Wrath of the Northmen

Oho - I got a note from the postman today. It told me that the parcel that had arrived for me was too large for the postman to carry, and please could I go and pick it up from the nearby package office. This is a clear downside to living in a socialist paradise - postmen get treated decently.

On the plus side, the first wave of my army has arrived!

You couldn't carry this, Mr Brevbärare?
Are you ill?

I'm going to wait until I've got a few more conversion options before really getting stuck in. But after two weeks of waiting, I had to stick a couple together. If only for the scent of plastic glue - I'd forgotten that pleasure.

I've got two box sets, one of Saxon Huscarls and one of Viking Thegns. Or vice versa, as the photo reveals. It's okay, the parts are interchangeable. This gives me extra variable heads, but the bodies are disappointingly identical. All sixty four models will have one of four torsos. Nicely modelled ones, to be fair, and there's a wealth of gear to stick all over them, from shields to axes to sidearms. And the heads, especially the Viking ones, really make up for this - there's twelve to choose from on the head sprue, and they're all crackers.

The first two are brief experiments. One has a two-handed axe, the other a langsax and shield (weapons dear to my heart).

Axey

Saxy

They're nice, too - easy to construct and neatly detailed. The heads come with super-long necks that need a bit of trimming to avoid a unit of chaos giraffes. And the hands are set in weapon-grabbing open claws, which make the hafts look a bit fat. Other than that, no complaints.

Two against many!

And the big question? The burning one that's been sitting in the back of my mind, telling me I've wasted all this money? The question of scale?

Shields - same size. Hands and shoulders - not dissimilar.
Weapons -  different strokes.

Actually, they're not too bad. I think if they were going on 20mm bases, they'd be perfect. And okay, neither their arms nor, erm, their arms are quite the same as GW's 'Heroic!' take on supposedly similarly-scaled models. I'm sure it's just for heroism purposes. You know, not to make this kind of hybrid is harder to achieve or anything. Heaven forfend that they'd try a cheap marketing trick like that.

That's not an axe, mate. This is an axe. 

I think the unit may look a little sparse as a result, but the plus is that I won't need to worry so much about how well they rank up.

More when the next boxes arrive and I start crossbreeding!