As I mentioned in a previous post, I managed to pick up this old Citadel miniature of the Mouth of Sauron off of eBay which I thought looked pretty cool. He didn't take particularly long to paint up as he is a fairly simple sculpt, but I had an absolute blast doing it. It's got me really excited to start getting into some more miniatures from Middle-Earth!
I painted him in fairly muted colours (similar to my Mordor stuff), except for the eyes upon his chest and his helmet to provide both a striking spot colour and to remind his underlings that he speaks with the conviction of the Dark Lord himself. I was surprised to find that the sculpt was of decent quality for its age, though the eye patterning on the fringes of his robes and the bridle of his horse were not particularly well defined so I struggled to do my best at picking them out. There was also text sculpted onto the scroll of the dismounted Mouth, but the detail wasn't great and got lost under a few layers of paint, which allowed me to just write over it. I must also admit I was surprised at how big he is. I was expecting him to be of a weird, smaller scale due to being an older miniature but in reality he seems to more or less at the same scale as modern LOTR miniatures. On foot he does appear about the same height as GW's Black Numenorians, so just a bit taller than most men, fitting as the Mouth of Sauron is believed to hail from that race.
As I already have a Mouth of Sauron miniature, I like to think of this guy as another, similar emissary of the Dark Lord. In the books at the Council of Elrond, the dwarves reveal that an emissary from Mordor offered them a ring of power in exchange for the location of Bilbo Baggins, and while I think this may have been an early allusion to the Mouth of Sauron himself, it could have been one of a number of Sauron's mortal thralls whose job it is to travel beyond beyond Mordor bearing the word of the Dark Lord. Whether this might be to deliver terms to Sauron's enemies, or to muster armies like the evil men who owe their fealty to Mordor, I like to think of this guy as one of many emissaries of evil to sally forth from Barad-dur in the third age. Consequently I think that I'll use him in game as the Mouth of Sauron, but as an allied unit in other evil armies rather than in my Mordor army itself; to represent him gathering, threatening, and relaying orders to the other dark powers of Middle-Earth.
Now that he is finished I'm ready and raring to go with my existing Middle-Earth collections. I've taken stock of what I've got and made some plans as to what I'd like to do with it, and I've decided that my first big project will be my 1000 point Isengard force as I don't plan on adding any more miniatures to it. Its as big an army as I think I need and there aren't really any other miniatures in the range I want. I think I'll also potter around with my Moria and Rohan stuff, laying the foundations for expanding those forces several months down the line, so check back on the blog soon for more Middle-Earth miniatures.
