2 Guys Handmade All the Chainmail for Lord of the Rings

There’s a lot of chainmail in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Think of the hundreds of soldiers who wear it into battle, from Orcs to Uruk-hai. You’d assume director Peter Jackson bought the chainmail in bulk from a Medieval Times or something. Nope - it was all handmade.

And as we see on this behind-the-scenes clip taken from the film’s DVD extras and posted to Twitter, two men did the whole thing. They are Christopher Smith and Carl Payne, and it took them roughly two years.

According to Smith, each suit is comprised of 13 thousand metal rings, which each have to be interlinked with pliers. With every suit representing three days of work, it caused the pair to developing thick calluses on their fingers. But there was an even more damaging psychological effect.

The clip flashes forward 18 months and we see the pair still hard at work, doing the exact same job. They seem to have gone slightly eccentric in the interim, however, proudly showing off a stuffed Papa Smurf toy bound in chains who they refer to as their hostage.

You can’t blame them. Making 10km worth of chainmail and only being acknowledged for it 23 years later is enough to send anyone over the edge.

Of course, that was back when people could concentrate. The Witcher producer who slammed audience attention spans would kill for viewers like Smith and Payne.