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I have a few of the GW Lord of the Rings figures, mostly unpainted.

A "few" might be an understatement. I have hundreds, but only a handful of Isengard Uruk-Hai and Rohirrim painted to play the GW game (Although from looking at SAGA, I think I might prefer it).

But most of the figures are slated to be based for Field Of Glory, or some other mass combat system.

Which brings me to my point.

The Middle-earth of the movies, and thus of GW, is not really the Middle-earth of Tolkien.

It is similar, in that it shares names and places.

But it is more like Peter Jackson, and thus Games Workshop are trying to tell us that a few guys in black robes, handing out beer and pizza in a full auditorium are actually Catholic Priests handing out Holy Communion at a Catholic Mass. There are some similarities, but a Mass and Communion it is not.

And what is ironic is that the LotR rules are perhaps some of the better rules from GW.

Has anyone looked at going beyond GW for Middle-earth gaming?

Or is the forum pretty much dedicated solely to the GW games and figures?

Because there are now quite a few offerings that are much more affordable than the insanely expensive GW miniatures... And in 15mm as well (Khurasan's "Great Enemy" line, as an example).

MB

I think you'll probably find that most of us here are fans of the Jackson movies, at least in terms of how everything looked.

I can definitely see that they are different from the book descriptions, and some aspects do bug me (I never imagined the Men of Gondor running around in clanky half plate, for example). However on the whole I am quite happy with them and they are quite close to what I had imagined reading the books- especially the Orcs, Ringwraiths and Trolls. I also like the Rohan models and the Haradrim and Easterling ranges, though actually when reading the books I never had a very clear image of that those troops would have looked like apart from vague stereotypes of the medieval middle east.

That said, I believe there is plenty of room for other interpretations of Middle Earth. I have sort of "come back to my roots" if you will with this game. When I originally got into GW games it was to try to recreate the amazing world I had been introduced to in Tolkien's books in miniature. Of course, GW's stuff is stylistically quite cartoony and doesn't fit well, but it was the best I could manage back in those days. As time went on I got distracted by GW stuff.

Now I'm back to Middle Earth and pretty much all of my purchases are aimed at it in some way.

I am using Historical ranges to expand and "fill in" the parts of the game that I feel GW/Jackson didn't do well enough (so, using Normans for Gondor, Vikings and Celts for Dunlendings, and so on).

One site I use a lot (as you might guess from my Avatar) is Red Box Games, who do a wonderful line of low key high detail sculpts that to me fit wonderfully with my vision of Middle Earth for the most part. I especially love the RBG Goblins and Dwarves!

I am all for going outside of the GW range for LotR; I have some Reaper stand-ins for heroes and will be picking up some Wargames Factory Orcs and some of thier Vikings to round out my Rohirrim.

However, I do disagree with you on the PJ imagery conflicting with that of Tolkien. Maybe it's because I read the book and saw the films at about the same time (well, I read the books having seen the first film, but no later), but I think it was pretty much spot-on. I can't think of anything where the visual design of the films takes a huge or unwarranted deviation from the books' descriptions.

I also don't buy into the thing of taking Tolkien's writings as sacrecanct perfection. Yes, they are excellent books, but the changes to the plot (moreso in the Hobbit films) are, to me, not anything to get annoyed about. By comparison, look at Shakespeare: I caould go and see Macbeth 5 times by 5 theatre companies and see a different version each time, from a 4-hour classically performed unabriged version to an altered, updated and concise version, and I could not say that one version was any more valid than another. The same with The Hobbit; Jackson has changed some things, but that just makes it an interpretation, not a knock-off or lesser/diluted version.

But that's just my take on it, I hope I didn't come across as trying to shoot down your ideas.

I'd actually be interested in your specific problems with the movie series, BeAfraid. I think Fellowship was closest to what I imagined in "feel", and the subsequent movies have usually been close but perhaps had an element or two that I didn't agree with. The Minas Tirith troops wearing plate mail is probably the biggest complaint I have.

