Remembering PRESTAGS

Most Awesome & Brilliant Actor Ever - John Noble

John Noble - brilliant actor and really nice guy.

My two favourites roles:

Denethor - Lord of the Rings.

Walter Bishop - Fringe.

 

Spoilt Rotten On Christmas Day

I was really spoilt on Christmas Day. Perhaps because I am recuperating I got all of my favourites: Turkey, BBQ Pork, Roast Potatoes with Rosemary, Coleslaw and Rich Thick Gravy. No one makes BBQ Pork like my better half. Washed down with an Australian Charddy of course.

We didn't have a pudding with brandy sauce this year, but we did have an alcoholic fruit cake with lots of thick cream.

I got some really cool presents, with an emphasis on Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Who wants to grow up.

The Look

The look, when you realise that Francis has the ring.

Finally the big day has arrived...

With the shopping folk heading off, we can settle down to the true purpose of Boxing Day:

Followed by

and then finally warmed with a dragon!

Can dragons fly?

In a week's time we will have the conclusion of Peter Jackson's reworking of the Hobbit. There has been much added to turn such a short book into three movies, but little has been added to the dragon: he can fly, he can talk (and be arrogant, philosophical and curious), he breathes fire, and most inportantly of all, he will do anything for gold.

Exactly what Gandalf thought a hobbit was going to do about this beast is never made clear: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

But what is charming about JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth is how rarely magic is actually used. Most of the time the hero's had to make their way with cunning, endurance and at times brawn. One wonders if perhaps there is some terrible cost involved in using magic that makes the practitioners so miserly in their usage of it. So how does such a magically creature as a dragon fit in the story?

“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”

How can a dragon fly?

I think the biggest flying animal that has every lived on Earth is a Pterodactyl species called Quetzalcoatlus. With an estimated wing span of 10-11 metres and a weight of 220 kg, it would have causes much consternation to any hobbit that got close.

However, given the lightness of the hollow bones, one toss of a rock by a Hobbit would see it scuttle off quickly.

Even given its impressive dimensions, it too would have been dwarved by Smaug. Although I am not aware of a scale anywhere, Smaug would be on par with some of the bigger dinosaurs. Not quite the size of a fully grown Titanosaur at 77 tonnes (below), but certainly up there.

(One wonders why the Dwarves did not adopt the simple expedient of small doors.)

So how would a, say, 20 tonne Smaug get airborne? Answer: only with magic:

While he may have the wingspan, his muscles just cannot be big enough to generate the thrust. I suggest that in fact his wings are for gliding and magic powers his lift off and landing (and smashing through weight bearing stone architecture). Getting 20 tonnes 100 metres into the air and moving forward at a flight speed of 200 kph would cost 2 GJoules. Keeping the dragon in the air would cost something too, but I accept the wings can convert drag into lift and benefit from some up draft, particularly near mountains, but there would be some ongoing cost in energy. Landing our be expensive too, as bringing 20 tonnes flying at 200 kph to a standstill would take 1.1 GJoules, but again some of that could be drag dissipated as heat.

Gandalf smashing a stone bridge in Moria would have cost a few MJoules and it absolutely left him exhausted. A dragon taking a short flight would cost more than 1000 time that. The extravagant dragon had to be stopped before all the magic was drained from Middle Earth!

How can dragons speak?

Smaug was skilled in the Common Tongue of Middle Earth. Skilled enough to guess at Bilbo's intentions and alliances and try to turn him into acting in his (Bilbo's) self interest. Peter Jackson also credits him with having some understanding of the machinations of Sauron, hence a powerful "theory of the mind" (a facility we share with most primates and a few other mammals, but no reptiles). The mouth and throat of Smaug are always shown as very reptilian, which would almost make speech physically impossible. Peter Jackson gets around this by having the dragon communicate via mental telepathy. Again, this requires magic, but as all you need to do is redirect a few million electrons in the brain of your "listener", it might be quite cheap magic, compared to flight. (Generating the required sound waves, again with magic, would be only slightly more expensive.) There is some suggestion elves can do this too, but Gandalf can't: it would have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble if he could.

JRR Tolkien is silent on the motivation of a dragon to speak. It gained him little against Bilbo. No one else seemed to know that the dragon could speak, so it gained him little with anyone else in the story. 

