Oliphaunt

And I just love these characters.

And it makes a lot of sense now that we have Minas Tirith and we have Grond, we gotta get some Oliphants with it, right? Well, the updated rumor is we are supposed to not only be getting it here in February, but it's gonna be 2017 pieces, which we knew, but an updated price of $230.

And this is supposed to be an Oliphant diorama with three minifigs included on it.

pretty excited about this one.

And perhaps suspiciously, they don't come from a non-specific elsewhere.

They come from the south and they come from the east and they ride creatures called Oliphants.

So there is – it feels to me like there is a racial coding and that maybe there would be an entering of a – like if you put other characters in it who are not white, maybe they would just be non-white characters in a white space.

They'll be orcs.

It'll drop something in there like, oh, the great beasts were pulling these towers.

Wait, what great beasts? Are these the Oliphants? Are they something else? Is there some dinosaur creature that you're just dropping in there? So I think they would bring the best out in each other.

Although, I don't know.

I wonder if Tolkien would like King.

Fantastic.

Then we have the Mumakil, who are the, you know, the Haradrin, the Oliphants, that kind of group.

of Sauron's servants.

And then I threw the Ents in here because the Ents are a monstrous being.

Uh, there's a Mishra's Workshop, which I know will catch Luis's eye.

There's also an Oliphaunt.

But I view this pack as a bit of a punt, and I, I guess I could c- consider Smuggler's Copter, but I'm not as big of a fan of it.

And I would actually just take Gut.

huge.

And then for the horizon, you hear the blare of the Mumakil horns and giant war elephants arrive.

It's not just an escalation of scale.

It's an escalation of feeling.

This was undoubtedly heroic and effective in the short term, but perhaps not the most sensible tactic in that battle.

Sauron's forces still had a huge numerical advantage, and those Mumakil were starting to have an effect.

Even well-trained horses were panicked, and Gothmog, who, to be fair to him, seems to have reacted quickly and competently to his new command, ordered his troops to surround the Rohirrim, cutting them off from any help from Minas Tirith.

Not that most of the troops in Minas Tirith were in any shape to help anyway, with one exception we'll come onto in a moment.

This was when Denethor was getting all funeral pyre fixated, and Gandalf had to ride all through the city just to intervene and save Faramir's life while the bottom tier of the city was still in flames.

This is the second dark point of the battle.

We sometimes like to imagine the arrival of the Rohirrim as being the turning point, which it was for a while, but Sauron's numerical superiority was so huge that once the impact of that initial cavalry charge had been dealt with, and the riders were caught up in the hack and thrust of hand-to-hand combat with Mumakil running amok, things swiftly turned bad once more.

Éomer and his surviving forces were surrounded, and took to defending a hill.