If there was one location I wanted to see when I visited The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season three’s set during its production, it was Rivendell. And though many of Rivendell’s buildings had been taken down by the time of my set visit, I was still able to make my way onto the incredible living set that makes up part of the elven stronghold during the season. And it was beyond my wildest dreams. The set, which was also used for elven scenes outside of Rivendell, as well as forest night shoots, and other fated encounters, was stunning.
A hand-painted backdrop extended the fantastical grove on all sides, as in the middle of the one-time Rivendell set, a real forest grew from the soil of this The Rings of Power location. Not all the trees that made up the thicket of the elven realm were alive, but MANY of them were. You could feel the dampness of the ground and the humidity that only comes when a grove of real plants are growing. The on-set forest was big enough that you could travel through paths in the trees and up and down different elevations. And the soil must have extended many feet down into the ground, because in some places, it made up whole hills, and in others, you could see roots growing deep. As I spun around to look at the canopies, I swear, real birds flitted through the leaves.
Is this place of growing nature and true creation not what Tolkien would have most wanted for a vision of Rivendell?
The Rings of Power season three Production Designer Kristian Milsted shares, “It was an honor to get to design this nascent Rivendell. And it was really important for us to put into the real world, so to speak. So you could see how the elves could have built something like this in five years.”
Milsted muses that when creating Rivendell, the team imagined an extension to the lore. He notes, “We had these ideas that this maybe was a path through the Misty Mountains. The elves knew about it already. So it’s like a secret elven path. And it’s like, okay, now we’re in trouble. We know where to go.”
To create this haven, Milstead deeply prioritized the way the elves might incorporate nature into their designs. He shares, “We riffed a lot on Scandinavian architecture, but also actually Japanese architecture and tried to really build within the trees. The elves have an affinity to really build within nature. They do use timber. But it’s all about exploring how you could incorporate living trees into the design. The elves have a love for nature, and it’s important to honor that. So they would have a combination of thoughts about how you could build stuff with what’s growing and what’s dead. But it was very important to me and the team that it feel real. We said, ‘We want Rivendell to look real in The Rings of Power; we want to look at a house and feel like that’s actually a house.'”
You can see these ideas come to life in the concept art for Rivendell pictured above and below. As Milstead describes, there’s a very natural flow to the entire place, the trees and houses bending and flowing together in harmony. But never does the design of Rivendell get so outlandish that it loses that very stable feeling of having actually been built.
Sometimes, Milstead notes, on fantasy shows, buildings become too spindly, materials don’t seem like they can exist. But it was important for The Rings of Power season three’s Rivendell to feel really grounded, especially given what it is in this story: a unique haven for the elves escaping Sauron’s evil. It needed to feel like a solid place to be.
“Tolkien was inspired by the nature of the Alps and Swiss Alps.” Milstead continues, “And there’s Lauterbrunnen Valley, the real place that he’s written about. So I started there. And then our concept artist, John Howe, he lives in the Swiss Alps. He actually lives in Switzerland, so he did some early concepts for this, but really, working with concept artist Dominic Lavery, we landed on the idea of having these chalets dotted around in the nature.”
In addition, Milstead shows us some other parts of Rivendell. There’s a communal square, and, of course, a bridge that looks very familiar. It was The Rings of Power season three’s goal to bring something to fans that feels both recognizable as Rivendell, honoring some of the established visions of it in The Lord of the Rings world, but also offers something new.
In The Rings of Power season three, Milstead shares of the new life the team infused into Rivendell: “We brought this kind of feeling of it being placed in an environment which feels truthful and real, but also highlights the notion that the elves are kind of refugees. Other versions of Rivendell are very serene and safe, just super zen. But here Rivendell is actually under a lot of stress. It’s safe, but only just.” And with that in mind, Milstead tried to avoid “making it too bucolic and pretty.” Instead, Rivendell is a place of self-sufficiency, born of the fight to preserve the legacy of the elves.
The Rings of Power‘s Master Armorer Alex Francis also adds, “We’ve got the establishment of Rivendell for the elves. In Rivendell, we see all these soldiers that have kind of been ragtag and been in many different battles, and they ended up being in Rivendell, and they’re a family now, a community. But they don’t have the resources of other factions. So they’re all trying to gather together, and they’re all kind of self-sufficient. They’re still out there fighting, but it’s not easy.” It’s certainly an evocative image of a Rivendell unlike any we’ve truly seen before on our screens.
One elf that we most associate with Rivendell, is, of course, Elrond. When we ask if any of the character is incorporated into the creation of The Rings of Power‘s Rivendell, Milstead notes that it is. Showing us parts of Rivendell that are Elrond’s, Milstead points out a room that’s “more like a library, and serves as Elrond’s front room/office, the place where he meets people, with private rooms behind.” But some of Elrond’s spaces are also devoted to “saving the lore and saving the objects of the elves” from destruction. Milstead shares, gesturing to Elrond’s spaces in Rivendell on a 3D model of the elven realm, “He has people working in there on putting scrolls back together and pursuing the history of the elves,” which Sauron tried to destroy in the sack of Eregion.
Prop Master John Hajdukiewicz and Set Decorator Tina Jones also echo these sentiments. They note that when they were decorating Rivendell in The Rings of Power season three, they considered that “after the sack of Eregion, the elves go back to recover as many of the artifacts as they can to keep their lore alive. So a lot of the chambers are populated with this in mind. They’ve gone as far as scraping up the burnt scrolls to then rewrite them out.”
And speaking of Elrond specifically, the pair note, “In Elrond’s chamber, for example, there were a lot of pieces that we had seen in previous seasons in Eregion. We’ve got these beautiful tapestries hanging in his rooms that are now all sort of burnt. And so it was quite sad. You created them and then sort of half-burned them.” In true Elrond fashion, the Eregion tapestries hanging on his walls in Rivendell tell “the story of Beren and Lúthien from the First Age.” What a point-perfect and sweet detail to discover about Elrond in The Rings of Power season three.
Ultimately, Milstead concludes, Rivendell is a place of great impact. He notes, “It’s something that you can say about conflicts all over the world in our world. There will be those important people and places who work to preserve, preserve history and art, even in wartime. This idea gave Rivendell a bit of gravitas. This is actually a really serious place, central to what’s going on. This place is an important stronghold.”
So there you have it: The Rings of Power‘s Rivendell is not only totally exquisite, but it’s grounded in a reality that resonates and steeped in true importance.
Additionally, as we mentioned, you can glimpse some of the forest set in other moments throughout The Rings of Power season three as well, as it rearranges itself into a woodsy backdrop that makes it possible to film scenes, especially at night, that would be incredibly complex to complete in a real forest. Rivendell’s living set is not only a beautiful tribute to the ways of the elves in Middle-earth and their love of growing things, but an incredibly practical innovation for the production of the show in our world.
We can’t wait to see Rivendell, Elrond, and our favorite woods more closely when The Rings of Power season three releases on November 11.
Explore our other The Rings of Power season three Set Visit pieces here: The Forging of Dark Lord Sauron, A Deep Dive into Orcs, A Piece of Adar Lives in Mordor, 13 Details We Learned on Set, All About Rivendell.