Matt Heerema
Contact
Back to Articles

Justifying Rivendell

A brief exercise in ascribing too much (?) meaning to expensive LEGO sets.

M
By Matt Heerema
Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland — waterfalls plunging past a village in a steep glacial valley

So, I bought a really expensive LEGO set.

It's Rivendell. I've been drooling over it since it was announced a little over three years ago. The waterfalls, the arched bridges, Elrond's study, the shards of Narsil, minifigs of the whole Fellowship. It cost about five hundred dollars, which is a ridiculous amount of money for a grown man, a pastor no less, to spend on a plastic toy.

Part of me is (only half-jokingly) feeling the need to justify the purpose. The headline: Rivendell is a significant location in my soul.

The Last Homely House

Rivendell first enters the story in The Hobbit, where it is "the Last Homely House," the final hearth before the Wild. Tolkien describes Bilbo's first stay like this:

"His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all."

Decades later, in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo wakes up in that same house after Weathertop and the desperate flight to the Ford. He wakes healed, the splinter of the Morgul-blade finally cut out of him, and the narrator hands us one of the loveliest sentences in the book: "Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness."

Then look at what actually happens at Rivendell. Frodo is healed there. The free peoples hold their great council there: Tom Shippey observes that in the "Council of Elrond" chapter, some fifteen thousand words long, "nothing happens: it consists entirely of people talking," and out of all that talking comes the decision the whole age hangs on. The war effort is outfitted there. Narsil, the Sword of Elendil, is reforged as Andúril. Bilbo hands over Sting and the mithril coat. Elrond's scouts range the lands, and the Nine Walkers are chosen and sent. Healing, counsel, preparation for war. That's the kind of place it was.

What Tolkien said he was doing

In 1951 Tolkien wrote a long letter to the publisher Milton Waldman laying out the architecture of the whole. Of Elrond and Rivendell, he said:

"Elrond symbolises throughout the ancient wisdom, and his House represents Lore — the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful. It is not a scene of action but of reflection. Thus it is a place visited on the way to all deeds, or 'adventures'."

A place visited on the way to all deeds. You don't get to stay in comfortable, safe Rivendell. You are healed there, counseled there, equipped there, and then you leave. In Frodo's case you leave in the least expected direction possible: straight toward the enemy.

What I see when I look at it

Here I have to be careful, because Tolkien famously hated allegory. In the Foreword to the second edition he wrote: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers." Allegory, he said, resides in "the purposed domination of the author," and applicability in "the freedom of the reader."

Tolkien did not write Rivendell as a metaphor for the church, and he would have resisted anyone who claimed he did, so I won't. But I will claim reader's freedom in thinking of it that way, and I'll claim it with his own blessing on the deeper point: he told a Jesuit friend in 1953 that The Lord of the Rings is "a fundamentally religious ... work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision," with the religious element "absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

Rivendell reminds me of what the church is meant to be.

Rivendell is a refuge of peace and security in a war-torn world. A house of healing. A house of counsel. A house of preparation for war. And what else is the church if not those things? People stagger in off the road carrying wounds they picked up out there. They are healed. They hear counsel, the kind that takes long deliberation and many unlike voices. They are equipped, old swords bestowed on new wielders. And then they are sent back out into the darkness to do battle. Frodo leaves the safest house in Middle-earth walking toward the most dangerous: Mordor.

I should also say where the picture breaks down, because the break teaches something too. Rivendell is elegiac (a new word I learned when researching what others have said about Rivendell...). Its songs are full of the Sea; it guards the fading memory of a home the elves left long ago, and its power holds against Mordor, as Gandalf tells Frodo, only for a while longer. Rivendell hopes backward, preserving what was, until it eventually falls. The church hopes forward, toward a house whose rooms are still being prepared.

So the set is going on display in my office at the church building. I plan to build it with a few close friends across some unhurried evenings, which seems like the right liturgy for the thing. And when someone eventually asks why a pastor keeps six thousand pieces of Middle-earth on his shelf, I'll get to say: because this is the Last Homely House, and you're standing in one too.

The part I don't need to justify

And yet. Having marshaled Tolkien's letters, the scholars, and my own ecclesiology in defense of an outlandish LEGO purchase, I have to admit that none of that is the real reason.

The real reason is that the thing is beautiful, and building it will be a lot of fun.

Tolkien had a category for this too. He called the human impulse to make imagined worlds "sub-creation," and he understood it as part of what it means to bear the image of a Maker: we make because we were made by One who makes. In the same essay he argued that fairy-stories give us Recovery, a "regaining of a clear view." I'd say the same about hours of quiet, careful work with your hands, in good company, ending in something lovely. Anyone who has built a LEGO set knows how meditative it is. Sorting, snapping, following the plan, watching a valley take shape on the table while the conversation wanders. It comes surprisingly close to Bilbo's list: food, work, story-telling, sitting and thinking, a pleasant mixture of them all.

Delight in beauty does not require justification via production. Meditation on a beautiful concept does not need to earn its keep. God strewed the world with beauty that serves no apparent productivity whatsoever, and one fitting way to honor that is to sit at a table with people you love and slowly assemble a small beautiful thing. Sabbath, in plastic.

So that's my justification. Rivendell is the house of healing, counsel, and sending, and I want its picture in the room where I do my work. All of that is true. But I probably would have bought the set anyway.

I said at the start that I was only half joking about needing to justify this. Now you can decide which half was which.

References

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links on this page are affiliate links, at no extra cost to you.

Featured image: Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland — often identified by scholars as an inspiration for Rivendell. Photo: Chensiyuan, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).

LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site.