Uruk-hai Warriors Bearing the White Hand — Print & Oil Painting

The shape of this one is the point of it. It is a low horizontal band, the proportion of a carved lintel rather than of a picture, and the figures have been arranged along it in a single rank at even intervals with no depth behind them and no ground beneath them. It is composed as a frieze, the way a carved band above a doorway is composed, and it reads left to right rather than in and out.

Five of them fill the strip and they are all built the same. Each stands square on, one arm crossing the body to hold a weapon upright against the shoulder, each in a plated cuirass and a heavy leather kilt, and each capped with a helmet whose crest opens at the top into a broad flat fan like a raised collar. The repetition is exact enough to be deliberate.

The mark is on the face of the central helmet: a pale open hand, palm out, fingers spread, laid across the front of the visor so that it covers the whole face. The two on either side carry paler and cruder versions of the same thing, and the outermost pair are little more than smudges. It is a badge applied by hand rather than a device forged into the metal.

Colour has been reduced almost to nothing. The armour, the helmets and the forest of upright shafts behind them are all worked in the same wet silver-grey, and the only relief is a dull brick red in the hanging kilts and a faint warmth in the sky at the back. Nothing shines.

A wizard who breeds his own army and then paints his sign on their faces is doing something the older powers in this story never bother with, which is branding. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the whole host of them assembled before the tower and one of their captains raising an axe.