LEGO Releases the Most Elaborate Lord of the Rings Set: A 6,167-Piece Rivendell

Many of us built our first LEGO mod­els in child­hood and, a few years there­after in ado­les­cence, read our first Lord of the Rings nov­el. We con­tin­ue to look fond­ly back on such for­ma­tive cul­tur­al expe­ri­ences in adult­hood, and indeed, some of us retain a gen­uine appre­ci­a­tion for the arti­facts them­selves well into mid­dle age.

It is toward that very inter­sec­tion of enthu­si­asm and means that LEGO has tar­get­ed its lat­est and largest Lord of the Rings-themed set: a 6,167-piece mod­el of the Riven­dell, the sanc­tu­ary locat­ed in the epony­mous Elvish val­ley, which is set to retail for $500 USD.

This new LEGO Riven­dell has room “for the entire Fel­low­ship to debate The One Ring, and the shards of a par­tic­u­lar­ly note­wor­thy sword,” writes The Verge’s Sean Hol­lis­ter, and it includes “tiled rooftops, imag­i­na­tive arch­es, and enough dis­tinct spaces to recre­ate mul­ti­ple scenes from the movies.”

This marks a con­sid­er­able improve­ment on the sets that came out at the time of Peter Jack­son’s Lord of the Rings movies in the ear­ly 2000s: Andrew Liszews­ki at Giz­mo­do notes that “the largest one was a 1,300+-piece recre­ation of the Bat­tle of Helm’s Deep that, by today’s LEGO stan­dards, was rel­a­tive­ly small. The col­lec­tion also includ­ed a tiny 243-piece recre­ation of the Coun­cil of Elrond, which, under­stand­ably, left LOTR fans dis­ap­point­ed.”

You can see an in-depth review of the new Riven­dell set in the video just above from LEGO Youtu­ber Brick­sie. He has a great deal of praise for the details of its com­po­nents, yet what­ev­er resources LEGO can put toward an offi­cial con­sumer prod­uct, they can hard­ly match the pow­er of sheer fan obses­sion.

If you want to expe­ri­ence a tru­ly faith­ful re-cre­ation of Riven­dell in the medi­um of LEGO, you’ll have to attend a con­ven­tion with Alice Finch and David Frank, builders of an elab­o­rate mod­el that includes no few­er than 200,000 bricks: a sprawl­ing mon­u­ment to the kind of qua­si-reli­gious (and some­times life­long) devo­tion inspired by both the imag­i­na­tion of Tolkien and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of LEGO.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Lord of the Rings Mythol­o­gy Explained in 10 Min­utes, in Two Illus­trat­ed Videos

Hokusai’s Icon­ic Print The Great Wave off Kana­gawa Recre­at­ed with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

The Vin­cent van Gogh Star­ry Night LEGO Set Is Now Avail­able: It’s Cre­at­ed in Col­lab­o­ra­tion with MoMA

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty to Cre­ate a LEGO Pro­fes­sor­ship

Why Did LEGO Become a Media Empire? Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #37

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.