Breyer's Christmas fjord

October and November have been a little bit crazy, but just dropping in real fast to share a release I was really, really excited about and surprised by. He was announced late in the year and I ordered him as soon as he came available. Two fjords from Breyer in one year! This was a Christmas web special which means he can only be purchased online, but he's still available. It actually a set called the Pony Snow Day set I think and features the horse, a doll, some accessories, and a little snowman. But of course, the horse is the reason I got the set.

Tinsel (as he is named by Breyer) is the grå coloration, which Breyer has represented before but never in a regular run (and still not technically in a regular run, but this one at least is more accessible than Silver Wolf or Astrid). I'm really excited to now have two of the fjord colors on the original Henry mold, and hoping for more in the future.

His paint job is a lot nicer than Henry's I have to say, as much as I love Henry.
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Here's the whole set, and yes the hat is intended for the horse and not the girl.
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All three of my fjords together
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Pretty big difference between the old face and the new
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He's super cute! It's really interesting to see the difference in sculpting between the two. The older one is more draft like, and the newer one is more of a sporty type fjord. I've seen that with Friesian models as well. I don't collect traditionals, but to think, we get two Fjords from Breyer this year, and then new Fjords from Schleich next year. Exciting times...

I like seeing Fjords getting so much atention, this is one of the most recognizable breeds, nobody can tell a Fjord looks like any other horse. So, I like when peculiar breeds are replicated. Very beautiful model, congratulations!

It is very exciting to see this breed getting a lot of attention. It's certainly distinct and has grown in common public knowledge more (maybe the movie Frozen helped? ). I remember riding them in parades in the earlier 2000s and people knew they weren't just "regular old horses" but they were really unsure WHAT they were so they would ask if they were donkeys, mules, even zebras!

Ponies and Paint wrote:

He's super cute! It's really interesting to see the difference in sculpting between the two. The older one is more draft like, and the newer one is more of a sporty type fjord. I've seen that with Friesian models as well.  I don't collect traditionals, but to think, we get two Fjords from Breyer this year, and then new Fjords from Schleich next year. Exciting times...

I definitely prefer the older style with the draftier/pony build, but mostly just because those are the fjords I know personally. Both molds are lovely but I don't know that they look exactly right next to each other, the styles are so different! The new mold's head is so small compared to Henry's.

I can't wait until the stablemate is released as a regular run. I'm sure it will be another standard brown dun, but I'd be 100% okay with that and would prefer it over a non-fjord color as the first regular run release. (It would be awesome if it was one of the rarer colors though!)

I've got the Henry (original version) and the new mould but I never thought of standing them together for a photo, it's fascinating to see how different they are for type as well as sculpting style.

And yes, so looking forward to that little trotting Stablemate! I'd be equally happy with a standard dun or a rarer shade - but I expect they'll save the unusual-but-possible colours for various exclusives, and regular runs will get maybe one dun and then some rather non-fjordy colours
Although the breed did have a lot of not-duns in it for a really long time, I've seen very old photos which were black'n' white but clearly showed the horses as black, bay/brown, and chestnut, so if they DID end up issuing the mould in non-fjordy colours I'd probably still buy them, and just put them on the 'historical' page of my site with all the other obsolete colours and extinct breeds

George wrote:

Although the breed did have a lot of not-duns in it for a really long time, I've seen very old photos which were black'n' white but clearly showed the horses as black, bay/brown, and chestnut, so if they DID end up issuing the mould in non-fjordy colours I'd probably still buy them, and just put them on the 'historical' page of my site with all the other obsolete colours and extinct breeds

That's cool, I didn't know that! They have already released it in chestnut, but it would look really handsome in a nice bay.

I've checked some of my older breed books, in a 1948 one it says 'bays and browns are also found, but dun is the prevailing colour', by the 1970s each book says they're only dun. I do remember reading once about how dun was actively preferred by the breeders and in the show ring, so it was a deliberate move to exclude other colours - but I can't find all my other books, so I can't pin down when that was said!

This is a black one I remember seeing before, here's another, and [url=https://colorgenetics.info/equine/gallery/historical-horses/chestnut-non-dun-fjord]this one's[/url] chestnut (even though it's black and white, you can tell that's the colour cos the lower legs are paler)

All I can find about it online is one vet's essay on colour genetics in the breed, the relevant sentence being : "If any Fjord horses were not homozygous for the dun gene then very rarely could a dark, nondun (bay, chestnut, or black) individual; still occur in the breed. This is expected to be very rare or nonexistent today. Suck dark croup outs would have been more common the past, but breed standardization has favored the linebacked duns that they are now very consistently present."