Rivendell

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Rivendell sits hidden in a narrow gorge of the river Bruinen, tucked into the moorlands at the edge of the Misty Mountains, unseen from the Great East Road that most travelers follow eastward. J. R. R. Tolkien placed this valley at the heart of two of his most beloved works, making it both a literal refuge and something harder to name: a threshold between the ordinary world and a timeless, Elvish one. The Fellowship of the Ring departs from Rivendell on the 25th of December, the date of Christmas. The ring is destroyed and Sauron falls on the 25th of March, the date in Anglo-Saxon tradition for the Crucifixion. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, was meticulous about these dates; almost no readers have ever noticed. What drew millions of people to this invented valley? What does Rivendell actually mean, and where did its landscape come from? And why, in 1968, did a group of Danish commune-dwellers abandon their family surnames to take its name as their own?

• 2. A Name Carved in Two Languages

  ›

  Tolkien built Rivendell's name with the same care he gave to everything linguistic. The English word "Rivendell" is a direct translation of the Sindarin "Imladris"; both mean "deep valley." The English half is split into two elements: "riven," meaning split or cloven, and "dell," an old word for a low-lying valley. The scholar Marjorie Burns points out that both halves of the word suggest descent, a pulling downward into a hidden place. That linguistic instinct mirrors something in Celtic mythology: the descent into the underground realm of the Tuatha De Danann, whose chiefs each ruled a burial mound. Within Tolkien's fiction, Rivendell carried a third name in Westron, the Common Tongue, rendered as "Karningul." Elrond's house there bore yet another title: the Last Homely House East of the Sea, a phrase that frames the entire wilderness of Rhovanion as everything that lies beyond its walls.

• 3. Switzerland and the Glissade

  ›

  Tolkien went hiking in the Swiss Alps in 1911, and he later said directly that the journey from Rivendell across the Misty Mountains, including what he called the "glissade" of Bilbo and the dwarves sliding down slithering stones into the pine woods below, was based on those adventures. The medievalist Marjorie Burns found a parallel in the nineteenth-century writer William Morris, who described approaching a valley he called Water-dale, or Vatnsdale, in Iceland in terms that track closely with Bilbo's approach to Rivendell. Both travelers ride across uplands dotted with patches of green. Both grow extremely tired. Both cross narrow ravines and stretches of bog before arriving at a valley that offers shelter and comfort. Morris wrote of crossing a "narrow, bridge-like rock"; Bilbo faces what Tolkien calls a "narrow bridge of stone without a parapet." The physical geography of Rivendell, then, is a palimpsest of real and imagined landscapes layered one on top of another.

• 4. Sanctuary and the Celtic Otherworld

  ›

  Matthew T. Dickerson, writing in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, argues that Rivendell consistently represents sanctuary throughout Tolkien's legendarium, a place that felt like home. The journalist Jane Ciabattari connected this to the real-world popularity of The Lord of the Rings during the Vietnam War era: readers of that generation, she wrote, yearned for exactly the peace that Frodo felt as "overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace... in Rivendell." Burns places Rivendell and the Elvish realm of Lothlorien alongside the Celtic Otherworld, known in Irish as Tir na nOg. Entry into these realms follows a set pattern: they are hard to find, but once admitted, a traveler crosses a river, signaling the spiritual transition from the ordinary world. In Rivendell's case, pines give way to beech and oak, the air grows warmer, and elves greet the arrivals with laughter and song before the water crossing that divides the rest of Middle-earth from the inner core of every Elvish realm. The Witch-king of Angmar's armies attacked Rivendell repeatedly during the Third Age and failed each time; the Ring Vilya, given to Elrond by Gil-galad, provided the power to protect the valley and to slow the passage of time within it.

• 5. Songs, Swords, and Sacred Dates

  ›

  The philologist Tom Shippey observes that Rivendell is the home of Elvish song in both of Tolkien's major works. The hymn A Elbereth Gilthoniel, which the hobbits hear sung in the valley, invokes the semi-divine Varda and carries, Tolkien himself said, the feeling of his own devout Catholicism. Bilbo's Song of Earendil, composed and performed in Rivendell, uses rhyme, internal half-rhyme, alliteration, alliterative assonance, and what Shippey describes as "a frequent if irregular variation of syntax" to produce what he calls "rich and continuous uncertainty, a pattern forever being glimpsed but never quite grasped." The scholar Rebecca Ankeny notes that verse also signals horror in Rivendell: when Gandalf recites the dark lord's inscription in the Black Speech inside the valley, the elves react with alarm, as if the sound itself threatens the sanctuary. Shippey contrasts how Bilbo sings the Old Walking Song hoping to reach Rivendell and retire, while Frodo sings the same song with weary feet, hoping to reach Mordor. The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that both Frodo and Aragorn receive their renewed magic swords in Rivendell, placing them in the epic tradition of heroes like Sigurd and Arthur at the outset of a quest. Aragorn's sword, reforged by Rivendell's smiths as Anduril, is one of the heirlooms that Rivendell held alongside the Sceptre of Annuminas and the Star of Elendil, relics of the lost kingdom of Arnor.

• 6. On Screen and on Record

  ›

  Peter Jackson filmed Rivendell's sequences for his 2001 adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring at Kaitoke Regional Park in New Zealand, with the waterfalls added later using computer-generated imagery. The critic Brian Rosebury notes that Jackson's Elves are portrayed as sophisticated and urban where Tolkien's were close to nature, yet the film's architecture and ornaments are dominated by natural motifs, suggesting what Rosebury calls "integration with nature, but at one remove." He describes the design as "post-Ruskinian," in the tradition of pre-Raphaelite paintings, William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement, and Art Nouveau architectural detail. These differ from Tolkien's own illustrations but, Rosebury suggests, in a way Tolkien might have welcomed, given his well-documented dislike of industrialised manufacture. The Canadian progressive rock band Rush approached Rivendell musically on their 1975 album Fly by Night, with a song that describes "elfin songs and endless nights, sweet wine and soft relaxing lights." The Tolkien Ensemble released four CDs between 1997 and 2005 setting all of the songs in The Lord of the Rings to music, each album carrying "Rivendell" in its title. The Dutch painter Cor Blok painted Middle-earth subjects across many decades; the Tolkien scholar Daniel Howick described Blok's 1960 painting of Rivendell as "wonderfully atmospheric."

• 7. A Name Adopted

  ›

  In 1968, on the Danish island of Zealand, a group of people founded a commune called Maos Lyst, which translates as Mao's Delight. The members replaced their family surnames with Klovedal, the Danish word for Rivendell. Several of those original residents later became well-known cultural figures in Denmark. A winery called Rivendell operated in New York's Hudson River Valley from 1987 to 2008. The Swedish classical composer Anna-Lena Laurin wrote a work for two guitars bearing the name. That a fictional valley, conjured from Swiss hiking trails and Irish mythology and two Old English words meaning split and dell, should end up as a Danish family name, a Hudson Valley vineyard, and a piece for classical guitar is not incidental. Tolkien himself modified The Lord of the Rings so that Bilbo, during his years living in Rivendell, supposedly wrote the collection of documents that became The Silmarillion, with those texts then preserved in the fictitious Red Book of Westmarch, its name echoing the real medieval Welsh manuscript known as the Red Book of Hergest.