Orgrim Doomhammer Standing in the Blazing Dusk — Print & Oil Painting

There is no hammer in this painting. Both fists are closed and empty at hip height, the arms hang slightly away from the body, and the weight is settled on the back foot. For a figure whose entire reputation is a weapon, the choice to paint him with nothing in his hands is the first thing the picture does and it is not an accident.

The armour is asymmetrical and it reads as scavenged. On the left shoulder sits a spiked iron pauldron over a mass of coarse pale fur; on the right forearm rides an enormous riveted vambrace, plainly heavier than it needs to be, stamped with a circular device. Below, a fur-trimmed kilt hangs over plated thighs with a horned buckle at the waist. Nothing matches anything.

His skin is a warm tan-olive rather than the green of the later generations, the crown of the head is bald, and a black beard is plaited and bound with rings under a heavy brow. A ring hangs from the nose. The face is set and the eyes are narrowed against the light behind him.

That light is the whole background. An orange and white blast fills the frame behind his shoulders with embers rising through it, the ground at his feet is cracked and lit from below along the fissures, and the top of the canvas cools to a grey-blue. He has been placed exactly between the fire and the sky and given no ground to stand on that is not burning.

He died handing things over. Caught in the open during a raid on a prison camp, covering the escape of a much younger orc, he was run through from behind by a charging lance, and with what he had left he passed on the hammer, the black plate and the office in one breath. The capital that young orc went on to found on a foreign coast is named after him, which is a longer memorial than most of the warchiefs in this collection got. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the orc he handed all of it to, calling down lightning and the fortified gate of the city that carries his name.