But a deep underlying shift in the history of Gondolin separates the earlier and later accounts: for whereas in the Lost Tales (and later) Gondolin was only discovered after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears when the host of Turgon retreated southwards down Sirion, in The Silmarillion it had been found by Turgon of Nevrast more than four hundred years before (442 years before Tuor came to Gondolin in the Fell Winter after the fall of Nargothrond in the year 495 of the Sun). In the tale my father imagined a great age passing between the Battle of Unnumbered Tears and the destruction of the city (‘unstaying labour through ages of years had not sufficed to its building and adornment whereat folk travailed yet’, p. 163); afterwards, with radical changes in the chronology of the First Age after the rising of the Sun and Moon, this period was reduced to no more than (in the last extant version of ‘The Tale of Years’ of the First Age) thirty-eight years. But the old conception can still be felt in the passage on p. 240 of The Silmarillion describing the withdrawal of the people of Gondolin from all concern with the world outside after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, with its air of long years passing.*
In The Silmarillion it is explicit that Turgon devised the city to be ‘a memorial of Tirion upon Túna’ (p. 125), and it became ‘as beautiful as a memory of Elven Tirion’ (p. 240). This is not said in the old story, and indeed in the Lost Tales Turgon himself had never known Kôr (he was born in the Great Lands after the return of the Noldoli from Valinor, I.167, 238, 240); one may feel nonetheless that the tower of the King, the fountains and stairs, the white marbles of Gondolin embody a recollection of Kôr as it is described in The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr (I.122–3).
I have said above that ‘despite the frequent reminder that Ulmo was guiding Tuor as the instrument of his designs, the essential element in the later legend of the arms left for him by Turgon on Ulmo’s instruction is lacking’. Now however we seem to see the germ of this conception in Turgon’s words to Tuor (p. 161): ‘Thy coming was set in our books of wisdom, and it has been written that there would come to pass many great things in the homes of the Gondothlim whenso thou faredst hither.’ Yet it is clear from Tuor’s reply that as yet the establishment of Gondolin was no part of Ulmo’s design, since ‘there have come to the ears of Ulmo whispers of your dwelling and your hill of vigilance against the evil of Melko, and he is glad’.
In the tale, Ulmo foresaw that Turgon would be unwilling to take up arms against Melko, and he fell back, through the mouth of Tuor, on a second counsel: that Turgon send Elves from Gondolin down Sirion to the coasts, there to build ships to carry messages to Valinor. To this Turgon replied, decisively and unanswerably, that he had sent messengers down the great river with this very purpose ‘for years untold’, and since all had been unavailing he would now do so no more. Now this clearly relates to a passage in The Silmarilion (p. 159) where it is said that Turgon, after the Dagor Bragollach and the breaking of the Siege of Angband,
sent companies of the Gondolindrim in secret to the mouths of Sirion and the Isle of Balar. There they built ships, and set sail into the uttermost West upon Turgon’s errand, seeking for Valinor, to ask for pardon and aid of the Valar; and they besought the birds of the sea to guide them. But the seas were wild and wide, and shadow and enchantment lay upon them; and Valinor was hidden. Therefore none of the messengers of Turgon came into the West, and many were lost and few returned.
Turgon did indeed do so once more, after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (The Silmarillion p. 196), and the only survivor of that last expedition into the West was Voronwë of Gondolin. Thus, despite profound changes in chronology and a great development in the narrative of the last centuries of the First Age, the idea of the desperate attempts of Turgon to get a message through to Valinor goes back to the beginning.
Another aboriginal feature is that Turgon had no son; but (curiously) no mention whatsoever is made in the tale of his wife, the mother of Idril. In The Silmarillion (p. 90) his wife Elenwë was lost in the crossing of the Helcaraxë, but obviously this story belongs to a later period, when Turgon was born in Valinor.
The tale of Tuor’s sojourn in Gondolin survived into the brief words of The Silmarillion (p. 241):
And Tuor remained in Gondolin, for its bliss and its beauty and the wisdom of its people held him enthralled; and he became mighty in stature and in mind, and learned deeply of the lore of the exiled Elves.