Perhaps, of course, he did not speak, but instead had the ability to incite dread and hallucinations in his potential victims, much like a Cobra. Bilbo feared an enemy who knew his secret and his suspicions about the dwarfish plan. That certainly would remove the necessity of having the ability and energy to smash loading bearing stone architecture, exterminate a large tribe of dwarves in combat and panic a town of people into abandoning their burning buildings.

I do not believe JRR Tolkien wants us to think this, so I suggest that the dragon has magically grown from a smaller creature who regularly conversed with the homonids of Middle Earth, perhaps a dark wizard even.

Why do dragons want gold?

Apart from the obvious that the story would not really work if he didn't love gold, he gains nothing from it. He does not spend it (preferring to take what he wants), does not appear to consume it, and he accounts for it, as noted in the book that he was aware that a gold cup had been taken by Bilbo.

I suggest that he simply extracts his magic from it. Perhaps this is another reasonal Gandalf want some of the least magically folk, the Dwarves, to take over the Misty Mountain again - to preserve that magic for his and his fellow wizards usage. Perhaps too that is why he was angry that the Dwarves went too deep in Moria. The magic in that gold is so strong that it spawns monsters.

Epilogue

I can't wait for Boxing Day. I shall have none of my questions answered, but it should be a fun interpretation of a ripping good yarn.

Middle Earth and Hexes!

Two of my favourite topics on one web site! I stumbled on this site at work, so thought to book mark it here so I can explore it at home:

6 hexes on this screen shot alone and loads of other hexes in Middle Earth that can be clicked. This is a must explore site!

http://middle-earth.thehobbit.com/map/thranduils-hall

BTW, I think you need Google Chrome to see this site:

Work Sux

We must remember to be warm and caring

We need to start the weekend with a group hug!

How many days to go, Bilbo?

How to make Hobbit Ears

Since a lot of webpages describe how to do casting quite thoroughly, this page is not an attempt to do so.  It's simply a quick tour through the process.  Also, a heartfelt thank-you is in order: I would have had no clue how to begin making Hobbit ears without the help and expertise of Ed Martinez, who also worked extensively on O.R.C.'s orc costume and makeup and assisted with our Gimli's facial prosthetic. Thank you, Ed! He can be emailed here.)

In the Lord of the Rings movies, Hobbits, like elves, have pointed ears.  (Actually, contrary to the popular image, Elves in Tolkien are never mentioned as having pointed ears, but Hobbits are!)  However, Hobbits are a sturdier, earthier people, and their anatomy reflects this, from their big hairy feet to their stocky frames.  Their ears, too, are less refined than those of the Fair Folk.  While an Elf's ears sweep upward to graceful, recurved points, a Hobbit's ears are wider, flatter, and the point angles backward.Originally,  I used a brand called Woochie's small "alien ears."  They worked pretty well, and show up in all the earlier photos, but are very "Elfy."  I painted them with stage make-up by hand and that was that. However, these darned people I'm doing the Baycon skit with had higher ambitions, and so the group of us took casts of our ears (and in the Dwarf's case, nose and cheekbones) in order to sculpt our own.

In this picture, Kel (who is our Merry in another life) has fitted a margarine tub with a hole cut in the bottom over my ear.  Before this, I put my hair into a swim cap, stuffed a silicon ear plug in my ear canal, and commended my soul to the Valar.  She and Judy poured alginate into the margarine tub, and Kel is busily tapping out air bubbles so we get a clean cast.  When the alginate hardens (which it does quickly), the tub is carefully worked off and there is a negative impression of my (teeny weeny) ear.

via www.scendan.com

This is a must for the boys weekend!

Python Guessed It

Yes, Python figured out the mystery of the acorn buttons. Bilbo Baggins wears them.

Thanks for the Awesome Middle Earth Present

A New Year Has Dawned

 

“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

Hobbiton

There is only one place where the movie set from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies remain in place, and that is Hobbiton. The set at Matamata in the Waikato region has now been made permanent as a tourist attraction. It amazed us with attention to detail, where a team of gardeners ensure that all the hobbit holes have beautiful real flowering gardens and vegetable patches.

Notice that the yellow flower in a pot next to Bilbo's famous green door at Bag End is still there and still flowering today.

