the Hunt for the Oliphaunt part 1

Oliphaunt  by Alan Lee

I started building an army for Harad by accident really. I was looking for a project to get my teeth in to. I had half-heartedly started a small a force of Anglo Saxons for SAGA but was finding it a bit of a grind. My partner had bought me Foundry’s lovely Romano Brit cavalry as a Christmas present, as soon as I saw them, I had a vision of them in a nice bright red. I had no idea how I would use them but I just liked the aesthetic. It was only while I was painting them that I thought of using them as Haradrim. And so was born my first unit of ”Harad heavy cavalry”. I whipped off a few heads and replaced them with some from the Gripping Beast Arab cavalry that I had bought on a whim one Saturday afternoon from a model shop in Salisbury and boom there they were. Scarlet themed with “brazen scaled“ armour and yellow and black round shields with spiked bosses they are very striking, and, for the first time ever, I painted the eyes on my figures. Some are a bit starey but mostly am pleased with the effect.
 One great strength about Tolkien’s writing, is that he does not provide intricate detail about the action or minutiae of appearance or equipment. He waxes lyrical about the flowers in the hedgerows and the “feel of the season” but rarely does he include description of dress or uniform and I think this allows each reader to “fill in” their own details, to colour their own interpretation of Middle Earth each according to his own imagination and vision.

   

a bit starey?

What next then? I have never had the slightest interest in collecting a Harad army but once I started thinking about it I realised it was just the project I needed. Tolkien wrote very little about Harad so there is plenty of room for imagination and a wide scope for using different troop types. There are many manufacturers producing high quality plastic figures from just about every arena of pre-gunpowder conflict allowing endless combinations of heads and legs and torsos and weapons.The ethnicity is kind of generic Middle East I guess, it’s the culture, the essence, that’s hard to pin down. Sort of Arabic but not quite. Some deep dark African elements.There really is so little information to be gleaned from the original text that just about anything goes.

Then there are the Variags of Khand, but what they are or what they look like is anyone’s guess. When I first read LOTR I imagined them as monstrous beasts, bat winged apes with human faces, however, GW and most other gamers seem to represent them as charioteers or light horse archers. I’m thinking I will go along with the horse archer vibe as I just happen to have a box of GB light Arab cavalry. They will need some work tho because they have to appear to be not from our Earths history, to carry as it were, an essence of otherworldliness or maybe Middleearthliness

Then there are the Easterlings, swarthy, stout, bearded axeman clad in chain mail. I am thinking of using Victrix triarrii for this, because the armour looks so different to Dark Age mail. I would use different heads of course, hairy, pointy helmet, big beards and the biggest axe I can realistically get away with.

There are the scarlet clad spear armed infantry, again in brazen scaled armour with round yellow and black shields. I am using Fire forge byzantine spear men, replacing the shields with round ones with spiked bosses (greenstuff). Fireforge have just released a Byzantine auxilary set featuring a nice armoured archer which, once it’s been Middleartherised, will also fit nicely within the scheme.

Viktrix Libyan Javelins

I will have to find a role for Perrys Azerbaijan swordsman because they are gorgeous, Victrix Libyan javelin men because I know they belong and I need to find a nice over scale Zulu type to represent the black men with white eyes and red tongues “like half trolls”

Perry Azerbaijan Infantry

Quite a project.

And then there are the Mumakil!

I have looked at every 28 mm war elephant on the market. There are some nice-looking ones such as Aventine, and some silly ones such as Essex. A lot of them look as if they are made of candy or like they could be the stuffed toys that are given as prizes at fair grounds. Victrix and Aventine have nice poses and look good, most of the others Gripping Beast, Warlord, Essex, Foundry look a bit, well, silly. All of them are far too small to represent the Mumak of Harad, a” beast of vast bulk and the like of him does not walk now in Middle Earth; his kin that live in latter days are but memories of his girth and majesty” (LOTR Two Towers of Herbs and stewed rabbit)

War elephants from Aventine, nice aesthetic, but beasts of vast bulk?

Gripping Beat Timurid War Elephant, a bit silly really?

