Origins and Names
Turgon was of the Noldor, the second kindred of the Eldar who dwelt in Aman under the light of the Two Trees, and he was born there in the ages before that light failed. His father was Fingolfin, eldest son of Finwë by Indis of the Vanyar, so that Turgon stood in the second generation of the princes of the Noldor and in the direct line of their kings. He was the second son of that house: Fingon was his elder brother, and Aredhel, named the White Lady of the Noldor, his sister. Among his nearer kin by his father's half-brother Finarfin were Finrod and his brethren, and the chronicles record a particular friendship between Turgon and Finrod, cousins of like temper. Of his mother's people the published texts of Beleriand say nothing further.
The name by which he is known in the annals is Sindarin in form; its Quenya shape was Turukáno. Both are compounds of two familiar elements: tur, denoting power or mastery, which recurs in such names as Turambar and Túrin, and káno, a word for a commander or leader, which appears likewise in the second part of his brother Fingon's name. The sense is therefore something like "lord-commander" — a name of office and bearing rather than of appearance or deed, and one given long before the events that made it fitting. Later usage attached to him the styles King of Gondolin and, in due course, High King of the Noldor in Middle-earth. Within his own household he was husband to Elenwë, whom he had wedded in the West, and father of one child, Idril, who came to be surnamed Celebrindal, Silverfoot, for her custom of going unshod.
In the works Tolkien saw into print the name surfaces only at the edges of the story. The genealogical matter of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings names Turgon as king of Gondolin and as the father of Idril Celebrindal, and so places him at the head of the line from which the Half-elven descend; nothing of his character or his realm is set out there. The guide to Elvish pronunciation in the same Appendices governs how the name is to be sounded: g is always hard, as in English get, never softened before a following vowel, and the short u has the value it carries in put. Since the word has two syllables, the stress falls on the first.
History
Turgon's recorded history begins with the revolt of the Noldor and their departure from Aman. He had no share in the oath sworn by Fëanor and his sons, and the chronicles place him among those who went out for love of kin and for the pull of the wide lands rather than for the Silmarils; but go he did, in the host of his father. When Fëanor seized the stolen ships at Losgar and burned them on the farther shore, Fingolfin's people were left to make their own way, and they crossed northward over the Grinding Ice of the Helcaraxë into Middle-earth. In that crossing Turgon's wife Elenwë was lost, while his daughter came through alive. The texts set the loss down briefly and without comment, and it stands as the first grief recorded of him.
In the first years of the Noldor in Beleriand Turgon held Nevrast, the coastland west of the mountains of Ered Wethrin, and built his seat at Vinyamar beneath Mount Taras, the one dwelling of his people that looked out upon the sea. There Ulmo began to trouble him with unquiet dreams, and Turgon and Finrod, riding together up the vale of Sirion, slept upon its banks and were counselled in sleep, so that each thereafter sought out a hidden stronghold against a day of defeat neither could yet see clearly. Turgon alone came upon the vale of Tumladen, a green plain closed about by the sheer wall of the Echoriath, and over the course of many years he built a city there, the labour kept so close that nothing of it was known beyond his own following. When the work was done he led his people away from Nevrast — a large part of his father's folk together with many Sindar of that coast — and they passed into the mountains and were not seen again in the outer lands. At Ulmo's bidding he left behind him in the emptied halls of Vinyamar a sword, a shield, a helm and a coat of mail, for a purpose that was not then explained to him.
Secrecy was thereafter the governing law of his realm: none might leave without the king's word, and the eagles of Thorondor kept watch upon the Encircling Mountains on his behalf. Two breaches in that law are set down. His sister Aredhel wearied of the enclosed years and won leave to ride abroad; she was lost to her escort, dwelt long in the eastern woods with Eöl, and returned at last with her son Maeglin, whom Turgon received with honour, having no son of his own. Eöl followed her in, and when he was brought before the king and refused the choice offered him, he cast a dart at his son; Aredhel took the wound and died of it, and Turgon had him thrown from the precipice of Caragdûr. The second breach was of another kind: Húrin and Huor of the house of Hador, still boys, were borne into the vale by eagles when their company was routed, and they were kept there almost a year. Turgon, who thought well of Men, gave them leave to go home again under oath of silence concerning the way.
When the Siege of Angband was broken in the Dagor Bragollach and Fingolfin fell before the gates of Morgoth, Turgon's city was untouched and his people kept within it, and the high kingship passed to his elder brother. In the years afterwards he sent companies of his folk secretly down Sirion to build ships at the river's mouths and seek the road back into the West, that pardon and aid might be asked of the Valar; ship after ship was lost, and no messenger of his ever came to Aman. When Maedhros at length gathered the great alliance, Turgon came out unlooked-for with a host at his back and stood with his brother's army in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. After Fingon was slain, Húrin and Huor with the men of Dor-lómin held the rearguard at the Fen of Serech so that the king might draw his people away; and before they parted Huor spoke of a star that should come out of their two houses. Turgon brought the remnant home through the mountains, and with his brother's death the high kingship of the Noldor in Middle-earth fell to him. He then closed his realm altogether, so that none went out and none came in.
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
The last passage of his history turns on a message he would not take. Tuor, son of Huor, was guided to the hidden vale by Voronwë, the sole survivor of Turgon's mariners, and came before the king wearing the arms left long before at Vinyamar — the sign by which he was to be known. He set out Ulmo's counsel plainly: the city should be abandoned and its people brought down to the sea. Turgon weighed it and refused, holding to the strength of his walls and to the labour of an age, and he stopped the last ways out of the mountains at Maeglin's urging. Tuor remained, wedded Idril, and their son Eärendil was born in Gondolin. Maeglin, taken captive beyond the mountains, bought his life by giving Morgoth the way in, and the assault came upon the city at a festival of high summer. Turgon fought while the fighting served, then gave his people over to Tuor's leading and would not go with them; he perished in the ruin of his tower when it was cast down. His daughter, her husband and their son escaped by a passage Idril had caused to be dug in secret, and through them Huor's words at Serech were answered.