In the present tale he ‘heard tell of Ilúvatar, the Lord for Always, who dwelleth beyond the world’, and of the Music of the Ainur. Knowledge of the very existence of Ilúvatar was, it seems, a prerogative of the Elves; long afterwards in the garden of Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva (I.49) Eriol asked Rúmil: ‘Who was Ilúvatar? Was he of the Gods?’ and Rúmil answered: ‘Nay, that he was not; for he made them. Ilúvatar is the Lord for Always, who dwells beyond the world.’
(iv) The encirclement of Gondolin;
the treachery of Meglin (pp. 164–71)
The king’s daughter was from the first named ‘Idril of the Silver Feet’ (Irildë in the language of the ‘Eldar’, note 22); Meglin (later Maeglin) was his nephew, though the name of his mother (Turgon’s sister) Isfin was later changed.
In this section of the narrative the story in The Silmarillion (pp. 241–2) preserved all the essentials of the original version, with one major exception. The wedding of Tuor and Idril took place with the consent and full favour of the king, and there was great joy in Gondolin among all save Maeglin (whose love of Idril is told earlier in The Silmarillion, p. 139, where the barrier of his being close kin to her, not mentioned in the tale, is emphasised). Idril’s power of foreseeing and her foreboding of evil to come; the secret way of her devising (but in the tale this led south from the city, and the Eagles’ Cleft was in the southern mountains); the loss of Meglin in the hills while seeking for ore; his capture by Orcs, his treacherous purchase of life, and his return to Gondolin to avert suspicion (with the detail of his changed mood thereafter and ‘smiling face’)—all this remained. Much is of course absent (whether rejected or merely passed over) in the succinct account devised for The Silmarillion—where there is no mention, for example, of Idril’s dream concerning Meglin, the watch set on him when he went to the hills, the formation on Idril’s advice of a guard bearing Tuor’s emblem, the refusal of Turgon to doubt the invulnerability of the city and his trust in Meglin, Meglin’s discovery of the secret way,* or the remarkable story that it was Meglin himself who conceived the idea of the monsters of fire and iron and communicated it to Melko—a valuable defector indeed!
The great difference between the versions lies of course in the nature of Melko/Morgoth’s knowledge of Gondolin. In the tale, he had by means of a vast army of spies† already discovered it before ever Meglin was captured, and creatures of Melko had found the ‘Way of Escape’ and looked down on Gondolin from the surrounding heights. Meglin’s treachery in the old story lay in his giving an exact account of the structure of the city and the preparations made for its defence—and in his advice to Melko concerning the monsters of flame. In The Silmarillion, on the other hand, there is the element, devised much later, of the unconscious betrayal by Húrin to Morgoth’s spies of the general region in which Gondolin must be sought, in ‘the mountainous land between Anach and the upper waters of Sirion, whither [Morgoth’s] servants had never passed’ (p. 241); but ‘still no spy or creature out of Angband could come there because of the vigilance of the eagles’—and of this rôle of the eagles of the Encircling Mountains (though hostile to Melko, p. 193) there is in the original story no suggestion.
Thus in The Silmarillion Morgoth remained in ignorance until Maeglin’s capture of the precise location of Gondolin, and Maeglin’s information was of correspondingly greater value to him, as it was also of greater damage to the city. The history of the last years of Gondolin has thus a somewhat different atmosphere in the tale, for the Gondothlim are informed of the fact that Melko has ‘encompassed the vale of Tumladin around’ (p. 167), and Turgon makes preparations for w
ar and strengthens the watch on the hills. The withdrawal of all Melko’s spies shortly before the attack on Gondolin did indeed bring about a renewal of optimism among the Gondothlim, and in Turgon not least, so that when the attack came the people were unprepared; but in the later story the shock of the sudden assault is much greater, for there has never been any reason to suppose that the city is in immediate danger, and Idril’s foreboding is peculiar to herself and more mysterious.