I have to say I am not a big fan of the PJ/GW aesthetic. I am always trying to recreate the world that opened in my head when I first read LOTR all those long years ago. When I first saw the films, I was impressed by PJs vision but it was not my own. Some of it I liked- the take on the Uruk Hai was unexpected and thought provoking, the Rohirrim were pretty much perfect  as and Anglo Saxon themed horse people and the city of Minas Tirth was excellent. However, a lot of it was awful. Elves that march in cadenced step and appear at Helms Deep, the whole Elf thing really. The daft, dull Gondorian armour. The small but significant plot changes. And the Mumakil! I could accept the multiple tusks, why not? But the ridiculous size of the beasts completely overcame my brains ability to suspend disbelief, and without that, the magic was gone. And for all their size a horse woman could ride between their legs and sever the tendons of both rear legs with a single back stroke while riding away from them! Never mind the improbability of the size what about the rules of kinetics? And then to disappear beneath a CGI Tsunami of green snot. Poor, sad, dreadful stuff.

All I was thinking was ”this is wrong, it wasn’t like that” How much better would it have been if the war elephants were just that. Huge angry elephants, of realistic but massive proportion, wreaking havoc and causing destruction, crushing all before them and creating genuine fear and mayhem; instead of a state of disbelief.
So, what then? Where to find this beast of vast bulk. Build one? Would that I possessed such sculpting skills. How big was the Oliphaunt? For that matter, how big are normal elephants? I thought if I could perhaps gain a frame of reference I could maybe discover model elephants in a different scale that I could use.
What was in Tolkien’s mind when he considered the elephant? One of the annotations on the famous Pauline Baynes map of middle earth states “elephants, like those used by Pyrrhus in Italy”. These then, were of the popularly imagined kind. You know, huge Indian elephants with war towers as opposed to the Hannibalic variety which were small African forest elephants and probably ridden by one person. 




annotated map of Middle Earth

In his letters he describes them as “A large eliphant of prehistoric size” his typo, not mine!

But at the moment they are in Ithilien (which is proving a lovely land); there has been a lot of bother about stewed rabbit; and they have been captured by Gondorians, and witnessed them ambushing a Swerting army (dark men of South) marching to Mordor’s aid. A large eliphant of prehistoric size, a war elephant of the Swertings, is loose, and Sam has gratified a life-long wish to see an Oliphaunt, an animal about which there was a hobbit nursery-rhyme (though it was commonly supposed to be mythical.) Tolkien - letters

How big are elephants anyway? How big is the biggest? A bit of googling reveals an enthralling story from 1956 concerning the hunt for the biggest elephant of modern times by a Hungarian born, Spanish business man and big game hunter Jose Fenykovi. Fenykovi tracked and killed his elephant which measured “Height From ground to withers,13 feet 2 inches, Length From trunk tip to tail tip in straight line, 27 feet 6 inches; whole skin from trunk tip to tail tip, 33 feet 2 inches.” So pretty big. Well worth a read.

the biggest elephant killed with a gun  

Fenykovi and his elephant

Mumak size? Not so much.

But Tolkien mentioned prehistoric. How big did those bad boys grow? You see, it was in my mind that maybe I could find a manufacturer of prehistoric animals that might have something I could use. Maybe there is a museum somewhere that sells a toy that would serve. For me the Oliphaunt has to be believable and therefore of a believable size, massive, of course, bigger than anything we could experience, but also believably sustainable of life. We know that prehistoric elephants were truly gigantic so would be perfect as Mumaks. Like Fenykovi, I set off into the forest of the internet on the trail of my own gigantic elephant.

The contenders for the worlds largest elephant ever which have enough mortal remains to reliably estimate their size are the Songhua River Mammoth 17 feet at shoulder and Paleoloxodon Namadicus a more modest 16 feet or so and weighing in at about 24 tons
largest elephant ever? 

A mammoth of gigantic proportions

However…..no matter how hard I looked I could not find a single one represented as a figure in an appropriate size anywhere. What to do?

Then my erstwhile partner, now my wife, who uses toy therapy in her work with children with behavioural problems, mentioned the rubber toy elephants that she had seen at the early learning centre. And an idea was born.

I searched the net and found several companies making realistic looking toy elephants. I needed one that would appear to be about 16-18 foot at the shoulder I had set my limits and any bigger would appear unfeasible.

Comparison of prehistoric monster elephant with Fenykovi's record making African elephant and human

28mm figures are variously described as between 1/56 and 1/64 scale depending on whether you measure from eye level or top of the head, which manufacturer produces the figure and which source you read. Based on this, I estimated that a 1/40 scale elephant would give me the size I wanted. I searched 1/40 toy elephant and found several reasonable candidates. Schleich African Female (£7.49) Papo large African (£7:79) and two others for similar prices. I bought ‘em.

Papo's African Male v Haradrim 16-18 foot?