The view across Hobbiton towards Bag End as it is today:

Bywater Mill today:

The last scene in The Return of the King at the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is Sam returning home to his family, after bidding farewell to Frodo and Bilbo at the Grey Havens.

Sam Gamgee's hobbit hole today:

We had lunch (and I had an ale) at The Green Dragon, which is now an operating pub and replica of Hobbiton's pub from the movies. Even the exit sign was in Middle Earth font!

Scenes of Middle Earth

Ringwraith

The Black Riders, or Ringwraiths, pursued Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin in The Fellowship of the Ring. In one scene a Ringwraith was silhouetted on a path at the top of a hill:

Here is the pathway and hill where the scene was filmed, at Mount Victoria in Wellington:

There is another scene where the hobbits hide under a tree, and a Ringwraith rides on the path overhead. The tree was artificial and created by WETA, although the scorpions and spiders that emerged from the Ringwraith's armour and crawled over the hobbits were real.

All that remains today is a hole near the path, above which the artificial tree was placed. This is a side on view, and is also Mount Victoria:

Forest Pathway

In an earlier scene, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin had rolled down a hill and fallen onto a pathway.

The hill and drop onto the pathway were also filmed at Mount Victoria, and here is the exact spot:

Gardens of Isengard

Before Gandalf realized that Saruman had been seduced by Sauron, he sought Saruman's counsel in the gardens of Isengard. This scene was also in The Fellowship of the Ring.

The gardens are in Harcourt Park in the Lower Hutt Valley north of Wellington:

Aragorn and Brego

In The Two Towers Aragorn is flung over a cliff into a river, where he drifts downstream. Aragorn ends up on a pebbled shore, where he is rescued by his faithful horse Brego.

Here is the exact spot where this scene was filmed:

A Train Through Middle Earth and the Thygocarriage

Yesterday we took the famous Northern Explorer train from Wellington to Auckland. This journey takes 11 hours and travels up most of the North Island. It is a brilliant way to see Middle Earth.

You have to give Kiwis credit for thinking of photographers. The last carriage in the train, which we dubbed the Thygocarriage, is an open air carriage from which photographs can be taken. I spent many hours out there and got some great shots even allowing for the moving train.

The North Island has less mountains than the South Island, but there are still amazing mountains and volcanoes, and snow in the middle of summer. The entire trip all of the landscape was hilly and completely green. This is so unlike Australia, which has lots of flat and lots of dry.

This photo is pure Middle Earth. It could be a scene from The Two Towers:

The train crossed over some huge aquaducts with views down into the gorges below:

Wow, a volcano:

The amazing thing is that airfares from Australia to New Zealand are very cheap, so NZ is a great holiday option. I wish we had visited years ago.

Super Computers and Trolls

We are having a great time in New Zealand and have visited many of the sites around Wellington where scenes from The Lord of the Rings were filmed.

We have driven past the famous Stone Street Studios, which is now closed up for Christmas. The giant outdoor green screen wall is clearly visible.

We also drove past WETA Digital, where there are blue cooling towers on the roof to deal with the enormous processing power of their computers and graphics. Now THAT is what I call a graphics card.

The WETA Cave was a highlight and a mecca for Tolkien memorabilia. Serious damage was done to the wallet at the Cave, and I got some nice t-shirts for Python and Thygocanberra.

There is a famous photograph of Legolas that was used for the marketing of The Lord of the Rings movies. Take note of the tree on his left.

We visited this tree! Awesomeness for die hard LOTR fans.

Love Their Work

The emails I receive from Air New Zealand still bring a smile to my face every time.

 

Gollum in Wellington

I have been checking out airport transport options in preparation for a planned holiday in Wellington, New Zealand.

When I visited Auckland airport last week there was the awesomeness of the Giant Dwarf Statue.

I have now learned that not only does Wellington Airport have a great Middle Earth logo, but there is a giant Gollum to look forward to.

This sculpture was built by Weta Workshop. I obtained the following information from the Wellington Airport newsletter for March 2013:

I can't wait to see this.

He Strode as a Giant Among the Geeks: OSDC 2013

I always intended to report upon the OSDC in Auckland. Thygocanberra has requested that I report upon: “how did NZ trip go? victories? triumphs? feasts? spoils?”. There were indeed all of these things, and more.

