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TurnerMohan — Snow Trolls
#lordoftherings #tolkien #trolls
Published: 2015-05-15 09:10:42 +0000 UTC; Views: 35052; Favourites: 538; Downloads: 156
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the snow trolls, while they receive only one brief, oblique reference in all of tolkien's work (helm hammerhand, stalking out of the hornburg by night to attack the dunlandings, is compared to them) nonetheless provide me with this mental image that is so wonderfully, classically, well... trollishthe "troll family" is a popular and enduring staple of northern european folklore; we see them all the way from the great jotuns of ancient norse mythology to the devious creatures of 19th century fairy-tale collections, to the fearsome northern giants in the "song of ice and fire" universe, and the picture painted, though varied, is on the whole strikingly consistent; primitive, mysterious, lumbering creatures, ancient, human-like but not so, often giant and immensely strong, sometimes magical, often (though not always) antagonistic, usually pretty dim (or perhaps simply slow and thorough in consideration by the standards of 'hasty' humans) I think tolkien must have had a great fondness for trolls as a fictional construct - no less so perhaps than for dwarves or elves - seeing in them an ancient and multifaceted element of the norse myths (and their victorian nursery-rhyme descendants) that he was so inspired by, so much so that, unlike with other classic "villainous" creatures of northern european folklore like dragons, goblins or wolves, he could not, it seems, write them off as wholly evil, instead populating his fictional world with a broad diversity of "trolls;" the greenman-like ents (an abbreviation of "etten," the rohirric (read, anglo-saxon) version of the norse "jotun" or 'giant') the stone hurling giants of the misty mountains, the trio bilbo encounters (come down south from the "etten-moors") the formidable bruisers of morgoth and sauron's armies, even (as discussed elsewhere ) the neanderthal-like pukel-men, might all be said to be types of trolls, and conform, to varying degrees, to the traits commonly attributed to trolls in germanic tradition.
Most artistic depictions of trolls (my own included) owe a great debt to the work of the "golden age" illustrators, particularly John Bauer, who's late 19th century paintings pretty well established the cannon of troll aesthetics (squat, wide faces, heavy, powerful frames, tiny beady eyes, tusk-like teeth, gigantic noses) that nearly everyone has riffed on since. I saw little point to deviate from it for these; one of the great pleasures of tolkien's take on pre-existing germanic fantasy creatures (like the mighty "alfir"-like elves or the dwarves) is just how easily it seems they could walk right out of stories like the elder edda (or the three billy goats gruff) into middle-earth and back again. Working within that established cannon, it was my intention (as is often the case) to try and lend some biological credibility to my specimens; I envision them sort of like (vaguely) humanoid wooly mammoth-type creatures, with a lot of fat and hair for insulation, creatures built to walk around naked in the frozen wastes of the far north, sniffing the air through their huge nostrils (the overall shape of their heads were inspired by that theory that ancient men believed the skulls of mammoths to be those of giants and cyclopses)
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Comments: 68
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One race of trolls was resistant to sunlight and served Sauron in his armies attacking Gondor.
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They`re called black trolls....some are capable of using black magic.They were perhaps the greatest achievement of Sauron the maia...
The warlord of Minhiriath was a hideous mutation created by Sauron out of elvish & trollish blood....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OomkOr…
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This reminds me of a book called "Giants" I had as a child - this is remarkable work, across the board.
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Love them! Great homage to Bauers' I like the way they don't look necessarily evil... nor good. Just "another" biological entity, perfectly fit for that cold, harsh, environment: The analogy with wooly mammoths is very appropriate. The seen to be very capable of being dangerous if threatened, but not primarily belligerent against humans.
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Great work. They look so quintessentially trollish.
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I was reminded that some others have a similar vein of thought regarding trolls & giants, in this case the Finnish artist Mara999.
zeonista.deviantart.com/art/Ga…
mara999.deviantart.com/art/The…
mara999.deviantart.com/art/Bil…
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Oh I love this, I automatically thought of Scandinavia and Scandinavian myths when I saw it. Love the atmosphere and the snow.
