Gondolin

The city was named by Turgon son of Fingolfin, who built it in the hidden vale he had been shown, and shaped it after the memory of Tirion upon Túna in Valinor. In the tongue of the Noldor of Aman it was called Ondolindë, a name glossed as the rock of the music of water — a reference to the springs and falls of the mountain-ringed vale rather than to anything of the builders' own making. Among the Elves of Beleriand the name took the Sindarin form Gondolin, and it was in that form that it passed into general use and into later record; it was understood there as the hidden rock, the element gond, stone, being joined to the sense of concealment. The shift is not incidental: in the same period the Noldo exiles largely set aside their Valinorean speech for the daily tongue of Beleriand, and their own names and the names they gave were reshaped accordingly.

Beside the single name there ran a tradition that the city bore seven, a conceit Tolkien returned to more than once; Christopher Tolkien notes that verses containing the Seven Names of Gondolin survive scribbled among the papers of the legendarium. Several of these — Gondobar, Gondothlimbar, Gwarestrin, Gar Thurion, Loth, Lothengriol — belong to an older layer of the writing and did not carry over into the later narrative, where the city is called simply Gondolin. What did persist was the descriptive byname: the hidden kingdom, or the hidden city, a designation that says less about the place than about the condition on which its existence depended, and one used by those outside it who knew only that such a realm was rumoured to be.

The name reached print long before the fuller account of the city did. In The Hobbit, Elrond examines the two swords taken from the troll-hoard and identifies them as ancient work of the High Elves, made in Gondolin for the wars against the goblins; the greater of the two he names Glamdring, Foe-hammer, and assigns it to the king of that city. For a reader of 1937 the word carried no more than that weight — a place of old and excellent smithcraft, remembered chiefly through the blades that outlasted it, and named without explanation, as though the explanation lay elsewhere.

Gondolin was a single city rather than a territory, and its situation cannot be separated from its character: it stood inside a natural fortress. The vale it filled, Tumladen, was a level plain closed on every side by the Echoriath, the Encircling Mountains, sheer on their outer faces and unbroken by any ordinary pass. That range rose east of the upper waters of Sirion, beyond the empty country of Dimbar, and its southern heights, the Crissaegrim, looked down upon that land; there Thorondor and the great eagles had their eyries, and their watch over the peaks was part of what kept the vale unseen. No highway ran to the city, and it lay off every line of travel between the realms of Beleriand, so that its neighbours were mountains and unpeopled marches rather than other settlements.

Entry was by one way only. A stream that had once drained the vale had left its bed dry, and this old channel ran out beneath the mountains on the side toward Dimbar, giving a passage into the ring that no eye would take for a gate. From it a tunnel led inward to a deep ravine within the rock, the Orfalch Echor, which climbed by stages toward the plain; the account of Tuor's coming describes the way as barred by seven gates in succession, each set across the cleft and each held by guards, from a first work of wood to a last of steel. The road was kept under constant watch, and those who found it were brought before the wardens rather than let through.

Within the ring the plain lay open and green, and out of its midst rose a single hill of stone, Amon Gwareth, standing alone above level ground. The city was raised on the crown of that hill; its slopes were smoothed and made steep so that the rock itself served as the outer defence, and the white walls and towers above could be seen from the mountain gate across the whole width of the vale. Water was abundant — fountains played in the squares, and in the great square before the king's tower Turgon set images of the Two Trees of Valinor, wrought in silver and gold. The arrangement was defensive as much as ornamental: one hill, one plain, one wall of mountains, one way in.

Before there was a hidden city, Turgon ruled Nevrast and kept his seat at Vinyamar under Mount Taras, on the coast west of the mountains. The impulse to build elsewhere came from Ulmo, who put unquiet into the hearts of Turgon and of Finrod Felagund and set them searching for places of refuge against a day of defeat that had not yet come; searching northward along Sirion, Turgon found the ring of peaks and the level land within. Ulmo afterwards came to him at Vinyamar and gave him counsel for the building, warning him that the doom pronounced upon the Noldor in the North would work itself out in the end, and that the city he raised would stand longest of the Elven realms but not forever. The work was done in secret over fifty-two years, and only when it was finished did Turgon remove his people — nearly a third of the Noldor who had followed Fingolfin, and a still greater number of Sindar — leaving Nevrast empty behind them. By Ulmo's instruction he left in the abandoned hall a sword, a helm, a hauberk and a shield, to be found later by one who would come with a message from the Sea.