I dont think a direct translation from the book would do well due to the age of viewers and the changing manners of speech. I love the books and I love the movies, all of them, PJ took some liberties, but other than tuariel I think in either the notes, supporting books, and the main books pretty much everything happened. Timeline was a little and some events and people altered, but it was done to give us a "better" experience, so All my thumbs up....that being said, I also use alot of Mithril's LOTR miniatures, they are almost same scale and were based off of MERP and some Angus Mcbride merp art.

there are many alterations in the films, some of them good and some bad, very bad. my biggest erks were the galadhrim arriving at helms deep, it brought hope to a battle where theoden was alone, but i understand that it was to show that the other races were not sitting idle. and the army of the dead arriving at minas tirith instead of dol amroth,
thats not to say i didnt enjoy the films, though the hobbit was less enjoyable.
i think it is best to play to the books (lotr that is) as there is more battles and skirmishes to go off, if you want to have a go at battles of the first and second age thats even better, but very complex since you have many balrogs and dragons and very op charecters, as for reanacting the hobbit, i would probs go from the films as the book is abit lighter and not asmuch fighting going on ( only just) but i think there are alot of fun scenarios you could create that dont exactly involve fighting,
though i found creating my own scenarios are abit tricky

 Da Boss wrote:
I think you'll probably find that most of us here are fans of the Jackson movies, at least in terms of how everything looked.

I can definitely see that they are different from the book descriptions, and some aspects do bug me (I never imagined the Men of Gondor running around in clanky half plate, for example). However on the whole I am quite happy with them and they are quite close to what I had imagined reading the books- especially the Orcs, Ringwraiths and Trolls. I also like the Rohan models and the Haradrim and Easterling ranges, though actually when reading the books I never had a very clear image of that those troops would have looked like apart from vague stereotypes of the medieval middle east.

That said, I believe there is plenty of room for other interpretations of Middle Earth. I have sort of "come back to my roots" if you will with this game. When I originally got into GW games it was to try to recreate the amazing world I had been introduced to in Tolkien's books in miniature. Of course, GW's stuff is stylistically quite cartoony and doesn't fit well, but it was the best I could manage back in those days. As time went on I got distracted by GW stuff.

Now I'm back to Middle Earth and pretty much all of my purchases are aimed at it in some way.

I am using Historical ranges to expand and "fill in" the parts of the game that I feel GW/Jackson didn't do well enough (so, using Normans for Gondor, Vikings and Celts for Dunlendings, and so on).

One site I use a lot (as you might guess from my Avatar) is Red Box Games, who do a wonderful line of low key high detail sculpts that to me fit wonderfully with my vision of Middle Earth for the most part. I especially love the RBG Goblins and Dwarves!

Have you seen Tom Meier's Orcs from Thunderbolt Mountain?

Those, and his old Ral Partha Goblins remain my favorites.

So much so that I am working on filling out the line with my own work (I am not quite to Tom's level in terms of speed, but I have the anatomical chops, even if I am very slow... And I work digitally).

There are images of a couple of the Orcs I am working on in the General Discussion forum.

And... I have a digital sculpt of an Easterling Chariot, done in the style of the Jackson movie Easterlings, which I plan to get printed in the next couple of months (probably just at Shapeways, since it is not detail heavy - but the Orcs/Goblins are probably going to set me back about $300 - $500 a piece to have printed with Stratsys's ultra-high resolution material - .0025mm resolution... Otherwise the teeth and claws won't come out right).

But I am looking to do an entire line for Middle-earth that is more straightforward and less ornate than the GW stuff. Jackson got a few things right, but most of it was tragically wrong (Elves with crooked swords is akin to Catholic Priests using Pentagrams instead of crucifixes, just as one error... And his orcs, while VERY impressive look nothing like Tolkien both described and painted).



MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Paradigm wrote:
I.

However, I do disagree with you on the PJ imagery conflicting with that of Tolkien. Maybe it's because I read the book and saw the films at about the same time (well, I read the books having seen the first film, but no later), but I think it was pretty much spot-on. I can't think of anything where the visual design of the films takes a huge or unwarranted deviation from the books' descriptions.