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Applying biological principles to fantastical beings and environments can be a real challenge, and you did a good job with it here! Bravo!
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than you, that was my aim here and i'm glad you think it's a success
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Love 'em. As a Norwegian, these feels very similar to the ones I grew up seeing in story books. Huge, primitive, and with an air of ancientness about them, as if they were the remains of some kind of antedeluvian (or pre-ice age) world before humans.
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In my experience antediluvian is actually Pre-Great Flood not Pre-Ice Age. It is a term originating in Christian theology. A fact which fits well with the way troll tales slowly intermingled with Christianity as it was introduced.
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Really splendid work Master Mohan; not only do these two giants look almost platonically trollish, they look downright intimidating to boot (something that is occasionally hard to impress, given our familiarity with the classic Trollish look - I sometimes wonder if Genius lies in being able to make the old feel new as much as much as in innovation).
Being true to myself, however, I was also moved to wonder just what vulgar recriminations must be flying through the head of that poor snow-man lying in the foreground: "It's snowing, the trolls are out and my manhood is hip-deep in permafrost - just where did my life go wrong?!?" (I'll let you in on a secret - he wasn't thinking "Hip-deep").
Please accept my congratulations once again Master Mohan for making the old-school Classic, not cliche.
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if by "just" you mean a couple dozen times in the last few years, yup
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Reminds me how awesome the movie Troll-hunter was,all the trolls were really classical looking in it.
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loved troll hunter, very cool little movie and perfect trolls.
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If these are Arda's trolls, then I think they're a wee bit too big. At most they are usually 10-12 feet tall in Tolkien's lore. Then again I might be wrong.
And while we're on the subject, have you thought that Trolls were just really big orcs, like how the Goblins are small orcs. Seems to make sense to me at least from a meta perspective, since Tolkien barrow both creatures from then already established fantasy for his own lore.
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the trolls always gave me the impression of being (roughly) twice a man's height, 10-12 ft range as you say, however ents who, while it's unclear if they are actually related to trolls (treebeard says that trolls were made in imitation of ents the way orcs were of elves) are atleast considered troll-like in some ways, and those can be larger (treebeard i believe is supposed to be about 14 feet tall, with several younger more hale ents being quite a bit taller) while the mountain giants who hurl stones over the heads of thorin & co could be far larger still. again it is never specified whether they are in any way related to trolls like bert tom or bill, but those do come from the "etten (or "giant") moors", and trolls and giants are often overlapped in ancient mythology (take for example the way that trolls in nordic folktales are supposed to be able to smell the blood of christians, and compare it to the rhyme of the man eating giant in "jack and the beanstalk"). I like the idea of "trolls" rather than simply a specific species, as this kind of wide range of creatures, who might therefore be a wide range of sizes and shapes. we never get to see a snow troll in tolkien's world, but I very much enjoy the idea of them as these huge (much bigger than the trolls in active service to mordor) basically freerange creatures, lost up in the far reaches of the forodwaith beyond the grey mountains.
whether or not the trolls are actually warped descendents of the ents (who are themselves, upon close re reading, described as rather humanoid creatures of flesh, not man-shaped trees as in the films' designs) i think a common origin between trolls and orcs is somewhat unlikely, not that tolkien ever fully consolidated any of this to his own satisfaction (the "origin of species" of the orcs themselves remained an unresolved question for him until he died, though most fans (myself included) seem to prefer the "perverted elves" explanation offered in the silmarillion) and i imagine that the more intelligent, wicked olog-hai of the third age are perhaps the result of experimental cross breeding between trolls and orcs or possibly even men (as saruman does with orcs and men in isengard)
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I agree with your discussion of size with Trolls : I bet that like Ents and Orcs they come in very different shapes and size, the oldest being extraordinary tall while others are just half-taller than a normal man.
