location), scene (for those MOCs depicting some action, even when it is at some location), characters and creatures (when people just make custom figs or build a Balrog or whatever). There will obviously be some overlap here - for instance, Shelob fighting Sam with the Tower of Cirith Ungol in the background - but I'll try to pick just one of these (scene in this example). By creation type: I won't put minifig scale, since most creations will be at that scale, but microscale, miniland, sculpture, mosaic By book: Hobbit, Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, Return of the King, Silmarillion. Scene MOCs are obviously tied to specific books. Location MOCs will be attributed to the first book (in publication order) where they were fully described. So Bag End would be linked to the Hobbit, even though it shows up in Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King as well. Orthanc is mentioned in Fellowship, but is fully described in the Two Towers, so would be linked there. I'll do the same with characters, but characters in groups will be linked to where that group came up. So Gandalf by himself would go to the Hobbit, since he is first linked there, but Gandalf as part of the group of nine walkers goes to Fellowship. Allusions to characters in verse is the exception here. Beren and Luthien, Earendil and some others come up in songs in Lord of the Rings, but are fully described in the Silmarillion, and so would go there. Some characters are never really fully described, and so would go where they are first mentioned - for instance, I'd link Gil-Galad with Fellowship, since the Last Alliance is described as a matter of lore (or living memory, if you're Elrond) in Fellowship, but he's never a fully realized character anywhere else (hmm, is there anything in the HOME books? I can't think of any, but maybe in UT). Some others: metadiscussion, non-LEGO, contest, official theme news

Welcome to TolkienBricks

Welcome to my newest blog, TolkienBricks. Yes, I am completely insane. I already have a gaggle of blogs (see the tabs at the top of the page) devoted to various LEGO niches, and I am constantly bemoaning the fact that I don't have time for the blogs that I already have. Yesterday, though, when LEGO announced their upcoming Tolkien license, I just had to add one more. The Lord of the Rings is my favorite book, ever since I first read it 30-odd years ago, and my first major LEGO undertaking was a (now long-interrupted) LEGO-illustrated Lord of the Rings. That movie poster above is my work from that project, BTW. Over the years I have also appreciated the number of great Tolkien-based creations (called MOCs, for My Own Creation) that other LEGO builders (AFOLs, for Adult Fans of LEGO) have built. This new theme may provide them impetus for me to re-start my dormant project, but in the meantime I want to bring my interests in Tolkien and LEGO together in this blog.

This blog will address all aspects of the intersection of Tolkien and LEGO. I'll cover the official theme as news and eventually sets come out. I'll also cover all of the great original creations that AFOLs have been building over the years. Content will draw on all of the Tolkien opus, from the original song of the Ainur to the dawn of the Fourth Age. Things could even go broader, if I find any relevant content. Say, for instance, a LEGO rendition of Farmer Giles, or Niggle, etc. I'll also occasionally delve into some non-LEGO Tolkien thoughts, but probably not so much as I'd like to maintain the character of this blog.

So, if it's not too presumptive: Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be!