AWESOMENESS

I have already posted as to the awesomeness of travelling to New Zealand on the Air NZ "Hobbit" plane. We saw some unusual aircraft on our journey, but nothing came close to the Hobbit plane which boldly proclaimed itself "The Airline of Middle Earth".

TRIUMPHS

The conference itself was well organized and a success. For a lawyer attending a hard core geeks convention I found it surprisingly enjoyable and genuinely interesting.

The triumph was PythonMagus, who strode through the conference as a giant among geeks. The Python's talk "Creating Masterpieces with Raphael" was the highlight of the whole conference, and I got a massive buzz seeing PRESTAGS Moderni Agone on the big screen. We met an intense young developer who told us after the talk that he has been working on a computer game for three and a half years. The Python completed MA in three months. Even in the small photograph on the below left one can recognise PRESTAGS Moderni Agone.

After his talk the Python was able to relax a bit, however he still maintained 'the stance'. That is the stance of triumph, which has not been seen since the cover picture for PRESTAGS Viking in 1975. The Python was also able to enter 'The Great Room', where only the great dare to venture.

FEASTS

Were there feasts? Yes, too many feasts! The formal dinner for the OSDC was held at Eden Park on the first evening of the conference. Eden Park is the most sacred place in New Zealand, and Aussies usually leave Eden Park on a stretcher, so it was a privilege to enter and survive this place. Dinner at Eden Park was great (it is hard to go wrong with a self-serve all-you-can-eat top restaurant quality smorgasbord) and the real treat was Yorkshire Pudding which I have not had in ages. I remember this pudding at the Python's wedding: is this correct?

The conference was held at the Langham Hotel in Auckland. I have stayed in quite a lot of 5 star hotels around the world and I can honestly say the Langham beat them all. I normally travel for business, and without family or friends, so perhaps I was particularly well disposed to the Langham because the circumstances were more fun. All of the food at the Langham was top notch. The morning and afternoon teas came with a huge variety of cakes and wraps. The lunches included numerous hot options, with no stinginess on the meat as is usually the case. The cheese platter was particularly memorable.

The view from my hotel window included an old red brick house among taller modern buildings. The house was now a posh French restaurant on top called "Number 5" and an earthy Italian restaurant below called "Da Vinci's". Python and I had an excellent two course Italian meal at Da Vinci's to celebrate his talk.

Feasts come in all shapes and sizes. I was well behaved on the first two mornings and had my own cereal breakfast, but on the last morning I went for the traditional hotel cooked breakfast of eggs and sausages.

The breakfast was first class. It was delivered precisely (to the second) at my nominated time of 7.15am and the poached eggs were still runny. A surprise was the toaster so that I could toast my own bread in order to achieve maximum freshness of toast. I have never encountered this before. The pot of strong freshly brewed coffee for one was enormous and I drank it all. I haven't slept since.

VICTORIES

There was a victory, and it was mine. Throughout the conference the Python and I continued our two player game of EDEE. How cool was this and how different to all the boring legal conferences I have been to over the years. Every couple of hours we would exchange turns, and even the uber geek talks with topics like "Clustering Web Apps with MariaDB & Galera" and "MySQL Roadmap, more flexibility with NoSQL API" could not hold the Python as he rushed to a quiet corner to do his move.

It was a particularly close and exciting game, and I had been rewarded with a radical opening strategy which the Python still refuses to concede is better than his opening strategy. In any event, after a particularly crushing counter move by me, the Python officially resigned in a game that he has dominated for years. It was a very satisfying victory indeed.

No PRESTAGS was played, although MI 22 and his friends did travel to New Zealand and they were remarkably well behaved.

SPOILS

The true spoils of the conference are knowledge. I learnt a lot, especially about cyber security and privacy which have always interested me. I really enjoyed a panel discussion on the second morning "Government surveillance of online communications" and the keynote address on the third day by Vikram Kumar, the CEO of Mega, which is a NZ based private cloud platform. There are so many threats to our privacy and even the geeks are struggling to hold back the ever increasing online Orwellian nightmare.

