Rivendell will look different in the third season of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”. The Prime Video series will present an early version of the elven refuge, and its team has explained how they built it: a watercolor by J. R. R. Tolkien himself, a real valley in the Swiss Alps, and sets built with wood and natural vegetation are behind the result.
The details appear in an Amazon feature about a visit to Shepperton Studios, where the creative leads present the new setting. The aim wasn’t simply to reproduce Rivendel from Peter Jackson’s films. That version belonged to a later period in the story; here, Elrond is starting to establish the enclave.
That temporal difference allows recreating a place that is highly recognizable without pretending it had been exactly the same for millennia. The team had to find a delicate balance: to present the viewer with a Rivendel they could recognize instantly, yet young enough to fit the events of the Second Age.
A Tolkien watercolor and a Swiss valley as starting points
The design took as its main reference a Tolkien watercolor used in a U.S. edition of The Hobbit. Its designers studied the arrangement of the river, the bridge, and the buildings within the valley. They did not merely recover a color palette; they sought for the landscape’s geography to maintain a recognizable relationship with the composition drawn by the author.
The second reference is Lauterbrunnen, in Switzerland, the Alpine valley Tolkien visited in 1911 that contributed to his imagining of Middle-earth. Production designer Kristian Milsted explained that the team flew over the area by helicopter and scanned it with visual effects specialists. He then integrated the physical set into a digital recreation of that environment.
This method also conditioned camera perspectives: when the characters view the landscape from the village, the horizon responds to a geography studied in advance. The production thus combines carpentry and set-building with digital tools, rather than relying exclusively on a computer-generated backdrop.
The sets incorporate real wood and plants, materials chosen to express the elves’ relationship with nature. Against the large monumental spaces of other realms in the series, this Rivendel seeks to convey protection and a certain simplicity. It is not yet the sanctuary consolidated as viewers of the film trilogy know it.
A refuge in the midst of the war against Sauron
The visual shift serves a function in the story. The third season of The Rings of Power takes place five years after the fall of Eregion. While Sauron extends his dominion and works on the creation of the One Ring, Rivendel and Lindon remain among the last elven refuges, protected by the Three Rings.
In that context, the set is not merely a wink to fans: it represents a place to take refuge in an increasingly hostile world. The series’ producers have also noted that, given the elves’ pace of life, their appearance should not change abruptly over a few years. Any evolution, if it continues to appear, will be gradual.
Season 3 premieres on November 11, 2026 on Prime Video. The platform will release the first four episodes that day, two more on November 18, and the last two on November 25. It will then be possible to see whether this version of Rivendel manages to unite Tolkien’s imagined landscape with the needs of a story advancing toward war.
