Snaga

Although I've never done any Middle Earth wargaming, I'm often tempted by it and always on the lookout for suitable miniatures. Those can be surprisingly hard to find - especially, perhaps, when it come to Orcs.

The fairly recent release of the Oathmark goblins changed that a bit; they're very nice Tolkien-esque figures, and wolf-riders are apparently to follow. But the only problem is that they fill only one of the two main Orcish slots in Tolkien's writings: that of the Uruks.

In The Lord of the Rings, goblins are broadly divided into two classes: the big fighting goblins (the Uruks) and the lesser kinds (whom the Uruks call "Snaga", meaning "slave"). The Oathmark goblins, being somewhat shorter than Men but still fairly large, fill the Uruk role perfectly (you might want to change the swords and bows for Isengarders).

But the smaller types must be closer to Hobbit-sized, because Frodo and Sam are mistaken for them when suitably disguised.

So I was pleased to discover that Oathmark heads and arms fit rather nicely onto Mantic goblin bodies. The Mantic goblins are much worse than their other lines - indeed, notoriously so. The beaky heads have a certain charm, but the arms are poorly cast and don't fit terribly well on the bodies. The Oathmark appendages solve that problem at a stroke.

What's nice about this is that the Oathmark goblins come with lots of extra heads and limbs, because each sprue allows for the assembly of its component Orcs as archers, spearmen or swordsmen. So by buying some Mantic sprues to go with the Oathmark ones, you can assemble five Uruks and five Snaga from each.