Posts Tagged: Lego

Remember back in your younger days when the hours would fly by as you dug through your bin of LEGO, bounded only by the limits of your imagination? Grown now, Alice Finch and David Frank have taken that concept to another level with their enormous recreation of Rivendell, The Last Homely House west of the Mountains, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

LEGO RivendellLEGO RivendellLEGO RivendellLEGO Rivendell

“This, of course, isn’t Finch or Frank’s first LEGO project,” explains Stew Shearer of The Escapist. “Both, in the past, took part in a collaborative project based on Hobbiton, another Tolkien location. Finch has also done a recreation of Hogwarts Castle, while Frank has built several complex castles. The two chose to build Rivendell in part because they believed it to “the ultimate challenge.”

This imagining, which takes visual cues from Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, measures in at 10′ by 5′ and contains over 200,000 pieces of LEGO. Certainly puts my old childhood creations to shame. But, damnit, those had heart! This Rivendell just has… immense amounts of creative vision, talent and hardwork.

helms-deep-tophelms-deep7helms-deephelms-deep2

Who doesn’t love LEGO? As a child with a strong sense of imagination, and a tendency to be happy enough staying indoors on a rainy day, LEGO was a door that allowed me to enter into an infinite number of other worlds. My time with LEGO and my time discovering Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings didn’t quite intersect, but they’re both formative parts of my childhood and adolescence. Hell, I have a LEGO set of Gandalf’s carriage, from the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring sitting on my desk at work right now.

Based on the layout of Helm’s Deep featured in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, this 150,000 brick set piece is astounding. The artists, who go by the names Rich-K and Big J, apparently, nail the atmosphere and scale of the conflict of one Lord of the Rings most iconic scenes. At the time these photos were taken, the model was about 90% complete, with an estimated four months worth of work. The time, money and personal investment that must have gone into this project is impressive.

More photos of this LEGO Helm’s Deep can be found on the artist’s MOCpages post.