(v) The array of the Gondothlim (pp. 171–4)
Though the central image of this part of the story—the people of Gondolin looking out from their walls to hail the rising sun on the feast of the Gates of Summer, but seeing a red light rising in the north and not in the east—survived, of all the heraldry in this passage scarcely anything is found in later writings. Doubtless, if my father had continued the later Tuor, much would have re-emerged, however changed, if we judge by the rich ‘heraldic’ descriptions of the great gates and their guards in the Orfalch Echor (pp. 46–50). But in the concise account in The Silmarillion the only vestiges are the titles Ecthelion ‘of the Fountain’* and Glorfindel ‘chief of the House of the Golden Flower of Gondolin’. Ecthelion and Glorfindel are named also in The Silmarillion (p. 194) as Turgon’s captains who guarded the flanks of the host of Gondolin in their retreat down Sirion from the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, but of other captains named in the tale there is no mention afterwards†—though it is significant that the eighteenth Ruling Steward of Gondor was named Egalmoth, as the seventeenth and twenty-fifth were named Ecthelion (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A (I, ii)).*
Glorfindel ‘of the golden hair’ (p. 192) remains ‘yellow-haired Glorfindel’ in The Silmarillion, and this was from the beginning the meaning of his name.
(vi) The battle of Gondolin (pp. 174–88)
Virtually the entire history of the fighting in Gondolin is unique in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin; the whole story is summarised in The Silmarillion (p. 242) in a few lines:
Of the deeds of desperate valour there done, by the chieftains of the noble houses and their warriors, and not least by Tuor, much is told in The Fall of Gondolin: of the battle of Ecthelion of the Fountain with Gothmog Lord of Balrogs in the very square of the King, where each slew the other, and of the defence of the tower of Turgon by the people of his household, until the tower was overthrown: and mighty was its fall and the fall of Turgon in its ruin.
Tuor sought to rescue Idril from the sack of the city, but Maeglin had laid hands on her, and on Eärendil; and Tuor fought with Maeglin on the walls, and cast him far out, and his body as it fell smote the rocky slopes of Amon Gwareth thrice ere it pitched into the flames below. Then Tuor and Idril led such remnants of the people of Gondolin as they could gather in the confusion of the burning down the secret way which Idril had prepared.
(In this highly compressed account the detail that Maeglin’s body struck the slopes of Amon Gwareth three times before it ‘pitched’ into the flames was retained.) It would seem from The Silmarillion account that Maeglin’s attempt on Idril and Eärendil took place much later in the fighting, and indeed shortly before the escape of the fugitives down the tunnel; but I think that this is far more likely to be the result of compression than of a change in the narrative of the battle.
In the tale Gondolin is very clearly visualised as a city, with its markets and its great squares, of which there are only vestiges in later writing (see above, p. 207); and there is nothing vague in the description of the fighting. The early conception of the Balrogs makes them less terrible, and certainly more destructible, than they afterwards became: they existed in ‘hundreds’ (p. 170),* and were slain by Tuor and the Gondothlim in large numbers: thus five fell before Tuor’s great axe Dramborleg, three before Ecthelion’s sword, and two score were slain by the warriors of the king’s house. The Balrogs are ‘demons of power’ (p. 181); they are capable of pain and fear (p. 194); they are attired in iron armour (pp. 181, 194), and they have whips of flame (a character they never lost) and claws of steel (pp. 169, 179).
In The Silmarillion the dragons that came against Gondolin were ‘of the brood of Glaurung’, which ‘were become now many and terrible’ whereas in the tale the language employed (p. 170) suggests that some at least of the ‘Monsters’ were inanimate ‘devices’, the construction of smiths in the forges of Angband. But even the ‘things of iron’ that ‘opened about their middles’ to disgorge bands of Orcs are called ‘ruthless beasts’, and Gothmog ‘bade’ them ‘pile themselves’ (p. 176); those made of bronze or copper ‘were given hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ while the ‘fire-drake’ that Tuor hewed screamed and lashed with its tail (p. 181).
