More Lord of the Rings

The most recent post in my series on Top eBay Chess Items by Price, titled BCM, Aljechin, Lord of the Rings, Fattorini, and a Pretty Face, mentioned,

I also spotted seven 'Lord of the Rings' chess sets, each one selling for $600 or more. Even more curiously, I counted four different sets among the seven. How many distinct 'Lord of the Rings' sets are out there? I'd like to come back to this question in a future post.

It turns out that four different Lord of the Rings (LOTR) sets is nothing unusual. A page on CollectTolkien.com, Archives: The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings Chess Sets, has photos for 17 different sets. Even that count isn't exact. One set, in painted and unpainted versions, is counted twice, while another set in two versions is counted only once. Yet another set is counted once while other sources inform that there are three distinct versions.

Without too much effort, I also located three sets not listed on CollectTolkien.com. The set pictured below is from 1979 Tolkien Enterprises Chess Set.

Something tells me that I'll be coming back to these sets after I've researched them a bit more.