Tolkien is actually even more elusive on the Troll's origins than he is for the Orcs. Some could believe that they were created by perverting the Ents (I know people who think that the creation of the Olog-haï in the Third Age is related to the dissapearance of the Entwives... which is possible though quite sad). Tolkien suggested at one point that they were made out of rocks and mud (which fit with the fact that they can be turned back in stone and that their rear-end is hard like "the roots of the mountains") but also that they could be a kind of animal that Morgoth took and perverted like he did with the Orcs (even attributing them some reptilian features like scales and the lack of fingers... even though the first feature is questionnable and the second one not existing among the sole reptiles). His last (to the date) thougts of the question were apparently that they were a perverted kind of primitive humanoïds (quite like you so) which will make the scales of the Lord of the Rings armors and not skin. And Tolkien did also suggest that they could have different origins (just like Orcs in fact).
So with all that considered, I think your approach, looking after his literrary and mythological interpretations more than after his actual writings is the best one for inspirations.
The tallest kind does fit very well with my head-canon on the Snow Trolls. We have very few informations about them but my belief is that they lived in the far North (nothing original here : snow = cold = north) and that they are a legend of the ancestors of the Rohirrim when they used to live in the northern part of the Anduin Vale. Something that seem really far in the green lands of Rohan and is just used by them as some sort of local middle-earthian boogeyman.
But one could believe that in the time of Fram they were actually a real thing that a lone rider could meet during a cold winter trip. And that, just like the Lossoth and the Dragons (who also live up north) and maybe the white wolves of Forochel, they may have been a reminder of the Greater Evil who ruled in the North before Sauron. Then, if the Snow Trolls really are fugitives from Angband's realm, it is likely that they will be one of the biggest type of Trolls since in Middle-Earth older = bigger.
However, if I entirely agree with your argumentation and think that drawing is truly awesome (the feel of the snowstorm is very good for me as are the white eyes of the Trolls), I am struggling to integrate these Trolls in your realistic Middle-Earth : they are not as exaggerated in their proportions as John Bauer's but they still look too "fary-talish" to me. The nose especially is too long and the forehead too small (it almost looks to me as if they had no space for a brain instead of space for a small -for their size- brain as they should have). I would have preffered (not artistically but out of coherency with your actual closeness with our own world) something more "neandertalish" and less "johnbauerish". If I may...
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oh and also, it might interest you to know i just started work on a painting featuring ents (and an entwife) from the elder days, before they became so knotted up and "treeish" as treebeard puts it. the word ent simply means "giant" (from etten-jotun) and it is my belief (which i intend to argue via the painting and the accompanying text) that, rather than moving creatures of wood, as they have been presented by most tolkien-illustrators and the films (and subsequentially have been accepted by basically everyone) the "tree shepherds" of are not trees at all but creatures of flesh; sub-creations of yavanna (as dwarves were of aule) and like the dwarves kind of a not-quite-spot-on interpretation of what the children of illuvatar would look like. creatures that could perhaps be physically perverted by morgoth (or merely imitated by him) into something that look like these two snow trolls; "good trolls" basically (like the part in the hobbit where gandalf idly wonders if he can find a "good giant" to block off the perilous mountain pass) i get an increasing sense from careful re-readings that that's what tolkien meant for them to be.
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Oh yes I am indeed interested in seeing that !
When reading you it came to me that what Bilbo considered to be stupidness with the Trolls is just the evil-version of the Ents's slowness. Ents could, after all, be made of "eath things" just like Dwarves and Trolls (and Adam) and opposite to both they don't need to eat but just to drink. I guess the slowness of the Ents, their ability to meditate for days (weeks ? months ? years ? centuries ?) just standing in the forest, and their age (that made their wrinkled skin look like bark is what make them "treeish" and not their inner nature.
And do you now know where you will be between the 9th and 16th of july ?