I also don't buy into the thing of taking Tolkien's writings as sacrecanct perfection. Yes, they are excellent books, but the changes to the plot (moreso in the Hobbit films) are, to me, not anything to get annoyed about. By comparison, look at Shakespeare: I caould go and see Macbeth 5 times by 5 theatre companies and see a different version each time, from a 4-hour classically performed unabriged version to an altered, updated and concise version, and I could not say that one version was any more valid than another. The same with The Hobbit; Jackson has changed some things, but that just makes it an interpretation, not a knock-off or lesser/diluted version.

But that's just my take on it, I hope I didn't come across as trying to shoot down your ideas.

Of you read beyond just the Trilogy, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion and venture into the secondary sources, you get a vastly expanded description of Middle-earth, and of the people in it (including paintings that Tolkien did, which include a few people, and orcs).

These works also explain why the alterations that Jackson did pretty much broke what Tolkien created.

Tolkien created Middle-earth as a "Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England." And as such, there are things within it that have very deep, and meaningful connections to the world (even Tom Bombadil).

And, as for The Hobbit, Jackson didn't just change a few things, he utterly eradicated 2,500 years of Middle-earth history, radically altered the History of Sauron, The One Ring, the Wraiths, the Dwarves, the a Elves, Gandalf, Thranduil, and introduced French (which to Tolkien, for Middle-earth would have been like introducing the Third Reich as a "friendly" component of his mythology) and Celtic elements to the mythology.

The original trilogy only had minor alterations that kept the basic story intact.

But what he did to The Hobbit made it no longer The Hobbit, and instead a story about a Hobbit and some Dwarves that set out to Kill a Dragon.

But the connection to the actual work is no more existent than if Macbeth took place in France, and was about a group of teens sharing a castle. The movie contains characters with similar names; places with similar names; but otherwise is no longer about Middle-earth.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
One last point...

Maybe the fact that I tend to take Middle-earth seriously enough to actually write scholarly articles about Tolkien's use of specific words and their relationships to the overall story (See Tolkien's story "Leaf by Niggle"), and that I have even read Tolkien's religious writings, and that I travelled to Oxford to the Bodleian Library to read the materials that were not published in "The History of Middle-earth, vols I - XII" makes me a little bit eccentric when it comes to Middle-earth, taking it far more seriously as a creation than do most.

I do not mean to come across as snobbish in this regard.

It is that I have a love for his works, much the same way that I love the works of Michelangelo (or, who I did my portfolio Life Drawing Studies final project on in 1983: Raphael), or DaVinci's Mona Lisa, or Last Supper.... Or the Love I have for the mosaic of Emperor and Empress Justinian and Theodora at the Basilica of San Vitale.

And, when someone tells me that Peter Jackson's movies are pretty much the same as Tolkien's works..... They are beautiful movies, and impressive productions in their own right.

But....

I have kind of the same reaction as if someone pointed to an image of Madonna Cradling the body of Justin Beiber and saying "That's Michelangelo"s Rondanini Pietá."

Well... It might be posed the same way. Madonna and Beiber might even be dressed the same way.

But it wouldn't be the Rondanini Pietá.

Sorry if this is using such specific terms that might not be known to many of the readers.

But the experience of reading this, and wondering "What the HELL is a "Rondanni Pietá?!?!" should be an indication that like most great works of art....

There is a depth to it that goes beyond the mere words on the pages of the books themselves, and that not knowing that this depth exists could lead one to think that they had experiences pretty much all there was to experience in a work without knowing that they were only looking at the surface of a very deep ocean.

MB

Fair enough, I do see where you're coming from. I still not sure I buy it, as to me the whole idea of a book and what that 'looks like' is in the hands of the reader, not the writer. Selfiish as it may sound, what Tolkien visualised when he wrote about Orcs is less important to me than what I see when reading the same passage (which happens to conincide with the PJ visuals, as I was simply too young to have read the books by the time the first film came out).

On the other hand, I do agree that the true strength of Tolkien comes in the world-building, particularly the stuff added outside the 'main' four books. It is that which takes it from beyond a story into a mythology.