Role and Powers
Turgon's standing in the legendarium is that of a builder-king, and the texts describe his authority chiefly through the thing he made. Gondolin was raised after the pattern of Tirion upon Túna, the Noldorin city in Aman that he had known in his youth and did not forget, with white walls, stairs, towers and fountains set in a green plain; it is presented less as a fortress than as an attempt to hold a memory in stone. To him personally is credited the making of images of the Two Trees, one of gold and one of silver, which stood in the court before his hall and gave no light of their own. Within the encircling mountains his word admitted no appeal, in matters of departure, of judgment and of war alike, and the smiths and masons of his following were reckoned among the most skilled of their kindred.
The power he exercised was, by the standards of the elder days, an ordinary one, and the sources are precise about its sort. It rested on concealment and on labour: a wall of mountains, guarded and finally stopped-up passes, the watch of the eagles, and a law of silence binding upon his people. Turgon is nowhere shown working enchantment or contesting Morgoth in strength of will; what protection lay beyond his own making was Ulmo's, whose power in the waters of Sirion long turned aside the search of Angband, and that was a lent strength rather than a possessed one. His host was well-armed and long unspent, but a hidden force is one that can be used only at the cost of being seen, and the single occasion on which he brought it into the field cost him a great part of it.
The limits set upon him are drawn in the matter of counsel rather than of arms. No other lord of the Noldor is granted so much guidance from the West, and none is shown profiting from it less at the last: he had the dreams that founded his city and the plain warning that would have emptied it, and he acted upon the first and set aside the second, weighing an age of work against a word he could not verify. His attempts to carry a plea to Valinor by sea failed without exception. The high kingship that fell to him after the Fifth Battle brought no corresponding reach, for the realm it named had shut itself; Gondolin outlived Nargothrond and Doriath, which is the measure of what secrecy could achieve, but it preserved rather than contested, and the errand Turgon could not accomplish was carried at last by his grandson.
Kinship, Friendship and Enmity
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
The house Turgon kept about him was small and grew smaller. He took no second wife after the crossing was over, and he begot no son; his sister came back to him only to die under his roof, and of all his near kin only his daughter remained beside him to the end. The sources give no hint that he sought to marry Idril to any lord of the Eldar, and she in turn appears in the annals not as a dependent but as the one member of his household whose judgment ran ahead of his own. It was she who mistrusted where he was content, and she who provided against a day he refused to plan for. The pattern that emerges is of a king much loved and little contradicted, whose closest counsellors were kin and whose kin, with one exception, told him what he wished to hear.
The exception was his sister's son. Having no heir of his body, Turgon raised Maeglin high among the lords of the city and gave him a place in his counsels, and the affection is recorded as genuine on the king's part. What he did not see was that Maeglin desired Idril, whom the custom of the Eldar set too near in blood for any such union, and that the desire was neither returned nor forgotten. The texts are careful here: the danger stood in the king's own hall for years, plain to his daughter and hidden from him. It is the one place where his habit of trust is shown as costing more than his habit of secrecy.
Outside his kindred, his warmest dealings were with Men, and specifically with one house of them across three generations — the two boys he sheltered, and long after, the son of the younger of them, to whom he gave his daughter and, in effect, his people. Among the Noldor lords this regard for the Edain was not universal, and the annals mark it as characteristic of him. His other alliances were of an unequal sort: Thorondor's eagles served his watch, Voronwë served his errand to the sea, and Ulmo's guidance came to him from a power he could neither question nor repay. Of Morgoth it is said that Turgon was the enemy he most desired to find, which is the plainest measure of what the hidden king was worth while he remained hidden.
Drafts and Variants
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
Turgon belongs to the oldest stratum of the legendarium. The tale of his city's destruction, written while Tolkien was convalescing during the First World War, was the first of the Lost Tales to be composed, and it remained the only full-length narrative of that event he ever brought to an end. The setting there is already recognisably the one afterwards published — the shut plain, the ring of heights, the hill on which the city stands — but much of the surface differs. Turgon rules a people called the Gondothlim, a name later abandoned; his Elvish name is given as Turondo, not Turukáno; his sister's son appears as Meglin, the mariner who guides Tuor to him as Bronweg, and the lord of the eagles as Thorndor. The king stands at the head of twelve houses distinguished by emblems, his own bearing the moon, the sun and a scarlet heart. His end — the refusal to go, and his tower cast down — passed into the later account substantially unchanged.
After that early effort the story was compressed rather than retold: the Sketch of the Mythology and the Quenta Noldorinwa reduce Turgon's reign and fall to a few paragraphs of summary, and when Tolkien took up the matter again in his last decades he broke off the new version before Tuor was ever brought into the king's presence. The developed narrative of Gondolin's ruin therefore had to be edited from work half a century old. What the late writings did revise was nomenclature and genealogy. The essay on Fëanor's alteration of Quenya speech sets out the Quenya names of Fingolfin's house — Findekáno for Fingon, Turukáno for Turgon, Itarillë for his daughter — and introduces there a fourth child of Fingolfin, Arakáno, youngest of that family, who was killed in the first fighting after the crossing into Beleriand. No such younger brother appears in the published Silmarillion, and the conception was never worked into the connected narrative.