ALL72011

Although it is not uncommon for there to be legends of warriors rising from the dead, sometimes to answer a call in the hour of their country's greatest need, this set seems firmly based on the Army of the Dead in the Lord of the Rings books. These are men of the White Mountains who were cursed to live as undead after they broke an oath. For our purposes then these are men of more-or-less medieval appearance, and as such they are the closest to being useful for the real world than anything that had gone before in this range. Indications of their not-dead, not-alive status are that the faces are vaguely skeletal in appearance, and that their clothing is not in good repair. Frankly however the faces at this scale look pretty reasonable to us, and if you were to paint them in living, fleshy colours then we think no one would be any the wiser. Some of the limbs have a slightly emaciated look to them too, but again nothing that would really notice if painted as living flesh. The tattered clothes is even easier, since it is perfectly reasonable to imagine men getting into such a condition after a long campaign, and indeed such dishevelled individuals make a welcome addition to medieval armies, which in most sets are modelled to look very neat and at their best.

There is much mail here, plus some very chunky lamellar and some quilted clothes, and the helmets are of various designs, some more historic and some more fanciful. So some individuals may be better suited than others to a given medieval project, but with little effort most could be put to some use. The weapons are mostly quite useable too, although the sling soon disappeared in the medieval period. There are some simple round shields, so there is much that would work for real history, although the quivers on the back of the archers belong solely to fantasy. The poses are the usual sort of thing for medieval figures, and not too bad, although many of the long-handled weapons are badly held. Sculpting is pretty good, but there is some flash in places here.