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yes the "stupid" trolls are said to be slow on the uptake in the hobbit and, side-taking aside, the same could very easily be said of the ents (or of ghan buri ghan's people) it seems a classic trait of "trolls/giants" (in the larger mythological sense of the words, not only as applied to middle-earth) and ents and trolls are both definitely members of the troll "species," as fictional creatures go. adressing the treeish/carnal composition of ents, i would highly reccommend reading the last comment in this forum scifi.stackexchange.com/questi… which i came across the other day after searching for "ents are not trees," I don't know if i entirely agree with the poster, and as an illustrator i like to look for opportunities for biological plausibility wherever possible, but it's one of the best comments, demonstrating a very thorough and formidable understanding of where tolkien was coming from in his fiction, that i've ever come across.
sadly, in answer to your question, by that time in july i will most likely be on the other side of the world (either in fiji, where a guy i recently did some work for just moved and has offered me a place to stay) or in new zealand (where i hope to meet another tolkien fan artist from here on deviant) so we'll miss eachother this time i'm afraid, but changing situations in new york have put me in a wandering kind of mood, and with any luck it wont be too long before i find myself returning to europe for a spell. we'll catch eachother somewhere, i'm confident
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So where did you go finally this summer ?
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I'm glad to hear you agree with my methods (and their results) of thinking about and depicting the "trolls" of middle-earth; going on tolkien's influences in myth and folk tales rather than driving myself crazy trying to figure out a way that creatures possibly descended from ents (or men or animals) could be made of the "stuff of the earth" and have scales and toe-less feet.
Honestly i really liked taking the opportunity to try and insert some classic, even cartoony aspects of fairy-tale troll designs (like the huge noses or small, flat brain-pans) into a realistically rendered image, as these were creatures you could see in a national geographic. i can see them existing alongside the otherwise very realistic look and feel of middle-earth, but it's great when you take a very realistic (aesthetically) fantasy like middle-earth and, just occasionally, make it bend toward the realm of fairy tale. I don't know if i'd do so with creatures like the olog-hai or the bodyguard of gothmog, I'd probably make those more hellish and frightening, without such huge noses but for these guys - and i guess in part this is because the snow trolls are so obscure, taking place way out on the margins of middle-earth, and on the northern margins, where the world of the grey mountains and fram's people and the beornings and eskimo/sami people-type forodwaith and the flightless worms like scatha comes to feel like a world purely of nordic legend - it just seemed right to go all the way. also, on a biological level, the fact that they're purely northern, cold-weather creatures kind of served for me as a justification for the huge fleshy, bulbous (rather than cavernous, like people who live in desert climates have) noses. I gave two more or less identical specimines for the purpose of seeing the front view and profile of their heads; the one facing straight ahead is a little foreshortened, causing their backward-sloping foreheads to appear even smaller on him, but as you can tell from the one in profile, there's room for a brain in there.
It's interesting (and kind of rewarding for me) that you say you would have preferred a more neanderthal-like and less baueresque portrayal, i guess you know my tastes and influences pretty well at this point, as both neanderthals and bauer-trolls (and the desire to kind of meet the two halfway) were at the very front of my mind while designing these, and in addition to mammoths, brown bears, apes, proboscus monkeys and giant sloths, this particular neanderthal sculpture lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1Bd… (which looks for all the world like it could have been the very being caricatured by bauer and his peers into figures like the troll mother and her three sons) was a great influence on my painting of these two, as well as for my portrayal of the Wood Woses . for those, being ultimately a type of human, i played it alot closer to the letter with making them neanderthal-like creatures, but with the trolls it was fun (and felt very trollish) to use many of the same neanderthal features but bend and expand them into heads and bodies of something more like elephantine size and facial proportions.
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Well I'm also with you on the idea that "Trolls" and "Ents" are basically words for "bad giant" and "good giant" and I'm okay with the idea that the Trolls of the Hobbit, the Silmarillion and the LotR are not all made of the same mold : the idea of creatures of "stuff of the earth" hungry for sheep and covered in scales is pretty odd. So I'm okay with them having very differnt looks depending of their nature : the bodyguard of a Balrog calls for a more serious drawing than Bill, Bert and Tom.