For close on four centuries the realm kept itself apart. Its people did not ride abroad, no embassies were exchanged with the other Elven kingdoms, and the sons of Fëanor and even Fingolfin's court knew only that Turgon lived somewhere out of reach. Two mortals saw the city in that time by accident: Húrin and Huor of the House of Hador, cut off in battle near the springs of Sirion and carried over the peaks by eagles, were lodged there almost a year and released at their own asking under an oath never to speak of what they had seen. The only serious breach of the peace came from within the royal house, when Turgon's sister Aredhel wearied of the enclosure and was permitted to leave; she returned long after with a son, Maeglin, begotten in Nan Elmoth by Eöl the Dark Elf, and Eöl followed them to the gate. Condemned by Turgon and refusing the choice offered him, Eöl threw a poisoned javelin at his son, struck Aredhel instead, and was cast from the sheer wall of the hill to his death. Maeglin remained, rose high in the king's counsels, and was reckoned among the mightiest of the city's lords.

Turgon did not come out for the Battle of Sudden Flame, and the ruin of the northern leaguer left his realm untouched; but he did send companies secretly to the mouths of Sirion, where they built ships and sailed west to seek pardon and aid in Valinor, and of those mariners scarcely any returned. When Maedhros gathered the great alliance, Turgon marched at last, and his host appeared unlooked-for from the south to join Fingon before the field. The battle became the Unnumbered Tears: Fingon fell, and with his death the high kingship of the Noldor passed to Turgon. Húrin and Huor with the men of Dor-lómin held the rear at the Fens of Serech so that Turgon might withdraw with what remained of his army, and Huor, dying, told him that from his house and Turgon's a new star would arise. Morgoth now knew that the king of the hidden realm was alive and that his city lay somewhere about the upper waters of Sirion, and from that time the search for it did not stop. It was narrowed further when Húrin, released from Angband after long captivity, came to the outer walls of the mountains and called aloud for admittance; Turgon refused him, and Morgoth's watchers marked the place where he had stood.

The messenger Ulmo had promised arrived in the last years, when Tuor son of Huor, guided by the mariner Voronwë and wearing the arms out of Vinyamar, was brought before the throne. His errand was that the city should be abandoned and its people led down Sirion to the sea while there was still time. Turgon considered it and refused, unwilling to give up the work of an age, and Maeglin's counsel weighed with him; instead the outward ways were shut more closely than before, and the realm staked everything on remaining unfound. Tuor stayed, was given the lordship of a house, and after some years wedded Idril, Turgon's daughter — the second marriage of Elves and Men — and their son Eärendil was born in the city. Idril alone acted on the warning: mistrusting her cousin, she had a passage dug in secret from her own dwelling, running deep beneath the plain to an outlet far beyond the walls. Maeglin, taken by Orcs while seeking ore in the mountains against the king's ban, bought his life in Angband with the location and the defences of the city, and was sent back to wait.

The assault came at the festival of the Gates of Summer, while the people kept vigil on the walls for the sunrise; the light they saw in the north was the army coming over the mountains, with Balrogs, Orcs, wolves and dragons of Morgoth's making. The defence was fought house by house through the streets and squares, and Ecthelion of the Fountain killed Gothmog, lord of the Balrogs, at the cost of his own life. Turgon died when the great tower was thrown down. Maeglin seized Idril and the child in the confusion and was flung from the walls by Tuor, going the same way his father had gone. Tuor led the survivors out through Idril's tunnel and then north over the high and perilous cleft of Cirith Thoronath, where Glorfindel turned to fight a Balrog and fell with it into the chasm; Thorondor bore up his body, and a mound was raised over him in the pass. The remnant came down at last to Nan-tathren and thence to the havens at the mouths of Sirion, where they joined the survivors of Doriath. The vale itself was left waste and never resettled, and what remained of the city went under the sea with the rest of Beleriand at the end of the age.

The city's folk were formed of two kindreds joined before its walls were raised. Turgon brought with him the Noldor of his father's following, and with them the Sindar who had dwelt in Nevrast and had taken him as their lord while he still held Vinyamar; in the closed vale the two mingled more completely than anywhere else in Beleriand, and the records afterwards speak of them without distinction as the people of Gondolin. Their lords are named only in part. Ecthelion, called of the Fountain, and Glorfindel, chief of the House of the Golden Flower, appear as captains of settled standing rather than as figures raised up by the last emergency, which suggests an ordered military establishment of long date; but the accounts that survive give no roll of the houses and no account of how command was divided among them.