But looking specifically at The Hobbit stuff, I still struggle to see where he has 'utterly eradicated 2,500 years of Middle-earth history, radically altered the History of Sauron, The One Ring, the Wraiths, the Dwarves, the a Elves, Gandalf, Thranduil'. Off the top of my head, the only major changes between the Hobbit (in terms of events rather than the book itself) are:

- Azog surviving the battle of the Dimril Gate, and thus leading the army at Erebor at the BotFA.

- Introduction of Tauriel

- Changing the way Smaug was killed (one of the few changes that does annoy me a bit)

- The Dwarves openly confronting Smaug, which I guess was added for narrative reasons and to provide a 'climax' for the 2nd film. Again, this I could have done without (especially the statue), but it hardly 'radically alters' the story/setting.

In my eyes, that's hardly dealing a massive blow to the setting Tolkien built, but I guess we'll just agree to differ there.

One last thing, I have to say I do respect your dedication to and knowledge of the works of Tolkien. It's nice to see someone trating it as the literary magnificence it is rather than years of English tutors I've had dismissing it as 'fantasy, therefore can't possibly be literary'.

Aye, that bugs the gak out of me too. Always wondered why we couldn't read LOTR in English class.

BeAfraid: I can sort of admire your firey purity, but I think I like my Middle Earth with some other influences. Tolkien was a bit of classist old racist, so I am pretty okay with taking my own spin on his excellent work of fantasy. I've always been fascinated with his orcs. The snippets of dialogue they get in the books are always so weighted with meaning and life compared to the fairly straightforward and dry heroics of all the non-hobbit characters.

But I can respect your POV, thanks for explaining it!

 Paradigm wrote:
Fair enough, I do see where you're coming from. I still not sure I buy it, as to me the whole idea of a book and what that 'looks like' is in the hands of the reader, not the writer. Selfiish as it may sound, what Tolkien visualised when he wrote about Orcs is less important to me than what I see when reading the same passage (which happens to conincide with the PJ visuals, as I was simply too young to have read the books by the time the first film came out).

On the other hand, I do agree that the true strength of Tolkien comes in the world-building, particularly the stuff added outside the 'main' four books. It is that which takes it from beyond a story into a mythology.

But looking specifically at The Hobbit stuff, I still struggle to see where he has 'utterly eradicated 2,500 years of Middle-earth history, radically altered the History of Sauron, The One Ring, the Wraiths, the Dwarves, the a Elves, Gandalf, Thranduil'. Off the top of my head, the only major changes between the Hobbit (in terms of events rather than the book itself) are:

- Azog surviving the battle of the Dimril Gate, and thus leading the army at Erebor at the BotFA.

- Introduction of Tauriel

- Changing the way Smaug was killed (one of the few changes that does annoy me a bit)

- The Dwarves openly confronting Smaug, which I guess was added for narrative reasons and to provide a 'climax' for the 2nd film. Again, this I could have done without (especially the statue), but it hardly 'radically alters' the story/setting.

In my eyes, that's hardly dealing a massive blow to the setting Tolkien built, but I guess we'll just agree to differ there.

One last thing, I have to say I do respect your dedication to and knowledge of the works of Tolkien. It's nice to see someone trating it as the literary magnificence it is rather than years of English tutors I've had dismissing it as 'fantasy, therefore can't possibly be literary'.

The Hobbit took place in the years 2941TA and 2942TA

They got this right at least.

But...

ALL of the history from 2063TA to 2490TA (The Watchful Peace) was utterly destroyed by Jackson. Jackson alters this so that it is "just ending" when the story begins.

ALL of the history of the Dwarves in Khazad-Dûm and the Battle of Azanulbizar was wrong (2790TA to 2799TA)
• This includes the death of Thror, that Thrain II did NOT die, that Azog was killed by Dain, who was only 32 at the time (sort of like a 13 year-old killing a navy SEAL), that Thorin didn't fight Azog....
• That Thorin was nearly 50 years older than Balin, and was the OLDEST of the Dwarves.