About enjoying the cartoony aspects : I know you do. Being after coherency (which is logical since my miniatures are designed to appear all side by side on the same battlefield) I do not have the same visual goals than you have. Your way of drawing something quite coherent but with exceptions seems, in fact, closer to the text : the LotR is some kind of patchwork of different litterary genres : some chapters are written like epic sagas (The Batlle of Pelennor Fields), some are vaudevillesque parodies of the english bourgeoisie (A long excepected party), some are written like horror books (The Barrow Downs) and one chapter (The Scouring of the Shire) is quite close to an orwellian dystopia. If I was to chose the illustrations of the Lord of the Rings I would love to have one (not many for the sake of a minimum coherency still) painter able to do different styles of illustrations according to the different styles of drawings.
As for guessing your inspirations, I deserve no credit for that, you aren't especially silent on the subject ! 
I knew that neanderthal statue though (and I was betting that it inspired your woose on the right) : it is extremly fitting for the wood wooses since he is smiling and had all this laugh wrinkles and Tolkien speaks about the fact that the Wooses love to laugh. I would be eager to see a depiction of the clothes of the different cultures of Druedain (of the Druadan Forest, Enedwaith, Calenardhon, Brethil and Hithlum) by the way : I had this idea that Tolkien also had in mind the native people of North America and the indians of Amazonia when writing the Druedain since they have a lot of features in common (yes I'm generalizing) the lack of facial hair (just kidding), not using metal tools and weapons, amazing sculptors of stone and wood, using poisonous darts, dressing with leaves, etc. It would be very interisting to me to see what you would do of a Ghân-buri-Ghân (dressed as a Tupi/Guarani but more sober), a Woose of Brethil or Calenardhon (with more celtic features), a Woose of Enedwaith (looking like coastal indians and sculpting colored statues looking like totem poles), a "Sador the Woose" (with Inuit features) and a Druadan of late Numenor (looking odd like indians dressed as european in the XVIIIth century could).
As for Trolls, the problem I have is that most neanderthal statues look very merry, not grim enough to me for a creature that is (after all) a man-eater (even though there is something scary of thinking about this happy neanderthal feasting on human flesh). The guy on the right here could do the job, but he is a early homo sapiens, not a neanderthal (the guy on the left is). Another inspiration that catch the "ape", "primitive human" and "mammoths" aspects to me is the Gigantopitecus . That some Trolls are more "ape-like" could explain why they could be confused for giant Orcs.
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one of my friends asked me a while ago if i could imagine the bodyguard of gothmog as having horns, as some of john howe's I.C.E. card trolls do www.john-howe.com/portfolio/ga… tolkiengateway.net/w/images/5/… and yeah maybe; it makes them look more like some sort of mighty hellspawn from abrahamic mythology (as do howe's - and mine, and most peoples' - balrogs) rather than creatures of nordic fairy tale like my snow trolls here. i might try something similar, while keeping enough lines and forms in common that you can tell they are of a common origin (being able to make the evil beings of middle-earth fluctuate between looking like very judeo-chistian "demons of the pit" -see Thuringwethil - and looking like more or less spiritually unaffiliated creatures of germanic folklore, while keeping them consistent within themselves, is something i think any fan artist should keep in mind while depicting morgoth's creatures). as i've said elsewhere i think trolls would be (as ents are described) quite varried as a species, and so plagued by "genetic abnormalities" that it'd be almost impossible to say what the actual proper number of fingers for a troll to have on each hand would be (or toes on each foot) so yeah some have huge baueresque noses and look more or less benign, some (hopefully not many) have more than one head, some have horns, some are more hairy, like these guys, whereas others might have naked "scaly" skin like the folds rhinocerous hides (or people with a really bad case of shingles)
