Rivendell

The form under which the valley is best known in the western tale is an English one, and this is a consequence of the translation convention that governs the whole narrative: names current in the Common Speech are rendered into English so that they carry to a modern reader the same transparency they had for those who used them. Rivendell is accordingly a compound of plain elements, riven and dell, and describes exactly what the place is — a narrow, deeply cut valley, a dell cloven out of the higher land. Behind the English stands the Westron name Karningul, of the same sense, which Tolkien notes among the small number of Common Speech forms he allows to show through the translation. Because the name is an English compound rather than an Elvish one, the pronunciation rules given for Elvish do not apply to it; the stress falls on the first syllable, and the frequent stressing of the final syllable is an error.

Among the Elves the valley was Imladris, and this is the name that appears wherever the older lore is quoted rather than the traveller's speech. It is Sindarin, and it agrees closely in meaning with its Common Speech counterpart: the second element belongs to a small group of words built on the sense of cleaving or cutting, which recur in weapon-names and in the names of sharp mountain ridges, while the first denotes a deep vale between steep sides. The two names are therefore not rivals but the same description in two tongues, which is unusual; more often an Elvish name and its later equivalent diverge. Elrond's own house preserved the Sindarin form in its records, and the annals that reach the Third Age from Elvish sources name the stronghold Imladris and add, as a gloss for later readers, that Men called it Rivendell.

A third designation is not a place-name at all but a description of hospitality: the Last Homely House east of the Sea. It reached the wider public through Bilbo Baggins, and it reflects a hobbit's sense of geography, in which the valley marks the final point of comfort, food and welcome before the road climbs into the Misty Mountains and the wild lands beyond. The qualification east of the Sea quietly points westward, to the Elvish homes that lie beyond the Great Sea and are not reachable by any traveller on foot. In ordinary speech the same place is also called simply the house of Elrond, so that in practice a single valley carries a topographical name in two languages and a household name that says nothing of the terrain whatever.

Rivendell is not a realm with frontiers but a single valley and the household set within it, lying in the eastern reaches of Eriador where the land begins to rise toward the Misty Mountains. Appendix A groups it with Hollin among the lands east of the Greyflood and the Loudwater, that is, in the country beyond the two rivers that divide central Eriador from the mountain marches; the old kingdoms that quarrelled over Eriador reckoned it as lying in that eastern portion. The Great East Road, coming from the west, crosses the Hoarwell at the Last Bridge and then winds through the broken, wooded hill country of the Trollshaws before descending to the Ford of Bruinen. The valley lies off this road rather than upon it, north of the crossing, and travellers bound for the High Pass and the lands beyond the mountains may pass by without ever seeing it.

Its chief feature is concealment by shape alone. The ground on either side is high moorland and stony hill, and the valley is cut so deeply and so narrowly into it that nothing shows until one stands at the very brink and looks down; the descent is made by a steep zigzag path barely wide enough for ponies, and it is easy to miss the head of that path altogether without a guide. From the rim the sound of water rises before anything is seen, for the river runs loud along the floor of the cleft and falls over ledges on its way, and the slopes are thick with pine. The Bruinen itself acts as the outer defence: the ford below is the one obvious approach from the west, and it lay within Elrond's power to raise the water against anything that tried to force it.

Within the valley there is no town and no fortification of the ordinary kind, only Elrond's house, standing near the water with terraces and gardens about it and open porches from which the heights can be seen. It is large enough to lodge a company of guests together with Elrond's own people, and it contains a hall for feasting and a second hall, kept for music and the telling of old matters, as well as storerooms, workshops and a treasury of records. What distinguishes the place is this combination: the plain comfort of a well-run house set inside a defile that functions as a wall, so that a valley with no gates proved harder to enter than most strongholds.

The valley's beginnings belong to the war between Sauron and the Elves in the latter part of the Second Age. Sauron's forces entered Eriador in 1695, and Gil-galad sent Elrond eastward from Lindon with what strength could be spared for the relief of Eregion. The help came too late: in 1697 Eregion was laid waste and its lord slain, the West-door of Moria was shut, and Elrond, drawing off northward with the survivors he could gather about him, established the refuge of Imladris in that same year. Two years afterwards Sauron had overrun Eriador entire. The turn came from the Sea in 1700, when a great fleet out of Númenor broke his power in the west, and by 1701 he had been driven from Eriador altogether, after which the western lands had peace for a long age.

The older lore preserved outside the Tale of Years describes the place from the beginning as both stronghold and refuge, and it is on that double character that its whole later history rests. Elrond, at that time Gil-galad's herald, had command of a force too small to save Eregion, and the withdrawal into the mountain country was a retreat rather than a plan; the people who came with him included fugitives from the ruined smith-realm. In the fighting that followed he was shut up in the valley with them, and the pressure was only lifted when Sauron was compelled to turn and face the armies advancing from Lindon and the coast. Later, when the Second Age ended and Gil-galad was dead, the mightiest of the Three Rings, which had been in the High King's keeping, passed to Elrond, and it remained in the valley, unused while Sauron held the One and unrevealed to any but a few.

