The Fall of Gondolin by JRR Tolkien
Edited by Christopher Tolkien
Cover art and interior illustrations by Alan Lee
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This volume completes the life's work of Christopher Tolkien in making his father's manuscripts accessible to the audience that developed as a result of the publication of The Lord of the Rings. While preparing Beren and Luthien, Christopher Tolkien was planning for it to be his last, but on reflection he decided that he wanted to do books covering each of his father's three major stories of the Elder Days.
This volume follows the structure of Beren and Luthien, in being a critical examination of the manuscript from the Tale to the final effort before the elder Tolkien's demise, rather than being an effort to create one complete text comparable to a novel, as was The Children of Hurin. However, there are some minor departures from that structure, perhaps because the story of Tuor and Gondolin never had an extended verse treatment comparable to the Lay of Lethian, the epic poem of Beren and Luthien in rhymed couplets. This is not to say that Tolkien never attempted such a work, but rather that his efforts foundered shortly after being undertaken.
Christopher Tolkien begins the volume with a brief preface in which he sets forth his purpose for putting together this book. He also expresses his gratitude to illustrator Alan Lee, who provided extensive interior illustrations for the book, both grayscale drawings at the beginning of each chapter and color plates tipped into the binding at various points. Interestingly enough, Mr. Lee's paintings, which appear to have been watercolors, are able to capture the style of the elder Tolkien's own efforts in visual media, without becoming slavish imitations. This is a very difficult balance to strike, and many talented artists struggle with it.
The next section is the prologue, in which Christopher Tolkien discusses the question of dating his father's work, particularly the original version of the Tale. There is some evidence that the elder Tolkien's memory of the precise sequence of events became blurred over the years and decades, such that he may well have put the event somewhat later than it actually belonged. However, this should not be seen as in any way disingenuous: the events that surrounded its composition were exceedingly traumatic, particularly the Battle of the Somme (World War I), which can result in memories becoming conflated.
Having dealt with these questions about the composition of the ur-text, Christopher Tolkien then provides a brief account of the backstory of the Fall of Gondolin, of the Creation of Arda and the entry of the Valar into it, of Melkor's rebellion and imprisonment in the Halls of Mandos, of the summoning of the elves to Valinor and the creation of the Silmarils which became an object of Melkor's lust upon his parole, such that he stole them and fled. From that crime flowed many more, including the massacre of the Telerian shipwrights in the wake of the rebellion of the Noldor or Gnomes, the people of Feanor, the creator of the Silmarils, who swore a terrible oath to retrieve them at any cost.
Thus the Gnomes returned to the Hither Lands, under the cloud of the prophecy that would be called the Doom of Mandos, and set up their kingdoms to do battle against Morgoth and his hordes. But bit by bit their strength was whittled away, thanks to infighting, untrustworthy allies, and the slow growth of their own population in the face of Morgoth's seemingly endless hordes of orcs, until Gondolin alone remained of the great Elven kingdoms.
Once we're grounded in that necessary scene-setting, we get a brief brief section of what would've been the Lay of the Fall of Gondolin in alliterative verse. The entire poem never reached beyond 150 lines, and only seventy are given here, an extract in which the names of the various houses of the Gnomes is given.
The next chapter is the Tale of the Fall of Gondolin, told in its entirety from the Book of Lost Tales. As Christopher Tolkien has noted before, this narrative is the only one in which the story of Gondolin's betrayal and destruction was told in full. Here is the account of the various kindreds of the people of Gondolin and their leaders, and how they fared in the heroic but doomed battle to save their city.
And it is a story told, with a narrator very clearly present front and center. That is at least some of its charm, which may well be part of the reason it was never again told in full. Did Tolkien find it simply too difficult to make the shift from that form of narrative to a more modern one, in which the narrative voice is implicit and effectively invisible? In particular, might he have found no good way to present the lists of various households and their leaders, which was so clearly an important part of the Tale (much as Homer's listings of the various ships was so important to the Illiad, or the genealogies of the Patriarchs to the Old Testament), in a way that would be acceptable to a modern reader.
In any case, one thing is certain: no subsequent retelling ever had the scope of the Tale. The next retelling comes from the Sketch of the Mythology, which Tolkien wrote up when trying to find a possible publisher for his literary Lays, his efforts to tell the stories of Turin and of Beren and Luthien in verse format. The purpose of this document was to give a publisher's first reader some framework in which to understand the partially written verse narratives. As a result, it is very much a summary -- but it is already beginning to show definite characteristics of the mature Silmarillion narrative. In particular, Tuor now belongs firmly in the genealogies of the Edain, the Fathers of Men. Specifically, he is now the son of Huor, brother of Hurin, and his early travails are the direct result of his father's demise at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, in which his more famous uncle was taken captive and tortured by Morgoth. Although this development makes Tuor first cousins with Turin and his sister/wife, the two stories do not yet connect.
