An Alternate Universe of Dwarvish Art & Architecture as Glimpsed in MERP's Mines of Moria

Or, a Manifestation of Furt's Guilt Over not Doing More with the Art History Courses He Took in College

I've tangled with Rolemaster's little sibling in the past and thought I was done with it for good, but a recent interest in megadungeons led me to crack open Middle-Earth Role Play's take on the Mines of Moria, particularly with an eye toward what the book does with the deepest depths of the dwarf hold and the Nameless Things known to lurk therein.

I was disappointed by a lack of support for the latter, outside of a handful of paragraphs gesturing at the dark mysteries and scary campaigns one could place down there. But I soon found myself thoroughly distracted by something else that I decided to spin into a whole blog post: the book's art direction, or rather, directions.

If you know MERP, you probably know the MERP art MO: slap an Angus McBride painting on the cover and then fill the pages with black-and-white illustrations by the omnipresent Liz Danforth. Danforth's style features both action scenes and still life portraiture, often very naturalistic with a bit of art nouveau throughout, but still possessing a clear place in the timeline of LotR art with inspirations going back decades, all the way back to the first doodles penned by jurt¹ himself. It is no different in Moria for MERP 2E, except there's far more art deco in keeping with how most Tolkien dwarves are presented.

As far as I'm concerned she is MERP's visual identity, with very few exceptions. But it just so happens that we're talking about one of those exceptions today, rather than Liz's work, except where comparing and contrasting feels appropriate. She will come back at the end though.

The second interior artist in Moria is one Kent Buries, a name I'm unfamiliar with but which is apparently closely tied to a whole lot of Palladium books. Right from his first piece on page 18, his take on dwarves is... different.

Initially I mistook the helmet for a bird face headdress or some kind of weirdly floppy hood, since they're out in some nasty weather. But then I saw how the ridges sit and I realized that they were actually rock, or something emulating it. That, plus the incredibly chunky-looking mace at the dwarf's side confused me.

I'd only been skimming the text up to this point and thought, maybe these aren't dwarves? Maybe they're hide-wearing Umli, the culture of half-dwarves invented for the game, who live in the wastes between Forodwaith and the northernmost mountains. But with my second look at these dwarves a few pages later, I quickly abandoned that theory.

Facing toward the viewer rather than away, we can see the unmitigated lumpy glory of this dwarf's weirdly organic and bulbous armor and weaponry. The knobs and protrusions aren't random despite how they first looked to me, and care was taken in making each piece symmetrical. His helmet reminds me of something a one-off villain from a sentai series would wear. I was confused and perplexed.

Yet another face-to-face with a dwarf in strange armor. This one lacks the winter weather furs the previous dwarves wore, and that causes an odd effect where it almost seems like there's no distinction between armor and exposed skin, like he grew this out of himself rather than putting it on. Combined with those thick cords like pieces of tubing that keep appearing as part of their gear, he almost looks sci-fi.

Here are some standard Danforth dwarves a few pages later for contrast:

Notice the radically different—by which I mean very traditional—armor and clothing they wear, obviously inspired by real life human material culture from various parts of medieval Europe. Notice also the noncanonical lack of facial hair on that one dwarf woman; at least get some sideburns going, girl!

By now the book had moved indoors from the historical timelines and overviews on the geography and climate of the Misty Mountains, to move toward the domestic. The books in this series love going over every facet of their subjects in grueling detail, to the point that we're treated to some Khuzdul vocabulary constructed specifically for the game. We're also treated to this... excitable fellow.

Five minutes into Smith, Flux & Chill
and he gives you this look.

By now the text had clearly established that this book is about the regular dwarves of Moria, from the time before Khazad-dûm was abandoned. These are just two artists' very different depictions of the same community, presented side-by-side without explanation or comment on the part of the book. But the textual descriptions of specific parts of Moria lean far closer to Liz Danforth's illustrations, so Kent's stuff is just kinda... there. The readers are left to deal with these incongruities by themselves, and at least for me, it bugged the hell out of me.

Then I got to the first Kent Buries depiction of Morian(?) architecture, and the wheels finally started to spin.

While there are some clear signs of artifice like the squared column bases and that carved archway in the back, the number of lumpy and organic features in this hall of lamps and light stones is unmissable. These dwarves deliberately sculpted the room with these rounded features in mind, a far cry from the clean lines and sharp angles of traditional dwarvish art deco.

An armory receives the same treatment later in the book, although I couldn't readily describe it as one if the marginalia didn't describe it as such:

Those might be shields hanging on more of those chunky cords they like so much, but the shapes along the wall and column more closely resemble teardrop-shaped eyes to me. The weapons held aloft by the procession of dwarves are fairly mundane-looking, though once again their helmets are very ridged and rocky-looking, as is the knife or short sword carried by the one in the foreground.

I can't quite tell if that axe up top is just an illustration separate from the scene or a gigantic capstone decoration, but it's possibly the most raw and nature brut thing (a term which I've made up unless it's actually a real thing) in this whole series of images in either case, with a head made of slapped-together rocks that feels like it belongs in the hands of a Gruul Clan barbarian from Magic: the Gathering or something.