The largest gathering the valley ever held came at the close of the Second Age. The Last Alliance of Elves and Men was formed in 3430, and in the following year Gil-galad and Elendil marched east to Imladris, where the host lay while its strength was assembled from the scattered peoples of the west. Not until 3434 did it pass over the Misty Mountains toward Dagorlad, and the war that followed cost both kings their lives. Elrond came back to the valley when it was over, and from that point its function shifted: it was no longer a war-camp but a place of keeping, where records, heirlooms and the remnants of ruined realms were preserved. Among what was held there was the sword of Elendil, broken beneath him at his fall and never reforged through all the ages that followed.

In the Third Age the chief threat came from Angmar, and twice the valley figures directly in that long conflict. In 1409 the Witch-king's onslaught destroyed the watch-tower on Weathertop and drove the North-kingdom's remnants back, and Rivendell itself was beleaguered in that campaign, though it did not fall. The reckoning came in 1975, when Angmar was broken at Fornost by a host out of Lindon joined by men of Gondor; Elrond's people rode in that battle, and it was Glorfindel of Rivendell who overtook the fleeing Witch-king and spoke the words that no man's hand would bring him down. Afterwards, with the northern kingdom gone and its people reduced to the wandering Dúnedain, Elrond's house became the guardian of what remained of Isildur's line, keeping both its heirlooms and, when need arose, its children.

The middle centuries brought sorrow of a private kind. In 2509 Celebrían, Elrond's wife, was waylaid by orcs in the Redhorn Pass on a journey south and was brought back wounded to the valley; Elrond healed her body, but she took no more joy in Middle-earth and passed over the Sea in the next year. In 2933 the two-year-old Aragorn was brought to the house after his father's death, was fostered there under another name, and the heirlooms of his house were given into Elrond's keeping. Travellers of quite different sort came in 2941, when Thorin Oakenshield's company halted there on the road east and Elrond, reading the map they carried, found writing on it that showed only by moonlight. Bilbo Baggins, who had passed through with them and again on his way home, returned in 3002 to settle in the valley for good.

The valley's part in the last war was brief and decisive. Frodo Baggins was carried across the Ford of Bruinen in October 3018 with the Nine at his heels, and lay in Elrond's house while the wound taken at Weathertop was searched out and closed. On the twenty-fifth of that month the council was held at which representatives of Elves, Dwarves and Men from lands that had long since ceased to consult one another set out what each knew of the Ring, and the decision to destroy it was reached there rather than at any court or capital. The Company chosen for that errand left the valley on the twenty-fifth of December and was not seen there together again. Rivendell was never assaulted in the War of the Ring, though the country about it was troubled, and it ended the age unbroken.

What ended it was departure rather than conquest. Elrond rode west in the autumn of 3021 with Galadriel, Gandalf and the Ring-bearers and took ship from the Grey Havens, and the authority that had held the valley for three ages of the world went with him. His sons remained for a time, and Celeborn came at length to dwell there with them after his own realm was empty; while they stayed, the house kept something of what it had been. When that household too was gone over the Sea, no dwelling east of the water still held anyone who remembered the Elder Days at first hand, and the valley passes out of the chronicles without any account of ruin or capture.

Authority in the valley was personal rather than institutional. Elrond is never given a royal title in the narrative; he is the master of the house, and the language used of his position is domestic throughout — his people, his household, his counsellors. Erestor appears as the chief of those counsellors, and the deliberation at which the Ring was discussed was convened and directed by Elrond himself with such advisers present, not by any assembly with standing rights. Others of the household are named in passing and show the range of its occupations: Glorfindel, whose power was of a different order from that of the rest and who was accordingly sent out when speed and strength were needed, and Lindir among the singers of the hall. No garrison is described. When the roads had to be watched, small parties of riders were sent out along them and recalled, which is how the approaches were kept rather than by any permanent force.

The household was also a family, and its ties reached beyond the valley. Elrond wedded Celebrían, daughter of Celeborn and Galadriel, in the first century of the Third Age; their twin sons Elladan and Elrohir were born in 130 and their daughter Arwen in 241. Through her mother Arwen was kin to the rulers of the wood beyond the mountains, and she spent long periods there among her mother's people rather than in her father's house. After Celebrían was taken from Middle-earth the sons made a settled enmity of the orcs of the mountains, riding out often and in company with the Rangers of the North. The valley took in others besides Elves: Gilraen came there with her small son after her husband's death and remained many years before returning to her own kin in Eriador, and the fostering of the heirs of the northern line was a duty the house carried across generations.

Toward its neighbours the house behaved as a point of resort rather than as a power claiming ground. Nothing suggests tribute, subjects or borders held by force; what is shown instead is a traffic of messengers and guests. Word came from Círdan at the Havens by the mouth of one of his people, from the Elven-king's realm east of the mountains by his son's, and from the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain by one of their elders who had passed that way before; men of Gondor found their road there as well. With the wandering Dúnedain the connection was closest and most constant, and with the hobbits it ran through long acquaintance rather than any treaty. Against the orc-holds of the Misty Mountains and whatever crept in the hills between there was no accommodation at all.

