The Rivendell set for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season three contains a growing forest. With living trees rooted in deep soil and paths rising and falling between them, the elves’ haven has a tangible foundation. That woodland had another use, too: the crew could rearrange it for elven scenes set elsewhere, night shoots and other encounters that would be hard to capture in a real forest.
Many buildings had come down before Nerdist visited Rivendell, yet the living forest was still there. Around its edges, a hand-painted backdrop made the grove appear to continue in every direction. Many trees, though not all, were alive. The reporter noted the moist earth and humid air, along with room to walk among the trees over changing elevations. In some spots, the soil rose into entire hills; in others, visible roots hinted at how far down it went. The reporter also remembered apparently real birds flitting among the overhead leaves.
Nerdist’s writer had been especially keen to see Rivendell as imagined by the show, and found the woodland better than expected. Its appeal went beyond appearance: using things that actually grow struck the writer as particularly appropriate for an elven refuge drawn from Tolkien.
For season three production designer Kristian Milsted, the settlement had to look like something the elves could realistically build within a limited period. “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.”
Rather than claiming an established piece of lore, the designers devised a possible past for the site. As Milsted puts it: “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.”
The houses belong among Rivendell’s trees, but they still look capable of standing up. Drawing on Scandinavian and Japanese architecture, the team worked buildings into the woodland instead of using it merely as scenery behind them. Their construction choices reflect how the elves relate to nature.
“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.’”
Prime Video’s concept art, shared with the set-visit report, shows trees and houses curving together while leaving the buildings looking feasible. Nerdist’s writer admired how the designs combined an organic shape with a sense of strength. Milsted wanted to steer clear of a problem he sees in fantasy architecture: overly slender buildings or materials that hardly seem possible. A haven for elves escaping Sauron had to look sturdy enough to protect them.
A particular landscape provided the starting point. “Tolkien was inspired by the nature of the Alps and Swiss Alps.” Milsted 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.”
A communal square and a bridge with a recognizable appearance sit alongside the dispersed chalets. The designers wanted viewers to recognize Rivendell from existing depictions in The Lord of the Rings, without denying this earlier settlement a character of its own.
This version differs in part because its inhabitants haven’t found complete peace. “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.”
That led Milsted away from “making it too bucolic and pretty.” The need to survive on limited resources, support themselves and defend elven life and heritage informed the place just as much as the forest and buildings did.
Master armorer Alex Francis explains what this means for the people living there: “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.”
Those soldiers, worn down by fighting, brought to Nerdist’s writer’s mind a Rivendell different from earlier screen portrayals. Here, the community is still working to find its footing, not living in a haven where safety feels assured.
Both the arrangement of Elrond’s rooms and the objects inside them show his influence, with material salvaged from Eregion housed there. Using a 3D model to show the settlement, Milsted pointed to a room that is “more like a library, and serves as Elrond’s front room/office, the place where he meets people, with private rooms behind.” Elsewhere, rooms are given over to “saving the lore and saving the objects of the elves” from destruction.
“He has people working in there on putting scrolls back together and pursuing the history of the elves,” Milsted explains. Their efforts address the attempted destruction of that history by Sauron when Eregion was sacked.
That thinking also guided prop master John Hajdukiewicz and set decorator Tina Jones as they furnished Rivendell. In their words, “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.”
Earlier seasons have already shown some of the items the elves retrieved. “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.”
Hajdukiewicz and Jones say the fire-damaged tapestries brought from Eregion to Elrond’s walls depict “the story of Beren and Lúthien from the First Age.” To Nerdist’s writer, this was an especially fitting, touching choice for Elrond. These objects do more than lend an ancient or scholarly air to his rooms: they are remnants of a home the elves no longer have.
Milsted sees this effort to save things as a reason Rivendell matters beyond offering protection. “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.”
The relationship between Rivendell’s beauty and the pressures surrounding it underpins Nerdist’s appraisal. Living woodland conveys the elves’ care for growing things. Burnt tapestries, scrolls under repair and inhabitants with scarce resources give that beautiful haven a concrete connection to the damage war has done.
The woodland’s usefulness extends to scenes outside Rivendell, giving the filmmakers a controllable forest setting. Night shoots in particular would be far harder to carry out on location. Growing plants let the set embody the elves’ approach to construction, while its purpose-built surroundings make demanding forest scenes possible to shoot there.
Viewers can see more of Rivendell, the artifacts recovered for Elrond’s rooms and the woodland used across different parts of Middle-earth when The Rings of Power season three arrives on November 11.
Other reports from Nerdist’s visits to The Rings of Power season three sets explore how Dark Lord Sauron is forged, the Orcs in greater depth, what remains of Adar in Mordor, and 13 discoveries from the set.