I'm quite familiar with ned the neanderthal and quentin the homo sapien (the two in that picture you linked) they're two of my favorite figure sculptures ever made, and both of them are currently a big influence on my portrayal of the ents to be featured in my next piece. particularly interesting to me is that (i believe) they are supposed to represent memebers of their respective species as they lived in britain at the same time a few hundred thousand years ago. the neanderthal (whose people were the first to come to europe, and had been there for a long time by the time homo sapiens started showing up) is the more "white" of the two, having long since evolved to deal with the cold and reduced sunlight, whereas the modern man, relatively new-come to europe, looks almost african, a specimen in transition from being "black" to being "white." the longer, leaner, and more "wooden" face of quentin as compared to ned is perhaps something i'll try and adapt as the difference between ent faces and troll faces, but yeah definitely quentin has the more stern expression, and the more tensile, on-the-surface musculature, that i can imagine one of the olog hai posessing (as opposed to their hairier, fattier northern cousins) also in the south (and this is definitely where tolkien gets a little horrendously racist for modern tastes) there seems to be alot more interbreeding between men and creatures like trolls and orcs, like the black skinned troll-men of far harad (i wonder if that is not perhaps how the more intelligent - though likely smaller than northern trolls - olog hai came about) I've always had this image of trolls or half-trolls of mordor in the second age, paraded in chains through the streets of armenelos as part of this great roman style triumph following ar-pharazon's capture of sauron, stripped naked, shaved and oiled like slaves at auction, for the numenoreans to marvel at their size and musculature (the people of the dunedain cheering for such "staining" of their own land - as tolkien might have put it - by bringing evil creatures there as display objects seems about right for the last few sorry decades of ar-pharazon's rule, maybe such creatures would even find work corralling victims for the fire in saurons temple a few short year later)
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Then does that mean, Trolls are as big as Balrogs?
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i dunno troy, maybe. the most powerful thing in middle-earth in the third age is the size of a starburst, it's not always about size
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Touché. Anyway, I like this drawing, reminds me of some artwork of George R.R. Martin's, A Song of Ice and Fire; particularly revolving the giants of the Wildlings.
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the giants in the ASOIAF universe, especially as described in the books as these huge wooly yeti-type creatures, fit squarely into the ancient nordic giant/troll cannon to me, and I was very pleased with their inclusion. I often think too much is made by modern fantasy fans of super-specific taxonomic distinctions between legendary creatures that often overlapped, like wyverns vs dragons, or trolls and giants having to be distinct species. these two could almost just as easily be kin of Mag the Mighty as of Bert Tom and Bill
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Just as I was wondering what you'd got up too, here it is. 
Yes, Tolkien sure loved his trolls, along with his other creatures of legend. The trio of bandits in The Hobbit were right out of a Welsh or Cornish story, the war trolls of Angband & Mordor were the mighty adversaries of the Aesir, and the presence of trolls in the wilder regions of Middle-Earth defined a savage borderland much as actual historical names in Iceland and Scandinavia. Crichton tried to deconstruct the legend in his epic novel Eaters of the Dead, but Tolkien took it at face value and made Trolls the less successful cousins of the Orcs. Less successful in the terms of a sunlight allergy and an inability to construct a societal model, but at the same time quite successful on the level of basic survival.
My introduction to trolls came with the D'Aulaires, and some Bauer-style illustrations of giants & ogres in some books of (non-Disneyfied) fairy tales. They seemed a lot more convincing in their brutish conduct than the sanitized cartoon brutish giants that showed up in the cartoons deemed safe for children. Every now and then one got by the watchdogs; one Scholastic book about a boy pretending to be a knight featured a troll-like giant who was very fearsome, much more than the idiot trio bad knights and the rather cute dragon.
