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To just add to an old thread:
Mithril miniatures originally got the license to make roleplaying and collector's miniatures in Middle Earth. The license originally belonged to Games Workshop in the early 80s. Games Workshop replaced Grenadier Miniatures.
As such, lots of older Mithril figures are characters from the Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP) supplements, as well as potential hero characters to represent someone's character in the game.
Mithril also, oddly, supported the collector's market by making every figure limited. They would only cast 5000 copies of each figure (and in 1988, this was a small amount) and they would knock figures out of print quite quickly too.
Famously, the mould for the Female Ranger broke early on, and only a few hundred figures were ever made. As a result, the figure is a true collector's item, with people paying up to a thousand dollars for one. It's a pretty naff figure, after all that.
Anyway, sometime in the mid 90s, Mithril bowed to customer pressure and planned a series of releases called the Warbands series. The warbands series was a full army pack with officers, drummers, standard bearers and so forth. There was a Gondor and Mordor set released.
At which point, Tolkien Enterprises perked up and went: hey, your license says Collecting and Roleplaying. Not Wargaming. No one's entirely sure what happened next, but a year or so later Black Tree Designs announced that they were releasing a Middle Earth wargame, with miniatures. Some time later, an American hobbyist released two of the Warbands here. Google "Time Machine Miniatures"
MERP was effectively cancelled in 1997 and Mithril stopped producing miniatures around this time. They did not pass on the license, however. When the movies came out, Mithril produced another range of collector's miniatures, which no one particularly liked However, this spurred them to restart their "proper" range, and they've since released everything from a Corsair crew, an entire cohort of Knights of Dol Amroth and now a Helm's Deep series.
GW has been less than thrilled by all this. But its perfectly legal. GW, y'see, got the Wargaming license. And as long as Mithril miniatures are sold for roleplaying purposes or diorama building, there's nothing that can be done.
There has been some speculation that Tolkien Enterprises may have approached Mithril to restart their line when the movies came out - perhaps to preserve a diversity of visions of the property.
Currently, Mithril tends to focus on making short run, expensive figures such as the Corsair admiral.
Gavin
PS: Mithril figures are often a hell of a lot more detailed than GW figures. Those orc warband figures "in the flesh" are quite complex and the detail more than compensates for the odd poses.
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