We went to see this today, and it's well worth a visit!
The exhibition room is hard to find so if anyone goes, it's on the top floor and you must follow the gallery all the way around the edge of the Oriental Room until you get there. No photos allowed but I did get a couple of Lurtz and a Cave Troll that were in the general galleries (I'll post them if they come out OK). All free of course.
There's the Narnia stuff first, after you pass by a load of furs hung up on the wall echoing the Freudian imaginings of Lewis
Oh, and the snippy little mare of a guard who was sat there stopping you ging the wrong way...ahem. This is pretty interesting, and they had made the gallery feel extra cold. However as you go round the display you spy the rounded Bag End replica entrance to the LotR stuff and go "Ooooooooooooh! Bag End!" and forget all about Narnia (or I did anyway, hehe).
All the weapons are there, plus loads of costumes, and some interesting descriptions and snippets of info. The main thing is just how detailed everything is. Incredibly so. It goes to show that the weapons designers must have included some genuine Tolkien nerds.
Boromir's shield has seven stars and waves around the boss. There is an intricate design of seven stars and the white tree on Isildur's armour. And many of the weapons have inscriptions along the blades - there is a rhyme in Tengwar on Aiglos for example. Even Sauron's armour is etched with plant tendrils.
My favourite part was seeing that Eomer's helmet has an inscription on the leather neck piece, reading: "This helmet belongs to Eomer, of the realm of King Theoden." Brilliant!
I was intrigued that Legolas's quiver is embroidered with a peacock! And Easterling armour is literally covered in inscriptions. Eowyn's helmet as Dernhelm was based on the Sutton Hoo helmet and designed to look a little like spectacles. Theoden's armour is supposed to show a hunting scene but I couldn't find that as that piece was overlit. Merry's Rohirrim scabbard straps (do these have a proper name?) were very nice, with a little scene of men hunting etched into the red leather, very like scenes from the Bayeux tapestry.
We also saw Arwen's helmet, quiver and arrows, for the scenes which were eventually (thankfully) cut. She was also supposed to have worn armour. This stuff was being shown for the first time. They also had the original design for the Witch-King's helmet which was more like Sauron's, straight up spikes on top and a big hole for the mouth covered with strips of iron (very Slipknot!). However 'in the flesh', the helmet used for the Witch-King is really quite unpleasant and frightening.
There have been a couple of days where one of the guys from Weta has been in and given talks and people have been able to 'play' with the weapons (Sting is apparently very heavy, according to some guy in there having a look round), but these have been and gone. But there is a special event upcoming (10th or 11th October?) where there will be a talk, Q&A etc.
Strangely there wasn't much in the shop. Other people were in and asking about it too. The shop assistant said Weta hadn't seemed to want to supply anything people could buy, not even any postcards, which she seemed to think was bad form seeing as photos were forbidden (you can take photos freely all over Royal Armouries normally).
I imagine it was fun taking part in putting the displays up, playing with Glamdring and whatnot. If you go, make sure to be like Sean Bean as Boromir wandering round Elrond's armoury and muttering about the Shards Of Narsil, heh.
Oh yes, and when you are done you can go and look at Henry VIII's armour, falconry, jousting and stuff like that, and watch actors doing re-enactments and talks so there's plenty of other things to make you footsore.
Note, take a taxi from the station. It has turned into some alienating, bleak Ballardian landscape round that bit of Leeds in the past five years with all the glass and steel apartments and office blocks and skyscrapers that look like Daleks. It's a maze trying to find the museum. I preferred the post-apocalyptic rubble that used to surround Royal Armouries.