Thranduil on a moose (Irish Elk) is simply a perversion, and an intrusion of an alien mythology into Middle-earth (given Tolkien's comments on the French, Celts, and the Irish, this is almost akin to having Winston Churchill contracting with Adolph Hitler to provide Panzers for the Royal Army), far too much of Jackson's design work on the elves was an intrusion of French mythology from The Normans (whom Tolkien loathed), which Jackson and his vaunted "Tolkien Authority," Phillipa Boyens, were either too lazy to investigate, or simply ignored it in spite of things for their own personal reasons (whatever those might be).

Oh... And ALL of the history regarding the Northern Kingdoms and the Nazgûl, as well as the History of Dol Goldur was changed (which accounts from 0TA to the events in the Hobbit).

Dale and Lake Town were pretty drastically altered in both content and relationship to the Dwarves (and never mind that Dale, as shown, is about 5X the size of the largest city in Northern Middle-earth at the time: Minas Tirith).

The Assault on Dol Goldur was wholly wrong, and they had known it was Sauron pretty much since 1600TA.

And, even though people don't seem to understand WHY it is important, the elves STILL have what Tolkien would call "Crooked Swords." That is actually a pretty major error that was introduced in the first minute of the first trilogy. Yet it is among the most important alterations given Tolkien's stated comments on the relationship to form (Hroä) and being (Feä).

These are not "small" changes Jackson made, but egregious alterations, and outright erasures of thousands of years of canon history.

He basically altered the entire Third Age right up to the events of The Hobbit, and then kept going with the changes.

Tauriel was really the least of the changes. Her place as a "captain of the guards" was out of place, and dystopic, but her existence was not serious.

MB




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
Aye, that bugs the gak out of me too. Always wondered why we couldn't read LOTR in English class.

BeAfraid: I can sort of admire your firey purity, but I think I like my Middle Earth with some other influences. Tolkien was a bit of classist old racist, so I am pretty okay with taking my own spin on his excellent work of fantasy. I've always been fascinated with his orcs. The snippets of dialogue they get in the books are always so weighted with meaning and life compared to the fairly straightforward and dry heroics of all the non-hobbit characters.

But I can respect your POV, thanks for explaining it!

Classist, yes. Racist, no.

He held some views that were common among everyone (especially conservatives) of that age, but many of these views altered during the 60's and 70's, where he was known to be very much a champion of the civil rights movement.

The issue of race with Tolkien is complex, and much of it can probably be written down to simply having lived a much more insular life than do people today.

And much of what people take as "racist" has more to do with the reality of who the Saxons in England viewed as an enemy, and whom the English as a whole tended to view suspiciously.

Some of that is what we would now call "racism," but given Tolkien's ability to confront some of the uglier parts of his personality and alter them as a result.... It could simply be that some of his prejudices never were challenged.

But he was VERY Classist, wishing to shift power from the House of Commons to the House of Lords. But many in the Middle Class during that period tended to have an exaggerated opinion of the peers.

MB

Da Boss wrote:I think you'll probably find that most of us here are fans of the Jackson movies

Most of us.

BeAfraid wrote:I have a few of the GW Lord of the Rings figures, mostly unpainted.

A "few" might be an understatement. I have hundreds, but only a handful of Isengard Uruk-Hai and Rohirrim painted to play the GW game (Although from looking at SAGA, I think I might prefer it).

But most of the figures are slated to be based for Field Of Glory, or some other mass combat system...

And what is ironic is that the LotR rules are perhaps some of the better rules from GW.

Has anyone looked at going beyond GW for Middle-earth gaming?

Or is the forum pretty much dedicated solely to the GW games and figures?

I intend to use the GW LotR rules for skirmish, at least initially. For mass battles I'm fairly taken with the Mayhem rules from Bombshell Games - interesting 'action point' and polydice mechanics, along with units creation rules that allow me to tailor my Middle-Earth forces as I see fit. Reducing white-hand uruk-hai in stature from their hulking wrestler movie image, for example.