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trolls as depicted in folk art pretty much always have these giant, face-dominating potatoes for noses, it's something i think the LOTR designers tried purposely to avoid, probably thinking it too cliched, too human, and not scary enough, but personally i dont mind the trolls of middle-earth, especially when they've been living out in the wild outside of the influence of their dark lords for thousands of years, coming to be basically just another part of the "landscape" of mythic creatures in middle-earth, they're still antagonistic, but they lose that hellish association and come to feel more like they do in northern european folklore; as if thousands of years after the war of the ring, when men have completely forgotten about morgoth and the valar and the whole context that creatures of fairy tales like trolls and goblins and dwarves and elves existed in, these things and what they really were and what side of good and evil they fell on will become mixed and confused in countless re-tellings.
it's impossible for me not to take a liking to trolls, even in the hobbit, where they want to eat the dwarves (and have purportedly eaten a lot of farmers and their families) it becomes immediately apparent upon meeting the goblins that those are far worse. they seem to me kind of like bears, these huge strong, largely solitary creatures. I may have to draw a couple of olog-hai for contrast (or possibly some of gothmog's bodyguard, who i think you could get away with making really hellish and even maybe put horns on their heads) just to show the difference between "soldier trolls" bred purposely by dark lords and these more wild, theologically neutral fairy tale types; while making them visibly of the same species.
"eaters of the dead" definitely seemed like chrichton's attempt - similar to the writers of "beowulf and grendel" in which grendel is always referred to as a troll - to recast grendel as a neanderthal (or a tribe of them) and play into that theory of early modern man's encounters with neanderthals being at the root of our stories of trolls/ogres and such. certainly troll features are not far from those we believe neanderthals had, albeit exaggerated beyond any human proportion. I've always found neanderthals incredibly useful in my musings on trolls, and in addition to mammoths, bears, apes, proboscus monkeys and giant sloths, this particular neanderthal sculpture lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1Bd… (which looks for all the world like the very being caricatured by bauer and his peers into figures like the troll mother and her three sons) was a great influence on my two boys here, as well as my Wood Woses
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Tolkien stated in his appendices and other writings that the "wild trolls" had undergone some rudimentary evolution in the Second Age by Sauron in an effort to make them more capable and less bestial, and it was also inferred that active Sauronic power at any time led to enhanced troll capabilities as well. When not under the Shadow though, the trolls basically got by on their own, usually to the despair of their neighbors. (FRPGs of course have made much of the mention in Moria of cave-trolls working alongside the orcs as hired muscle.) The trolls apparently did well in their new environmental niches, to the extent that they were a permanent menace in Rhudaur, Angmar, and the Forodwaith. So the lumpish Moria cave-troll from the FOTR movie could easily be represented as a First Age type that later turned into the trolls we expect from folklore in the Bill, Bert & Tom mold. Indeed, some of the BOFA trolls show this sort of creative adaptation into objects of folklore, as opposed to the singularly developed olog-style war trolls from the ROTK text & film. I wouldn't mind seeing an illustration of Gothmog's grotesque troll-guards, or your take on one of Sauron's olog-hai. (I rather like the idea of the olog-hai as trolls with uruk-grade intellect, like some of the cleverly wicked giants from folklore.)
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Wonderful, gotta love the trolls of John Bauer! I really like this mammoth feel and appearance you've given them, it sure suits them well!
And i suppose that the human is hiding from them? And that the trolls are a bit too big and slow minded to realise he's there, or something like that? Just wonderful man, well done indeed
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oh and yeah i imagine that poor dude's probably ducking down for dear life. he's either there to try and pinch something from their purses, or just happened upon them by accident. the trolls seem to know somethings up, the one is palming that club like a beat cop, and the other i think can probably smell the intruder, but might have a hard time seeing him with those beady little eyes
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Yeah small eyes and a big nose is probably not the best thing when it comes to spotting thieves
That troll mother was incredible, can't believe i missed it.
And yes i totally agree with you, enough of the bodybuilders! A bodybuilder body needs lots and lots of oxygen which makes it kinda weak in reality... So keep up the mammoth trolls, love it! Also troll shouldn't be too human so tusks is straight up the right alley
I liked Azog's head quite a lot but his wardrobe and his scars felt like something out of a crappy video game. In fact the whole Battle of five armies kinda sucked, reewatched it the other day and i really didn't enjoy it a second time. I prefer LOTR over The Hobbit with out a doubt, dont know what PJ did but i though it was not even in the same league.
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