In both tales that reach the valley it serves the same structural purpose: an interlude in which the journey stops and the reader is allowed to catch up with it. Thorin's company turns aside from the road worn out, and what follows is a fortnight of mending gear, eating, sleeping and listening to singing, during which the things the travellers are carrying half-understood are identified for them by someone older and better informed. Almost nothing is done there in the way of action, yet the expedition leaves knowing what its weapons are, where its road runs and what waits on it. The pattern repeats on the way home, when the same company's survivor comes back westward and lingers before the last stage; the valley bookends the adventure rather than forming part of it. Its narrative use, in short, is exposition made hospitable — counsel given over food instead of in a council chamber.

In the longer tale the same stopping-place carries a change of scale. Everything before the ford is flight — a private matter of one household, pursued along back roads — and everything after it is a shared undertaking, because at the valley the scattered knowledge of many peoples is brought together and set out in order for the first time. Rumours that had been circulating separately in the Shire, in Gondor, in the wood beyond the mountains and under the Lonely Mountain are matched against one another there, and out of the matching comes both the reader's full account of the Ring and the decision about what must be done with it. The valley is thus the hinge of the book: a place of deliberation rather than of battle, where the story is redirected by speech.

What the place stands for is rest that cannot be kept. Weariness and even grief are eased in it, verses are made and rehearsed there at leisure, and guests find it hard to think of leaving; yet every stay ends with a departure eastward or west, and the narrative gives the valley no episode that does not conclude in a road. The point is pressed when the surviving travellers return at the end and find the oldest of its guests grown very old indeed, drowsing between questions. The shelter had slowed nothing after all, and the reader is left to understand that what the house preserved was memory, not exemption.

The valley was not invented for the long tale. It came ready-made from the earlier book, and when the sequel was begun it was one of the few fixed points the new story already possessed and had to reach; the opening drafts, in which the ring-bearer is Bingo Bolger-Baggins rather than Frodo, run eastward toward Elrond's house much as the finished narrative does. What altered in the writing was not the place but the company that arrived at it. Through several phases of composition the weather-worn wanderer taken up at Bree was himself a hobbit, called Trotter and marked out by his wooden shoes, and it was in Elrond's house that his identity was to be disclosed — at one stage as Peregrin Boffin, a connection of Bilbo's who had left the Shire long before. Only later did that figure become a Man and the heir of the northern line, a substitution that changed the whole weight of the Rivendell chapters, since a household reunion became instead the recovery of a kingship.

The other large change concerns what is said in the valley rather than what happens there. The council chapter was reworked more often than almost anything else in the book, and much of the ancient history that the final text delivers through Elrond had not been devised when the earliest versions were written. Gandalf's absence, explained in the finished chapter by Saruman's treachery, had quite different causes in the outlines that preceded it — in one he is held fast by Treebeard, at that point conceived as a hostile giant rather than as the guardian of a forest — and Saruman's turning emerged only in the course of working the chapter over. The chronology that places the founding of the refuge after the ruin of Eregion belongs to later labour still, worked out in the drafts of the tale of years, so that a place long in print was afterwards given the deep past that the published narrative treats as its foundation.

The valley reached the screen first in the Rankin/Bass television film of 1977, where the halt at Elrond's house survives the general compression of the novel largely because the moon-letters on the dwarves' map are needed for what follows; Elrond was voiced by Cyril Ritchard. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of the following year, with André Morell as Elrond, keeps the valley as a waypoint but reduces the deliberation held there to a short scene, which has the effect of turning a decision reached by many voices into an announcement. The same studio's Return of the King of 1980 makes a different use of the place: rather than an episode it becomes a frame, the film returning throughout to a celebration of Bilbo's birthday in Elrond's house at which the war is recounted in retrospect by a minstrel of Gondor — a device the book does not employ. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, in twenty-six half-hour parts, is the version that preserves most of what is spoken in the valley, since its length allows the council to proceed as an argument rather than a summary; Elrond was played there by Hugh Dickson.

Peter Jackson's trilogy filmed the valley's exterior at Kaitoke Regional Park north of Wellington and cast Hugo Weaving as Elrond and Liv Tyler as Arwen, and its best-known departure falls on the approach: Glorfindel does not appear, his errand on the road is given to Arwen, and it is she who carries Frodo to the crossing and summons the flood. Inside the house the council is rewritten as an open quarrel between the delegations, and the reforging of Elendil's sword is removed from the valley altogether and postponed to the third film, where Elrond brings the finished blade to Aragorn in Rohan; the films also dispatch a company of Elves from Elrond to the defence of Helm's Deep, for which the novel offers no warrant. The later Hobbit trilogy returns to the same setting and enlarges the stay considerably, giving Lindir a speaking part (Bret McKenzie) and staging a meeting of the White Council in the valley, an episode assembled from the appendices rather than taken from the shorter book.