I learnt about Tor, which has a suite of applications to assist online privacy. I learnt about BeagleBone which is a credit card sized linux computer: absolutely brilliant and I want one. I don't need one but I just want one. I learnt that I cannot challenge the geeks when it comes to 'most nerdy' t-shirts or 'most nerdy' laptop stickers. I collected a lot of stickers at OSDC. But I still think my own sticker design of the linux penguin with the V for Vendetta mask was the most original at the conference.

HOME

No matter where you go or whatever you do it is always marvellous to get home. As the return flight descended over Sydney I was able to take a photograph through the window with a rather crappy camera. I am quite proud of this photograph. It captures the CBD and harbour bridge, and the bushfire haze that was still sitting over the city. Welcome back to Sydney.

Awesomeness in Auckland Airport

AAA = Awesomeness in Auckland Airport. A giant dwarf towers over the entrance hall in Auckland airport.

Totally Awesome Transport

How totally awesome: we flew to New Zealand in the Hobbit plane!

Exception to the Green Rule

Clever #1 daughter has made some gifs inspired by Australia's national dish post.

Another

Boromir Memes

The teenage children tell me that Boromir Memes have a cult following on the internet.

First, what is a Meme? It is a picture with words, which I used to call a pictogram. There are a number of 'Memes' on this website.

There is a famous line in the first "The Lord of the Rings" movie where Boromir says "One does not simply walk into Mordor ..." Apparently this is the origin of the Boromir Memes. The relevant speech is in many places on You Tube:

 

I had a quick look online and yes there are numerous Boromir Memes. Here is but a selection:

I like Boromir, so I have made a Boromir Meme of my own. It is very obscure, although PythonMagus will understand what it means.

Counting Down. Less than Four Weeks

At this time in four weeks, Python and I will be in Auckland at OSDC!

Favourite Aircraft

Favourite aircraft are these.

 

To Middle Earth Yoda wants to go.

Time For a New Emperor

Time for a new galactic emperor, Yoda says.

New leadership we need, for a new journey, to ... ...

In Memoriam: J R R Tolkien

There have been a number of posts recently about my favourite author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE.

Today is the anniversay of Tolkien's death. He died 40 years ago, on 2 September 1973, aged 81.

Both PythonMagus and Thygocanberra are also fans of Tolkien, and of his great books "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The trilogy consists of "The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King". Much has been written about Tolkien and his works, and I have read most of it. On this day I offer some random thoughts about Tolkien and my life.

When I was a young boy I used to travel to Albury to visit my grandparents. One of my oldest and happiest memories is staying in bed all morning, reading "The Lord of the Rings" for the first time, while my grandfather brought me cups of tea and bread & butter.

I also remember as a boy being intrigued by the Middle Earth alphabets in the appendices at the end of "The Return of the King". My favourite was the Dwarvish runes - the Angerthas - and I had hours of fun writing messages using these runes. I can't resist now grabbing my old copy of "The Return of the King", yes my original 1974 edition with a nice musty smell, and providing a copy of The Angerthas from Appendix 3 for any budding students of Dwarvish languages.

The world of Middle Earth created by Tolkien is so deep and so vivid that it remains in the mind like a real memory. Whereas the contents of other books fade, my imagining of Middle Earth still lives in me as fresh as it ever was. Perhaps I prefer Middle Earth to the world we live in now, and perhaps I keep Middle Earth alive by visiting it frequently in my mind.

Tolkien is one of the lucky soldiers who went to the trenches in World War I and returned. He created a code he could use in correspondence with his wife Edith to avoid the British army's postal censorship. This is pure Tolkien. He went on to invent entire languages and alphabets for the races of Middle Earth. When one thinks of the creative energy and achievements of Tolkien, only one returned soldier, the enormous tragedy of the loss of 10 million military personnel comes into perspective. The total number of casualties including wounded and civilians exceeded 37 million.

My father is an avid reader but he has never liked Tolkien's works. I wonder whether Tolkien is an author that you either love or hate. Or perhaps it is the fantasy genre that you love or hate. Tolkien has been described as the father of 'high fantasy' but I don't even know what that is. I have always been much more of a science fiction buff than a reader of fantasy novels. To me, Tolkien's creation is so unique that it deserves a category, even a genre, all of its own.

