pegkerr | Lord of the Rocks

Some of the old-timers in Bruce Birkemeyer’s rock collecting club weren’t exactly encouraging when he wondered if he should enter his Lord of the Rings display in a regional competition.

The problem was that Birkemeyer had literally thought outside the box. The competitions sponsored by mineralogical societies consist pretty much exclusively of rock hounds displaying their most interesting finds in a 3-foot by 4-foot display box.

Everybody does it that way.

Nobody, by contrast, tries to tell a classic fantasy story with rocks — rocks that happen to look, if you eye them closely and maybe receive a hint or two, like a troll hiding behind a bush or a wizard standing above a deep pit or the smoke of Mount Doom. ...

Nobody until Birkemeyer. The Mankato retiree, had — for reasons he can’t entirely explain — decided to try to find agates, jasper and other semi-precious stones that looked like characters and scenes from The Two Towers — book two of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy Lord of the Rings.

Click here to read the rest of the story (including some photos).