The same thing informs my model choices to some degree. I've bought up a bunch of second-hand GW uruk-hai: I think they're a decent compromise, particularly for the volumes that might be needed for mass battle games, but maybe with a couple of small alterations: dremeling out some of the plate and replacing it with mail, for one thing. Ditto for Mordor orcs and dwarves. At least the former aren't green cartoon gorillas, and the latter have legs and a lack of comedy-viking horned helmets. The plastic dwarves are unfortunately difficult to find on ebay, though...

I'm not entirely sure where to go for elves, beyond sculpting some myself, but for humans I've been eyeing up historical ranges. I was going to use GW Rohirrim; but getting back to the topic of enormous uruks, I think the fine 25mm Perry sculpts would increase the effect more than I would like. Perhaps chunkier 28mm-30mm historicals would help skew them towards 'orc+' height. (I have a bunch of GW uruk-hai and a 5th ed plastic bretonnian on the table right beside me, which helps confirm that) I've mentioned elsewhere that I've been looking at Footsore goths for Rohirrim - maybe their early saxon cavalry too - though before that I had thoughts about Gripping Beast plastic saxon heads on - brace yourself - Conquest plastic normans.

For mass battles, I have two sets of rules:

Hoplon and Field of Glory

The former, as I mentioned, is a DBx variant, which ads units, an actual morale system, and disorder, as well as special characteristics for the troops, and differentiation for weapons and armor.

It is somewhat like FoG, but retains much of the dynamics of DBx, AND, best of all, it does not have an IGOUGO turn sequence, but rather players move by order of initiative, which is a combination of the total of their PiP die, and the Command Rating of the general (which is from zero to four with the fantasy variants).

The nice thing about Hoplon is that the troop characteristics allow for the addition of "magical properties" for the troops without a single alteration of the rules. The additional characteristics work just like all other characteristics, and for Middle-earth, there is not a lot of magic in the form of spells.


It is all basically in the morale system, where the forces of The Shadow cause fear or terror. There are a few other minor effects, such as benefits to or hampering of movement, or the degradation of fighting abilities, but these tend to be rare.

We are looking at trying to develop the rules for Hyboria as well, but in the world of Conan, you might run into spell-casters who can produce profoundly strange and unusual effects.

Also, for elf miniatures:

Thunderbolt Mountain Miniatures

This is Tom Meier's most recent miniature company, and he has probably the best Elven Miniatures ever made, even if the lines are not complete.

He has a nearly complete line of Wood Elves (lacking really only Horse Archers), and some High Elven Heavy Infantry (Spearmen and Archers - but no Command Group).

I am hoping to add to these lines, like I am doing with the Goblins/Orcs (the Orcs currently available from Thunderbolt Mountain are really applicable to only the Hithaeglir region - The Misty Mountains... But I hope to see a selection of Mordor Orcs, Morgul Orcs, and a few of the other factions of Orcs that exist in Mordor). Hoping to get to Uruk Hai as well.

I do really like a lot of the GW miniatures. Peter Jackson's design team is really good in that regard, and the design work itself is excellent.

So... Simply because a lot of others play the LotR SBG I will keep the selection I have of these for that purpose.

But the goal is to eventually get a line of miniatures that follow more closely how Tolkien described the world (chainmail and scale being the heaviest armor for humans, Orcs being a cross between Apes and Mongols, Orcs also being mostly only slightly larger than dwarves, no Norman, or Norse influence for the Edain cultures - The Norse are one of the groups of "Easterlings" to the Edain, and so on).

It isn't that I don't think the Jackson derived stuff isn't attractive. It just isn't really how Tolkien described it.

As for "how people imagined' what they read....

Just because you "imagine" it being some particular way does not mean this is how Tolkien imagined it, and we have statements to that effect in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth, The Art of JRR Tolkien, and Unfinished Tales.

Just like one might imagine a different appearance for the Early Imperial Roman when reading the accounts of The Dacian Wars, but what they imagined might be wholly different from the depictions of the Roman Legionaires as depicted on Trajan's Column, or other classical artworks of the period.

