$460, 5,471-piece Lego Barad-dûr set comes for LOTR fans’ wallets in June

Here's something for any Lord of the Rings fan with a tall, narrow space available on their tchotchkes shelf: Lego has announced a $460, 5,471-piece rendition of Barad-dûr, which viewers of the films will recognize as "that giant black tower with the flaming eye on top of it."

Sauron, Base Master of Treachery, will keep his Eye on you from atop the tower, which will actually glow thanks to a built-in light brick. The tower includes a minifig of Sauron himself, plus the Mouth of Sauron, Gollum, and a handful of Orcs.

The Lego Barad-dûr set will launch on June 1 for Lego Insiders and June 4 for everybody else. If you buy it between June 1 and June 7, you'll also get the "Fell Beast" bonus set, with pose-able wings and a Nazgûl minifig. It doesn't seem as though this bonus set will be sold separately, making it much harder to buy the nine Nazgûl you would need to make your collection story-accurate.

The designers at Lego had a lot of latitude to imagine what the inner workings of The Dark Tower might look like, since neither the books nor the Peter Jackson films spent much time depicting or describing its interior. Lego's promotional pictures show some kind of be-skeletoned torture chamber, an armory, a Palantír viewing room, and a dining hall for Orcs (there are some bones on the Orcs' dining table, but it's not clear whether they come from humans, hobbits, or something else).

And just in case the base set isn't tall enough for you, Lego says that the tower sections are fully modular and that you can make an even taller and more imposing tower by buying multiple sets and stacking them on top of each other.

The Barad-dûr set complements the $500 Lego Rivendell set that the company released last year, which also borrowed heavily from the film version's design. The main thing the two sets appear to have in common is an extremely haunted-looking Frodo minifig, complete with the One Ring. Both sets also have a Samwise, but the Barad-dûr version looks more self-assured and heroic, as befits the character's journey in the story.

Lego also sells a few LOTR characters as part of its vaguely Funko Pop-esque "BrickHeadz" series, if that's something you're into.

Listing image by Lego