The Fall of Gondolin

The Fall of Gondolin is not a novel but an edited dossier: a compact volume of roughly two hundred pages in which Christopher Tolkien sets out, one after another, the texts his father wrote about the ruin of the hidden city over some six decades. The reader therefore meets the same events repeatedly rather than once, in versions that differ in length, tone and detail — an expansive early prose tale, terse summary accounts written for the compressed chronicles of the mythology, and a late narrative abandoned before it reached the city walls. Between these texts the editor supplies linking commentary, and a separate discussion traces how the story shifted from one telling to the next. Alan Lee's drawings and colour plates accompany the sequence, and the volume closes with the customary apparatus of the later editions: a list of names, notes on points of difficulty, and a glossary of words used in senses now obsolete.

The editorial stance is philological rather than novelistic. Where The Children of Húrin had been assembled into a single continuous narrative, here no attempt is made to weld the drafts into one story; the seams are left visible and are in fact the subject of the book. Christopher Tolkien's voice throughout is that of an annotator explaining what survives, what was superseded and what was never finished, and the arrangement asks the reader to hold several incompatible tellings in mind at once. The result is closer to a documented case study of a story's growth than to a work of fiction, though the early tale is complete enough to be read straight through.

Within the legendarium the volume occupies a middle ground between the finished Silmarillion, where the destruction of the city is given in a single condensed chapter, and the scholarly History of Middle-earth, where the same drafts appear embedded in a much larger apparatus. It completes the set of three tales Tolkien himself regarded as the central stories of the Elder Days, and is addressed to readers who already know the outline and want to see how it was made — not to newcomers seeking a first account of the events.

The oldest text in the book is also the oldest surviving narrative of Tolkien's mythology: he composed the tale of the city's destruction in 1916–17, while on sick leave from the army after the Somme, and he later recalled the circumstances plainly in a letter to W. H. Auden, dating the writing to 1917 and describing it as work done without books to hand. It was the first of the tales of the Elder Days to be set down in full, and it was written at a length the story never again received. In the spring of 1920 he read the tale aloud to the Essay Club of his Oxford college, Exeter — the earliest public airing of any part of the legendarium, and, as Christopher Tolkien observed, a piece his father then thought fit to present as a finished thing.

Everything written afterwards was shorter. In the mid-1920s Tolkien produced a compressed summary of the whole mythology in which the siege and sack of the city occupy a few paragraphs; a fuller prose account of the same kind followed around 1930, and the story was carried through the successive revisions of the 1930s in that condensed form. When the writing of The Lord of the Rings intervened at the end of that decade, the First Age material was set aside for well over a decade, and the chronicle-style annals Tolkien returned to in the 1950s again treated the fall in outline rather than in scene. The result, as the 2018 volume documents version by version, is that the events acquired their canonical shape in summaries while the one expansive telling remained the earliest and least revised.

The last attempt at a full narrative dates from about 1951, when Tolkien began again from the beginning, following Tuor from his captivity in the north to the hidden way that leads to the city. This version is much more detailed than anything since 1917, but it breaks off as Tuor and his guide look down at last on the plain before the walls, so that the destruction the title promises is never reached. Christopher Tolkien first printed that fragment in 1980 in Unfinished Tales, where it stands as the opening item of the First Age section; the earliest tale had appeared separately in the second volume of the History of Middle-earth in 1984. The 2018 book brings both, and the intermediate summaries, into a single sequence for the first time.

The Fall of Gondolin was published on 30 August 2018 by HarperCollins in Britain and by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States, edited by Christopher Tolkien and illustrated by Alan Lee, who had provided the pictures for the two preceding volumes. It completed the sequence of separately issued Great Tales begun with The Children of Húrin in 2007 and continued with Beren and Lúthien in 2017, and the editor — then in his mid-nineties — presented it in his preface as the end of his work on his father's manuscripts, a statement that proved accurate. A German translation by Helmut W. Pesch appeared in the same year under the title Der Fall von Gondolin; no revised edition of the English text has followed, the book having been assembled from texts already established in the earlier scholarly volumes.

The volume is arranged as a single chronological sequence of documents framed by editorial matter. A short preface states the purpose of the book and its relation to its two predecessors; a prologue then sets the story in its place within the mythology, sketching the westward flight of the Noldor and the founding of the hidden realm so that a reader coming to the texts without The Silmarillion at hand can follow them. Only after this do the texts begin, each printed under a heading naming the manuscript from which it is drawn, and each introduced by a paragraph or two in which the editor explains when it was written and how it stands to what precedes it. The order is the order of composition rather than of narrative interest, so the longest and most circumstantial telling stands first and the shortest versions follow it — an arrangement that runs against the usual expectation of a growing story, and one the editor takes care to justify in the opening pages.

