Jareth Sculpt: Part II

One of my favourite portions of this sculpt; the scars on his back, souvenir of the ritual scarification through which he shaped the wild magic-vortex and the wasteland it created into the kingdom of the Labyrinth, under his sovreignty.

Jareth is covered in scars.

I wanted his sword, which is of iron (a fact that has earnt him a certain degree of mingled terror and acclaim amongst fae who have faced him in battle) to have a kind of essential, visceral look to it.  Unfortunately, due to the limits of clay, by which I mean my rank amateurism, this would have no balance as a life-sized prop but oh well.

A better view of the sword and amulet, accompanied by that gorgeous goddamn scarf/belt/thing.  The sunset colours are breathtaking.

During the casting for Labyrinth, Brian Froud first met David Bowie right after the costuming people had given him a bone flute they'd made for him; at the time, Froud and Henson were still trying to decide who to cast as the Goblin King, and as soon as Froud walked in, Bowie introduced himself then picked up the bone flute, hopped up on the table, crouched down and winked at Froud and proceeded to play the bone flute at him, evidently with such mischievous otherworldliness that Froud decided on the spot that yep, this is our Jareth.  So of course I decided my version of Jareth has to have a bone flute, though I've yet to decide how he got it.

The sculpt came out with rather an expression of pathos here.  I wish I'd done his mouth differently though.  Oh well.

A few eons into a reign whose length is best measured  in geological ages, Jareth and the Unseelie monarch whose many names include Mab and Morgana fought to a standstill, and at immeasurable cost,  a terrible monster from the worlds before, the living incarnation of malice and despair, which during its last awakening epochs before had left a terrible mark on the world and bid fair to do so again.  The thing cannot be killed; however, they exiled it to a deep slumber in a far, supposedly uninhabitable corner of the world Above, which had only recently drifted into any semblance of its current configuration.

In the instants before it vanished, it looked Jareth in the eye and rasped "I leave you my hatred," cursing the entire coastline along which it had lain dormant with its blight.  To erase that mark and prevent its otherwise inevitable spread, he undid entire epochs - the greatest manipulation of time he has ever attempted, far less accomplished, as such things are not undertaken lightly, even to one of his power and skill.  And when all was said and done, the earth for miles to either side still-warm lava and the sea barren of any life, far less the schools of fish on which the equally vanished, he found, in his pocket, the skeleton of a fish, which had washed there in his battle with the monster.

Props - the fish's skeleton, souvenir of the horror known in what is now Orkney as the nuckelavee; the iron sword, forged by goblin smiths for one of their own kind in the days long before they had a king; the bone flute; the crystal; and the staff, embedded with a crystal, used for support both magical and physical for centuries subsequent to his battle with the nuckelavee.