The fact is... We have fairly detailed descriptions of a good many of the troops in Middle-earth. Jackson did a good job of depicting some of them (Rohirrim, Easterlings - to a degree, Dwarves in the first Trilogy, and if the Elves had straight double-edged swords even they would be fairly close to Tolkien's own paintings), yet really dropped the ball on others (Gondor, Haradrim, The swords of the Elves, all of the Elves in these last movies, and pretty much all the Orcs and "Goblins" - he had a pretty good reason for why he went with the orcs as he did, but even there he could have found a way to come closer to the mark with the proper marketing).

MB

I don't want to derail this into a "was Tolkien a racist" or not argument, but I think even if he wasn't explicitly racist, he definitely (like most people of his time, of course) had racist leanings.

That doesn't automatically make him a terrible person, if he never acted on these thoughts, in my view. I mean, I'm racist too. I get uncomfortable around black african men. I know I do. It doesn't make me a terrible person, it's a subconscious thing, but it is there none the less. I am pretty prejudiced against Irish Gypsies based on experience and upbringing, and that is again something I have to check myself for. I imagine that Tolkien was somewhat the same, but his biases might have gone a little more under his own radar for being more acceptable at the time. I didn't know he'd come out strongly against it later in life, that's cool, but it also doesn't erase the racist undertones of his work.

I hope that makes my POV clearer- I don't want to totally derail the thread with this, but I felt maybe you took something more negative than I meant from what I wrote.

And as to what Tolkien imagined vs. what I imagine, I'm cool with it being different. My imagined Middle Earth was based on how I interpreted his writing through the lens of my experience, and whether I took certain bits very seriously or not that he described. If my Middle Earth is "inaccurate" it doesn't bother me at all. Though I commend your commitment to fidelity in that matter.

Hmm. I still see easterlings, wainriders, balchoth etc. as analogous to huns, sassanids, mongols, early Islamic forces etc. etc. threatening the eastern edges of Europe as a whole; as opposed to 'anyone east of Cantware'. (Heck, if that was the case, a few hundred years earlier all those Angles and Jutes pretty much fit the description too. Not to mention the earliest versions of Tolkien's legendarium - wasn't Eriol the father of Hengist and Horsa, visiting 'the Lonely Isle' [Britain] before his sons' invasion?)

The "Easterlings" are actually a collection of people's, which varied significantly through the Ages of Middle-earth.

In the First Age the Easterlings were Vikings (probably Danes). If you look at the names they had, and where they came from (Eriador, and not "Rhûn"), the Easterlings in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad were in fact the ancestors of the Dunlendings and Rhuduar Hill Men.

We don't hear of "Easterlings" again until the end of the Second Age and the beginning of the Third Age.

And here, they are a mixture of Hun, Bulgar, Magyar, and Mongol. But it is interesting that Tolkien used the word "Variag" for the Easterlings who settled Khand, to the SE of Mordor. The word is a synonym for "Vikings," but more specifically for the Rus (The Russian, and thus "Easterling" Vikings/Norse). The word "Variag" also has Sanskrit origins and relations that make the cultural associations for the Khandirim more Easterly than Northern, but there are still deep connections between the Rus and the more Easterly Steppe people's.

Sassanids would be closer to Umbarrim, or Haradrim, as Tolkien used the Semitic Levant as the basic template for Haradrim, and the Persians and Arabs would be about as "Harad" as you could get, with the more civilized of the Southrons being established with the prior Númenórean colony of Umbar.

We also have some Chinese and Indian influences in the Easterlings (specifically the Wainriders and Balchoth) where Tolkien describes their nobles traveling and sometimes fighting in/from Chariots - spreading of which... I have a chariot miniature for the Jackson Easterlings that I need to get printed and in a Shapeways shop, at least until GW tells me to quit it).

So... Even though they have some sort of terrestrial analog, the one thing that Jackson did right was his attempt to create original cultures (even though he kind of failed in some of the particulars, specifically with the Haradrim) rather than depict them explicitly as a terrestrial culture. He probably needed to stick just a bit closer to some of our ancient cultures than he did.

MB