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A Lord of the Rings City Made of Matchsticks
Ripley's
For reasons that neither science nor theology will ever be able to explain, Patrick Acton decided to spend three years of his life stacking matchsticks together to form the mountain city of Minas Tirith, as seen in the Lord of the Rings movies:
TheOneRing.net
"It's a burning passion."
Between the fortified city and the mountain upon which it sits, this seven-tier structure was built using 450,000 individual matchsticks. To us, gluing together that many matchsticks into a shapeless blob sounds like an impossibly tedious task, but Acton sculpted the city down to the last tiny detail, including windows, doors, staircases, archways, and even the trebuchets sitting atop each watchtower along the outer wall. He even managed to build curved walls and the winding branches of a miniature tree using nothing but tiny, brittle sticks.
Ripley's
We're amazed he didn't whittle a stick figure Denethor to plunge down in a fireball of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Acton's attention to detail was so specific that he had to create new buildings and structures to populate the fantasy capital city of Gondor, because neither the punishingly wordy books nor the 10-hour movie trilogy contained enough material for his liking. This makes Acton the first person in history to decide that The Lord of the Rings, in all of its adapted forms, simply wasn't long enough.
doryfour/Flickr
Acton thinks the final Hobbit film should be split into two parts.
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