An Hour With Warren Ormsby-Green, LOTR Master Armorer

On September 15th, I went to a talk at the Auckland War Memorial Museum given by Warren Ormsby-Green, the Master Armorer on the LOTR films.

At the Auckland War Memorial museum today, they had Medieval Day, and the master armorer from Lord of the Rings, Warren Ormsby-Green, gave a talk that was supposed to be about historical armour and the Lord of the Rings armour. The talk took place in a medium-sized lecture hall. Warren was on a low stage with a set of 15th-century type armor he had made himself, and a low table with breastplates, scale armor, leg pieces, gauntets, swords, and some LOTR souveniers. 

From the talk, it was obvious that Warren KNOWS armor and related European history inside-out, and gained hands-on expertise via historical re-enactment, and is a wonderful craftsperson. However, for all his gifts, Warren is not one of nature’s lecturers - he was made to show, not to tell. He did have to cope with the audience challenge of many tiny children asking many questions, screaming, etc, and with the distraction of four fully armoured Goths arriving gothically late. 

Warren is clearly a man who adores his work and is thrilled to be able to make armor, leather gear, jewelry, swords, etc. all day. He had made everything he was wearing, including gorgeous over-the-knee leather boots, a fabulous leather waist-pack that incorporated a ballock dagger he had made. The blouse he had on beneath his War of the Roses coat may have been stitched up by  LOTR wardrobe, if not made from a similar pattern: it had that distinctly Elvish collar to it, and Warren is of elvish build. About a quarter of the way through the presentation, deal ing with the fractious audience, he threw any attempt at structure out the window and turned the whole thing into one long Q-and-A session. This worked much better for him.

Does it seem improbable to you that Warren made everything? Not to me, after all the Kiwis I’ve met. New Zealand is the last bastion of do-it-yourself. Yankee ingenuity has nothing on Kiwi ingenuity. Warren seemed like a quintessential Kiwi to me in lots of ways; a little formal, more inclined to do than to talk, but he loosens up when he’s talking about what he loves, even more so when he gets to show you something. Any moment when he picked up a weapon – a sword, a halberd, a dagger - it was clear he knew how to use it. The armor he had brought he had all made himself, and it included some very impressive fluted plate armor and scale mail. He was also endlessly patient with the noisy children. He seems like he deserved the career-making good fortune to be the LOTR armorer, and the things he made all had a wonderful vibe to them.

Most of what Warren had to say about the LOTR armor was not new to rabid fans. The Elves were based on Middle Eastern and Asian influences, their swords and scimitars similar to katanas. The Gondorians have design elements from 16th-century Spain. The Rohirrim are based on Vikings. The Dwarves’ designs were strongly Celtic (news to me), and the Orcs were based on “fantasy – we went with fantasy for the villains.” 

What was news to me was his description of the Haradrim’s armor, which had not been revealed back in September 2002. This is going to be brass and spiky, like inverted scale mail. “We called them the Pineapples, because they looked like pineapples, we all thought,” he said. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that the Haradrim won’t be fearsome; he also said that the set crew were giving each of the Ringwraiths nicknames on the set based on their armour designs (Spider-Man and Squeaky were two.)

Warren himself made the armour for the Ringwraiths, for Gil-Galad, and for Elendil. There were several LOTR set extras that we got to see and handle. These included section of spare Gil-Galad chain mail, one of the decorative clasps from Isildur’s armour, which I will describe momentarily, and the wing forehead/nose piece from Elendil’s helmet, made of brass and steel. This piece is decorated in its center with a tiny White Tree of Gondor, and the detail on it is quite amazing. It was escorted around the audience, so I got a good close look – and I held it up to my own forehead for a minute. Hey, I can dream.

This decorative clasp of Isildur’s deserves a long description. It was shaped like a rounded cross or a very stylised four-leaf clover, made of brass. A very detailed image was engraved on the front: a bearded man in long robes and armor, wearing a crown, holding a Palantir in his right hand and a two-handed sword in his left. Also on his left side was a hint of the seven-layered fortress of Minas Tirith. The design area was about the size of a fifty-cent piece, and the engraving itself was both intricate and weighty.

As the talk went on, the children, all herded together at the front, became more restive. One of Warren’s most endearing characteristics was the way that, if a small boy asked to see a weapon, Warren would say “Sure!” and hand it over. Warren would then go on to answer another question without much minding that a small enthused child was holding a blade half as long as himself, or a tiny girl was playing with a steel war-hammer. Warren had an assistant of more practical turn who kept an eye on the children as they played with the swords and things, which were all SCA blunts. They took the weapons around the audience, too. 

One child’s question produced an interesting tidbit about life on the set. “How many dents can armor have?” Warren explained that armor could take a lot, and that sometimes he let dents stay in his historical re-enactment armor as souvenirs. He said he had some dents right now that he gained in a backstage duel with one of the LOTR calendar illustrators, and he was honoured. John Howe? Alan Lee? One of the others on the art team? He didn’t say who it was, but he said they were excellent with a sword.

Afterwards, we were able to ask him one-on-one questions. I had three for him:
What did they use in the movie for the orc blood in the Last Alliance scene? He said it was a standard corn-syrup-based theatrical blood mix, with gravy and maple-type syrup added to make it dark.
Does he have a web site? This is coming soon, he says; someone is having problems with coding his order form. I’ll keep my eyes open for this and I have his phone and e-mail if you really want to contact him and order something. His business name is Stahlhelm Armoury.
Who made his boots? He did. 

So, that was that. This was my first time meeting someone who actually worked on the movie instead of just talking to someone who knows them second-hand. 

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