It's also interesting to see that Tolkien is beginning to consider practicalities of time in the history of Turgon's founding of Gondolin. Instead of the protected plain in the middle of the Encircling Mountains being discovered by Turgon's retreating armies, it is now scouted out far earlier and developed as a last redoubt for the Noldoli (as they are now called).
After discussing the notable changes in the Sketch, Christopher Tolkien then presents and discusses the account of the fall of Gondolin in the Quenta Noldorinwa, the first attempt to tell the story of the War of the Great Jewels in extended prose format after the abandonment of the Book of Lost Tales. Yet this version is clearly developed from the Sketch, apparently by means of expansion, which leaves us wondering how much of the fascinating detail of the Tale was definitely abandoned for good, and how much was simply omitted for the sake of brevity.
In the next chapter we get some frustrating hints of what those answers might have been. This is what Christopher Tolkien calls the Last Version, a prose document that appears to have been intended as a work of narrative prose comparable in scope to The Children of Hurin. In it we get a rich and detailed account of Tuor's arrival in Vinyamar (Turgon's original capital in Beleriand after the crossing of the Grinding Ice) and his encounter with Ulmo, lord of the seas (a figure in many ways reminiscent of Poseidon/Neptune in Greco-Roman mythology). The rest of the story is a lengthy trek overland, trying to shake off the orcs who are trailing them so as not to lead agents of Morgoth to Gondolin.
Presumably it would have gone on to tell the story of Tuor delivering Ulmo's message to Turgon, to prepare to confront Morgoth directly and win victory, which is refused by an elven king far too attached to the works of his hands and those of his people, the story of Maeglin's betrayal and his jealousy towards Tuor for winning the heart of Idril, and the final, disastrous battle. However, the text ends abruptly just as Tuor and his elven guide pass through the last of Gondolin's seven gates and gaze across the plain of Tumladen at Gondolin's beauty. There we the readers are left wondering where it might have gone, with only a few tantalizing notes to suggest the way.
In the next chapter Christopher Tolkien discusses these texts and their relationship to other materials that are not sufficiently relevant to be quoted at length in this volume, but have been presented in the various volumes of the History of Middle-Earth. In particular, it is interesting to consider how the elder Tolkien developed the story of Gondolin in the parallel traditions of the Annals of Beleriand, which had begun more on the order of a simple timeline, but which became a narrative tradition in its own right. Here and there we find small differences in details that were never quite rectified, and we are left wondering if this were an oversight on the part of the author, or if they represent an effort to present the Annals as a feigned document of the Noldorian lore masters themselves, complete with errors resulting from incomplete information on their part.
The remaining chapters deal with Earandil, Tuor's son who fled with him from the wrack of Gondolin and who grew up to be a great mariner and the messenger who gained the aid of the Valar just as Morgoth was about to complete his defeat in detail of the last few communities of the Eldar and the Edain. Sadly, it was hampered by Tolkien's inability to ever get the original Tale of Earandel beyond the original sketches of a great Adventure which in many ways was peripheral to the conflict with Morgoth. In the Sketch Tolkien presents a number of important events that would ultimately become the conclusion of the War of the Great Jewels, but in a way that seems oddly disjointed. We have the Sons of the Valar heading off to do battle, and we have Earandil arriving in Tirion in Valinor, but there is no clear causal relationship between them. That develops only in the Quenta Noldorinwa, where it becomes clear that the Valar send their army to vanquish Morgoth once and for all in response to Earandil's pleas for succor for the defeated (and thus utterly humbled of their overweening pride) fragments of the elven kingdoms of Beleriand.
Following them is a list of names of persons, places and things in the various documents, generally with an explanatory note. There are a few additional notes on various names and details -- the nature of the Ainur, the development of Hurin's ties to Gondolin across the various manuscripts of the legendarium, etc.
On the whole, it is much like Beren and Luthien -- fascinating for the long-time Tolkien fan, particularly for those little insights in the commentary when Christopher Tolkien points out some odd little tweak in a text that turns out to have profound implications later. But for the average reader, it's not really sufficiently interesting in its own right to merit the purchase, especially if one has not read substantially from the twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth
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Review posted July 17, 2021.