I have always admired the 'Catholicity' of Tolkien's works. For over two decades now I have attended the Traditional Latin Liturgy (the Tridentine rite, now the Extraordinary Form) and fought the good fight against modernism, and other heresies and uglinesses in the Catholic Church. Only recently I found out that Tolkien's grandson Simon Tolkien had offered the following recollection: "I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right". This is fantastic: Tolkien was a traditionalist like me!

When I was at university in the 1980s I rembering thinking how great it would be if there was a movie of "The Lord of the Rings", but I thought it would be impossible to ever translate the book to the screen. I was wrong. Special effects and computer graphics and Tolkien fans rising in the ranks of movie making all came together in 2001-2003 when Peter Jackson released the amazing trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson was, in my opinion, largely faithful to Tolkien and he managed to capture the magic of Middle Earth. The casting, the music, the cinematography, the script - it was all amazing and most Tolkien fans were not disappointed.

The Lord of the Rings movies depicted some things exactly as I had imagined: Strider / Aragorn, Gandalf, the inside of hobbit holes, and the Argonauth. I'm sure every Tolkien fan has their own list. There was only one chapter in the whole "The Lord of the Rings" that I never really warmed to, being chapter VII in "The Fellowship of the Ring": 'In the House of Tom Bombadil'. Jackson left this out of the movies and I agree with this decision. However, I don't agree with leaving out chapter VIII of "The Return of the King": 'The Scouring of the Shire'. This is one of my favourite chapters.

Last year Peter Jackson released the first of the Hobbit movies, 'An Unexpected Journey'. While it was not as serious as the Lord of the Rings movies (and neither was Tolkien's book) the movie was great fun.

Just as Tolkien interesects with many happy childhood memories, so the movies intersect with newer happy memories. I remember seeing 'The Fellowship of the Ring' with my sister on one of her rare 10 year home visits from her religious order. My memories of 'An Unexpected Journey' are associated with my daughters, and a new generation of Toklien fans.

Tolkien was happily married to Edith for over 50 years, and they had four children. Tolkien and his wife share a grave in Oxford, which includes the inscription 'Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, 1889-1971' and 'John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973'. In Middle Earth lore, Luthien was a princess who forsook her immortality for her love of the mortal warrier Beren.

Tolkien lives on, in his great books, and in the movies.

New (old) Tolkien book

Amazon blurb

The Fall of Arthur, the only venture by J.R.R. Tolkien into the legends of Arthur, king of Britain, may well be regarded as his finest and most skillful achievement in the use of Old English alliterative meter, in which he brought to his transforming perceptions of the old narratives a pervasive sense of the grave and fateful nature of all that is told: of Arthur’s expedition overseas into distant heathen lands, of Guinevere’s flight from Camelot, of the great sea battle on Arthur’s return to Britain, in the portrait of the traitor Mordred, in the tormented doubts of Lancelot in his French castle.

Unhappily, The Fall of Arthur was one of several long narrative poems that Tolkien abandoned. He evidently began it in the 1930s, and it was sufficiently advanced for him to send it to a very perceptive friend who read it with great enthusiasm at the end of 1934 and urgently pressed him, “You simply must finish it!” But in vain: he abandoned it at some unknown date, though there is evidence that it may have been in 1937, the year of publication of The Hobbit and the first stirrings of The Lord of the Rings. Years later, in a letter of 1955, he said that he “hoped to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur,” but that day never came.

Associated with the text of the poem, however, are many manuscript pages: a great quantity of drafting and experimentation in verse, in which the strange evolution of the poem’s structure is revealed, together with narrative synopses and significant tantalizing notes. In these notes can be discerned clear if mysterious associations of the Arthurian conclusion with The Silmarillion, and the bitter ending of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, which was never written.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544115899/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=whatdoesthepr-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0544115899&adid=1XQZWN41GRYY7YX3HMEV

 

 

PRESTAGS of the Rings

In 1977, SPI published "War of the Ring", a board wargame based upon JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". The game included a strategic adventure and wargame, and two related games, "Sauron" and "Gondor".

Being both an avid wargamer and a complete Tolkien fan, I purchased "War of the Ring". I still have this game, and indeed it resides it my boxes of 'the best of the best' along with (needless to say) PRESTAGS.