Because the last and most detailed of the narratives stops before the events named in the title, the editor does not leave the sequence hanging. Immediately after that fragment he reprints the closing portions of the two earlier summary versions, so that the reader who has followed Tuor to the last stage of his journey can at once read through to the sack of the city, the flight of the survivors and the passage of the refugees to the sea. This makes the middle of the book unusual to navigate: the same summaries appear twice, once in their proper place in the sequence and once again, in extract, as a supplied ending. The comparative essay that follows takes up the story motif by motif — the sending of Tuor, the message of Ulmo, the discovery of the way in, the betrayal from within, the fate of those who escaped — and is the place to look for an account of what changed between versions, rather than the headnotes, which stay close to the manuscripts in front of them.

The back of the book carries the reference apparatus, and it repays knowing which part answers which question. The list of names covers the persons, peoples and places of all the texts together, with brief identifications and, where a name was altered between drafts, a note of its earlier forms; the additional notes gather longer discussions that would have overloaded the headnotes; the glossary explains archaic and technical vocabulary in the early tale, which is written in a deliberately antique manner. A redrawn map of the lands north-west of Middle-earth is supplied for orientation, though it shows the region rather than the city, and no plan of Gondolin itself is given. The illustrations are distributed on two systems: line drawings set within the text at intervals, and full colour plates gathered in separate sections, listed by title in the front matter for those who wish to find a particular one.

Nothing in the volume disturbs the books Tolkien published in his lifetime, though those are where most readers first meet the city. In The Hobbit the destruction is present only as provenance: Elrond, examining the blades taken from the trolls' hoard, identifies them as ancient Elvish work made in Gondolin, and the sword Gandalf carries from that point is said to have belonged to the city's king. The Lord of the Rings adds a genealogical thread rather than a narrative one, for the line of Elrond runs back through Eärendil to Tuor and to Idril, the daughter of Turgon. A reader who knows only these two books has the name, the swords and the descent, and no account of the events themselves; the 2018 volume supplies what those allusions take for granted without revising a syllable of them.

Against the two posthumous editions that readers treat as standard, the book stands as source rather than substitute. The chapter of The Silmarillion that narrates Tuor's errand and the sack was made from the compressed tradition of the summaries, not from any full telling by the author in his later years, and setting those summaries out in sequence makes visible how thin the base of that chapter is. The late narrative had already been printed in Unfinished Tales with its own notes, so the overlap between the volumes is substantial: what the 2018 book adds is not fresh text but the arrangement, the linking commentary and the comparative discussion. Its authority is therefore documentary. Where the versions disagree, it does not adjudicate, and the Silmarillion chapter remains the only place where the story is told once and settled.

The disagreements are not minor, and the earliest text is where they gather. It belongs to a stage of the mythology in which the Enemy bears a different name, the Noldor are called Gnomes, and the geography of the north has not yet taken the shape the later maps give it. Its assault on the walls is carried by contrivances of iron and bronze and fire, some of them hollow and filled with Orcs, a conception Tolkien never repeated and quietly dropped; Balrogs are killed in the fighting in numbers that the later writings, where they are few and terrible, cannot accommodate. The fates of the chief persons survive, and the emblems and houses of the defenders survive with them, but the surrounding machinery does not. The comparative essay is candid about this, and the volume asks its reader to treat the first telling as a document of 1917 rather than as an account of what happened.

What the story carries for the legendarium as a whole is a hinge rather than an episode. The last free realm of the Noldor ends here, and out of its ruin come the survivors who reach the mouths of Sirion, and from them Eärendil, whose voyage brings the host of the West to break Morgoth's power. Everything after the Elder Days — the founding of Númenor, the line of the Half-elven, Elrond in Rivendell — depends on a handful of refugees escaping a burning city. The volume does not argue this; it simply places the texts where the dependency can be seen, and the prologue exists to give a reader enough of the surrounding history to feel it.

The book was issued in more than one form from the outset. Beside the ordinary illustrated hardback, HarperCollins produced a deluxe slipcased issue in the manner of the two earlier Great Tales, so that the three could stand together on a shelf as a matched set; a trade paperback followed, as did an audio recording of the texts. None of these issues altered the contents. Because the volume had been assembled from material already established in the earlier scholarly editions, later printings reproduce the setting of 2018 without correction of substance, and there is no revised or expanded state of the English text to distinguish.

Translation began at once. The German version by Helmut W. Pesch appeared in the year of publication as Der Fall von Gondolin, from the house that had long carried Tolkien's German editions, and other languages followed. In German, as in English, most of the contents had been available for decades in other bindings: the earliest tale in the translated Book of Lost Tales and the late unfinished narrative in Nachrichten aus Mittelerde, the German Unfinished Tales. What the new translation supplied was therefore the same thing the English volume supplied — the sequence, the connecting commentary and the comparative discussion — rather than any text previously unknown to readers of that language.

No literary prize is recorded for the volume. Its standing was settled instead by what happened afterwards: Christopher Tolkien, who had announced in the preface that this closed his work on his father's papers, died in January 2020, so that the book remained the last he edited. Publication of unreleased material from the papers has since continued under other hands, beginning with The Nature of Middle-earth in 2021, edited by Carl F. Hostetter. The Fall of Gondolin thus marks the end of a single editorial undertaking that had run from the Silmarillion of 1977 through the History of Middle-earth to the three separately issued tales.