Rule rested with Turgon alone, and the one law reported of it defined the realm entirely: the way in was not a way out. Once his people had been brought within the mountains none was suffered to depart, and those few who found the entrance from outside were kept rather than turned away, being taken under guard up the ravine to stand before the king — a procedure the gate-captain Elemmakil sets out plainly when Tuor and Voronwë are halted at the outermost gate. Turgon had no son. His daughter Idril, called Celebrindal because she went always unshod, was his only child, and beside her in the royal house stood her cousin Maeglin, his sister's son, who desired her though marriage between kin so near was not permitted among the Eldar. The high kingship of the Noldor that came to him late brought no change in any of this: it was a title held by a lord whom no petitioner could reach.

In the work Tolkien himself published, the rule of Gondolin survives only as genealogy. Elrond, receiving guests in his own house two ages later, names Eärendil as his father and that city as the place of his father's birth; and the appendix which sets out the three marriages between Elves and Men gives Idril as the daughter of Turgon, king there. Of the government itself nothing passed into that record — no bounds, no succession, no neighbours — but a line of descent carried out of a place that no longer existed.

Gondolin is one of the few places in the legendarium that the narrative almost never enters on its own account. It is approached: the reader is admitted in company with someone who has been looking for it, and the long description of the way in — the dry riverbed, the tunnel, the ravine climbing between its gates — is given at the pace of a man walking it for the first time and being stopped at every stage. The fullest telling, the later account of Tuor's journey, spends its whole length on that approach and breaks off soon after the city comes into view, so that even in Tolkien's own hand the reaching of Gondolin is treated as the substance of the story rather than as a preface to it. The effect is that the city is defined by the difficulty of arriving, and everyone who matters to its history is introduced at a gate: the two mortal brothers carried in over the mountains, Aredhel returning, Eöl behind her, Húrin shouting at a wall that does not open.

What the place stands for in the book is the policy of hiding, tested to destruction. Beleriand contains several refuges of that kind, and Gondolin is the one that keeps its secret longest and is undone most completely — not by assault from without, since the mountains held, but by a lord of its own household who had been within the walls the whole time. The narrative sets the choice out plainly before the ending: a warning is delivered, an alternative is offered, and the king declines it. The city therefore functions as the last term in a sequence of falls, and its ruin closes Noldorin power in the north; yet the story does not treat the loss as final, because the point of the episode is the handful who get out. Everything that follows in the Elder Days runs through the child born there and the passage his mother dug in secret.

Beyond that, Gondolin carries a particular weight as a copy. Its towers, its fountains and the images set in its chief square are all described as recollections of something the builders had seen elsewhere and left behind, so that the city is less an achievement of exile than an attempt to keep a memory standing. When it goes, the last likeness of the Blessed Realm in Middle-earth goes with it, and what survives into later ages is a name attached to old weapons and to a line of descent — a place remembered by its craftsmanship and its refugees rather than by anything it did.

Gondolin has the longest drafting history of any place in the legendarium, since the tale of its fall was the first of the legends Tolkien actually wrote out, composed while he was invalided home from the war and preserved among the Lost Tales as the story of Tuor and the exiles of Gondolin. That early version is far more populous in detail than anything that reached the Silmarillion. Its people are called the Gondothlim, the dwellers in stone, and they are organised into twelve houses distinguished by emblems — the Wing, the Mole, the Swallow, the Heavenly Arch, the Pillar, the Tower of Snow, the Tree, the Golden Flower, the Fountain, the Harp, the Hammer of Wrath, and the king's own — of which only two, Glorfindel's and Ecthelion's, survived into later record. Tuor's guide bears the earlier form Bronweg, afterwards reshaped as Voronwë, and the seven names are not a scribbled curiosity there but a formal proclamation made at the gate.

The assault as first written is mechanical rather than bestial: Morgoth's engines include contrivances of iron and bronze that carry Orcs within them, a conception Tolkien abandoned without replacing it in narrative form. Balrogs appear in that text by the hundred and are killable in numbers, and Gothmog is named a son of Melko; both features he later withdrew. Names shifted too — Meglin for Maeglin, Isfin for the sister who became Aredhel. What did not follow was a finished retelling. After the Lost Tales the fall was reduced to summary in the Sketch of the Mythology and the Quenta Noldorinwa, and the late prose account begun in the 1950s, which supplies the ravine and its seven gates, breaks off before the city is entered. The published chapter is accordingly a compilation from the old outlines rather than a completed late narrative.