This next image was seemingly drawn by Kent by himself, yet within it the Kentish and Danforthian dwarf styles clash almost comically:

This incredibly normal-looking Chamber of Mazarbul with recognizable furnishings and fixtures nonetheless hosts a group of very lumpy dwarves, whose material culture apparently didn't develop so far in that aesthetic direction as to create books made out of boulders, or lecterns shaped like an outcropping of flowstone. The pattern on the wall, though difficult to see through the shaft of sunlight, even resembles the Danforth image of "axehead" pattern stonework described elsewhere in the book.

I don't know how to address this clash, and it's kind of the exception that proves my hypothesis later, but it's weird and amusing all the same.

A "freestanding" Kentish dwarf building appears elsewhere, this one a rare glimpse at the dwarves' surface level architecture.

Unlike the armory, this building's function as a watchtower is very much evident, but it arrived at that functionality by being grown and carved out of an existing rock formation, rather than creating something with blocks and mortar. This is the closest dwarvish equivalent I can think of to the broader fantasy trope of elves or other woodland beings living inside still-living trees that have been nurtured and grown around their homes.

I had been sharing these pictures with a Discord server, and one person pointed out how similar the hall of lamps and armory look to those old "Net of Being" paintings by Alex Grey, which you might know better as the thing where they got the face for that one TOOL album cover.

It would actually be pretty easy to explain all of this as dwarves listening to TOOL and taking a bunch of shrooms and call it a day, and I'm only half-joking. I think dwarves would be fairly likely to cultivate weird forms of mushrooms given their limited forays into agriculture seem to focus on underground-friendly crops and root vegetables like earth-bread.

But instead I choose to ascribe a deeper, albeit probably accidental meaning to this art style.

Do you all remember the Glittering Caves, where Éowyn and the civilians at Helm's Deep took refuge? 

Like a handful of other locations in Middle-Earth, they were directly inspired by a real-life place jurt had visited in his life, in this case the caves of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. Both Cheddar Gorge and the Glittering Caves' depiction in the live-action Two Towers film (which I think was just a set constructed for the scene rather than any existing cave where it'd be a nightmare to safely navigate dozens of extras and equipment around?) are dissolved limestone caverns struck through with stalactites, stalagmites, bands of minerals, columnar rock formations, etc. and as a result have an overall extremely lumpy character.

Early in the Fourth Age it was the site of one of the last new dwarf colonies, where Legolas' and Gimli's bromance really started burning after the former listened to the latter's breathless adoration for the natural beauty of the caves and how his people would work to emphasize it rather than just use it to extract precious minerals. To quote Gimli's reply to Legolas warning him not to tell all dwarves about that pretty little place:

‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by

such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore,

not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of

blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of

flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of

rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as

the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that

are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights,

Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-dûm; and

when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills

were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.’ ²

Gimli's fantasy, which eventually becomes policy enacted by him as lord of the Glittering Caves, is one of gentle stewardship of nature and its beauty. It fits comfortably within jurt's quasi-nationalistic, anthropocentric (or in this case, Khazâdocentric?) style of environmentalism in which conservation of nature's utility and beauty by and for the benefit of people is emphasized higher than raw as-is preservation. And in the distant future of the Fourth Age, I could easily see parts of the caves resembling that hall of lamps, or that craggy tower.

It's never emphasized nearly as much as with those caves, but dwarvish appreciation of their rocky homes is present throughout the universe. So I think it's reasonable to believe many more examples of naturalistic architecture could be found throughout the many dwarf-holds of the world, their history stretching as far back as the days when Aulë was finally permitted to wake his children up.

And if that style of building, mimicking the lumpiness and organic shapes of natural caverns, has been present for so long, isn't it also reasonable to think it would go on to influence other areas of dwarvish art, artifice, and aesthetics? Wouldn't those motifs and stylized landforms eventually find their way into smaller creations, weapons, armor, and even clothing? It's a little like how many real-life settled, agricultural societies adopt vegetal motifs which get so widely used and abstracted that eventually they cease to clearly resemble plants.

The Kent Buries illustrations, then, can be read almost like glimpses into an alternate universe where dwarf art and architecture was informed from the ground up (heheh) by that adherence to the forms of nature, rather than by the mastery of intricate stonework and yawning volumes shown in most dwarf depictions.

The images don't culminate in anything, and as I said before it's likely they aren't really "saying" anything at all, it was just one artist's personal style placed in an unusual context. In all likelihood I bet the reason for the two illustrators being present side-by-side at all was because of some long-ago contract, schedule, or budgeting reasons. But all meaning is fabricated out of nerve impulses and the consequences of random chance, so I guess why not read a little extra into it?

I consider the Buries illustrations the star of this book for that reason, as well as the reason that later in the book Liz Danforth sins against the entirety of Eä and all its creatures with this absolute nightmare of a Frodo face:

Delayed Happy Halloween, here's your dose of horror for the year.

At least we got that Absolute Twunk of a Samwise coming to the rescue like a snack back there.

¹ Jurt being my way of verbalizing the letters J.R.R.T., in typical Furtive fashion. Similar to how in the rare circumstances where I have to talk about him, George R. R. Martin is rendered down to gurm. I like how simultaneously "cute" and diminishing it sounds.

²  The Two Towers, "The Road to Isengard".