For fans of PRESTAGS, published two years earlier in 1975, there was a wonderful treat with "War of the Ring" (WOTR). The treat was: many of the awesome PRESTAGS counter pictures were used in the counters for WOTR. I have studied both of these epic games and I have identified ten (10) units where the same counter picture was used.

Number 1. The PRESTAGS axemen and (surprise, surprise) the WOTR Dwarves.

Number 2. The PRESTAGS archers and (again, no surprise) the WOTR Elves.

Number 3. The PRESTAGS heavy cavalry and the WOTR heavy cavalry of Rohan and Gondor.

Number 4. The PRESTAGS swordsmen and the WOTR swordsmen of Gondor.

Number 5. The PRESTAGS Improved bowmen and the WOTR Mordor Orcs bowmen.

Number 6. The PRESTAGS militia spearmen and the WOTR spearmen of Elves and Gondor.

Number 7. The PRESTAGS oriental horse archers and the WOTR Rohan horse archers.

Number 8. The PRESTAGS barbarian infantry and the WOTR Orcs (entirely appropriate).

Number 9. The PRESTAGS elephants and the WOTR Haradrim Mumakil elephants. The hobbits called these oliphaunts.

Number 10. The PRESTAGS ballista and the WOTR catapults.

There are of course many unit counters that are unique to each of PRESTAGS and WOTR, with ten examples in the following collage. However, for me there will always be a special bond between these two games, both from the great SPI at the high water mark of their game publications in the mid to late 1970s. Back when I was in high school. And mad about wargames. And mad about Tolkien. And still am.

Words of Encouragement

Favourite quotes, Yoda has. Encouragement for Messrs PRESTAGS.

For Mr Thygocanberra:

Gandalf: Breathe the free air again, my friend.
Theoden: [stands up from the throne] Dark have been my dreams of late.
[looks at his hands]
Gandalf: Your fingers would remember their old strength better... if they grasped your sword.

Theoden: So it begins.

Gamling: He leaves because there is no hope.
Theoden: He leaves because he must.
Gamling: Too few have come. We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor.
Theoden: No. We cannot. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless.

For Mr Paul:

Thorin Oakenshield: I cannot guarantee his safety.
Gandalf: Understood.
Thorin Oakenshield: Nor will I be responsible for his fate.
Gandalf: Agreed.

Thorin Oakenshield: Where did you go, if I may ask?
Gandalf: To look ahead.
Thorin Oakenshield: And what brought you back?
Gandalf: Looking behind.

Radagast the Brown: What if it's a trap?
Gandalf: It's undoubtedly a trap.
[draws his sword]

For Mr PythonMagus:

Gandalf: The board is set... the pieces are moving

Gimli: I will be dead before I see the Ring in the hands of an Elf! Never trust an Elf!

Gimli: Dwarf doors are invisible when closed.
Gandalf: Yes, Gimli, their own masters cannot find them, if their secrets are forgotten.
Legolas: Why doesn't that surprise me?

 

Strange icons these are, of Theodin, Thorin and Gandalf. What say you Messrs PRESTAGS? Blasphemous or not?

Before PRESTAGS ... there was my first wargame

I still have my first ever wargame, and I purchased it not long after I first met Maurice. I guess we are talking 40 or 40+ years ago now! Can you guess what it is? Easy:

Yes, it is Battle of the Five Armies. Check out the combat strengths for Smaug versus the other units. There are no such extreme ranges in PRESTAGS.

It may be hard to read in the image, but Smaug is 100-100-15. But there is more, because this wargame includes the absolutely classic rule (which must be a joke by the designer):

Almost half a century later the subject matter of this wargame will be included in the third instalment of Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" movies. I can't wait. The wargame included a lot of the units and characters, even a great little grey counter for Gandalf, but there were no hobbit counters. Below is Dale from the wargame map and Dale from the Hobbit movies.

This old game holds a lot of memories for me. Of the introduction of a new hobby - board wargames. And of the introduction of a new friend, also about to become a wargame addict.

In the era of early wargames like Battle of the Five Armies, they certainly weren't shy about including the name of the game in the middle of the map!

After PRESTAGS, for obvious reasons of sentimentality, this is my favourite game. And, I do believe you could play Battle of the Five Armies with PRESTAGS, albeit without Smaug!