After collecting all of the Fellowship of the Ring and all of the Thorin & Company minifigures, I’ve been thinking about how to display them. There isn’t really any good set that naturally includes all of the characters. Not everyone is in Helm’s Deep (and it’s too expensive anyway) and Moria is a very crappy diorama. The upcoming Council of Elrond is way too small. So for Lord of the Rings I eventually settled on building my own.

One of my favourite scenes in the entire trilogy is the movie-only scene where Frodo drops the Ring in the snow and Boromir briefly picks it up. It’s a great character moment for Sean Bean and a beautifully filmed scene overall. So I ordered a bunch of white slopes and set to work on recreating the slopes of Caradhras. It turned out that I could have used a bit more of each, so it’s a very unstable build, but when left alone on a shelf it looks fine.

There’s not much to say about it. I added a little weapon rack in the back, since the characters aren’t really armed in the scene, and I don’t want to lose all those extra items.

Bag End, from the very recommended set 79003 The Unexpected Gathering, is by far the most iconic Lord of the Rings set released so far. It’s a very solid build (although rather scaled down), comes with the best dwarves and it works perfectly with 9469 Gandalf Arrives for reproducing his famous scene. Unlike the other Hobbit sets, it’s great for scenes from both movies. However, it is decidedly toyish.

Early on, I made a small addition using the tree from 10193 Medieval Market Village to improve the stump they put on the roof. Using the movie as a reference, I managed to get a pretty good tree going. As I then bought other Hobbit sets (79002 Attack of the Wargs, 79004 Barrel Escape and 79001 Escape from Mirkwood Spiders) to get the missing dwarves (I bought Ori, Nori and Dori separately as that set is way too expensive), I gathered a bunch of pieces that I would eventually use to improve my Bag End.

The idea was to make Bag End into a double diorama. Outside I wanted to recreate the scene with Gandalf on his cart as he pulls up along Bagshot Row in the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, and inside I wanted room for all of dwarves at dinner with Bilbo, from An Unexpected Journey. Two scenes, 61 years apart, in a single set.

To keep the brick count down, the outside of the Bag End set is rather simple. There is a bench and the gate, and some flowers, but otherwise just a plain flat surface. I wanted to recreate the elevated garden with the stairs leading down to the gate, and the road outside sloping slightly upwards. I bought some extra flowers and generally threw everything I had at making it lush. The house itself is extended by turning the right wall along the front.

Inside I lengthened and widened the entire room. The cooking area was pointless but I wanted to keep the study, and I put in a dividing wall. That room is a mix of Bilbo’s study and the livingroom with all the maps and documents scattered around. For the main room I built the main fireplace (where Gandalf reveals the ring) as a backdrop for the dining table, even if it’s not completely accurate. With a longer table I could fit all of the dwarves, in the correct order no less.

I wanted to include lights, so I bought a set off Lifelites.com. These lights are extremely compact. The control box fits into the same dimensions as a 2×4 brick, and the LED:s are small enough to fit inside hollow cylinders. However, I have a couple of issues with these. First, I bought the shorter cable versions so I couldn’t reach all four lights to a single control box, although that’s easy enough to fix. Secondly, the buttons are very hard to press, so I need to reinforce the floor below the box. And last, the lights aren’t very bright. When there’s any kind of ambient lighting they are simply drowned out. When I do wire up my other sets I think they’ll look good in the evening anyway.

The entire building was set up to rotate, to more easily access the interior scene and the lights, but it didn’t turn out good enough. However, it lets me shift the upper area slightly to make it look a bit more organic, which always helps with Lego. I may add more supports underneath it to make a more solid build, and once I get longer cables for the lights I’ll put the control box somewhere less visible. But apart from that, I’m happy with it now. Bring on Orthanc!