A small detail of the narrative is curious: what ‘messengers’ did Meglin send to Melko to warn him to guard the outer entrance of the Way of Escape (where he guessed that the secret tunnel must lead in the end)? Whom could Meglin trust sufficiently? And who would dare to go?
(vii) The escape of the fugitives
and the battle in Cristhorn (pp. 188–95)
The story as told in The Silmarillion (p. 243) is somewhat fuller in its account of the escape of the fugitives from the city and the ambush in the Eagles’ Cleft (there called Cirith Thoronath) than in that of the assault and sack itself, but only in one point are the two narratives actually at variance—as already noticed, the Eagles’ Cleft was afterwards moved from the southern parts of the Encircling Mountains to the northern, and Idril’s tunnel led north from the city (the comment is made that it was not thought ‘that any fugitives would take a path towards the north and the highest parts of the mountains and the nighest to Angband’). The tale provides a richness of detail and an immediacy that is lacking in the short version, where such things as the tripping over dead bodies in the hot and reeking underground passage have disappeared; and there is no mention of the Gondothlim who against the counsel of Idril and Tuor went to the Way of Escape and were there destroyed by the dragon lying in wait,† or of the fight to rescue Eärendel.
In the tale appears the keen-sighted Elf Legolas Greenleaf, first of the names of the Fellowship of the Ring to appear in my father’s writings (see p. 217 on this earlier Legolas), followed by Gimli (an Elf) in the Tale of Tinúviel.
In one point the story of the ambush in Cristhorn seems difficult to follow: this is the statement on p. 193 that the moon ‘lit not the path for the height of the walls’. The fugitives were moving southwards through the Encircling Mountains, and the sheer rockwall above the path in the Eagles’ Cleft was ‘of the right or westerly hand’, while on the left there was ‘a fall…dreadly steep’. Surely then the moon rising in the east would illuminate the path?
The name Cristhorn appears in my father’s drawing of ‘Gondolin and the Vale of Tumladin from Cristhorn’, September 1928 (Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1979, no. 35).
(viii) The wanderings of the Exiles of Gondolin (pp. 195–7)
In The Silmarillion (p. 243) it is said that ‘led by Tuor son of Huor the remnant of Gondolin passed over the mountains, and came down into the Vale of Sirion’. One would suppose that they came down into Dimbar, and so ‘fleeing southward by weary and dangerous marches they came at length to Nan-tathren, the Land of Willows’. It seems strange in the tale that the exiles were wandering in the wilderness for more than a year, and yet achieved only to the outer entrance of the Way of Escape; but the geography of this region may have been vaguer when The Fall of Gondolin was written.
In The Silmarillion when Tuor and Idril went down from Nan-tathren to the mouths of Sirion they ‘joined their people to the company of Elwing, Dior’s daughter, that had fled thither but a little while before’. Of this there is no mention here; but I postpone consideration of this part of the narrative.
§ 2 Entries in the Name-list to The Fall of Gondolin
On this list see p. 148, where the head-note to it is given. Specifically linguistic information from the list, including meanings, is incorporated in the Appendix on Names, but I collect here some statem
ents of other kind (arranged in alphabetical order) that are contained in it.
Bablon ‘was a city of Men, and more rightly Babylon, but such is the Gnomes’ name as they now shape it, and they got it from Men aforetime.’
Bansil ‘Now this name had the Gondothlim for that tree before their king’s door which bore silver blossom and faded not—and its name had Elfriniel from his father Voronwë and it meaneth “Fairgleam”. Now that tree of which it was a shoot (brought in the deep ages out of Valinor by the Noldoli) had like properties, but greater, seeing that for half the twenty-four hours it lit all Valinor with silver light. This the Eldar still tell of as Silpion or “Cherrymoon”, for its blossom was like that of a cherry in spring—but of that tree in Gondolin they know no name, and the Noldoli tell of it alone.’
Dor Lómin ‘or the “Land of Shadows” was that region named of the Eldar Hisilómë (and this means Shadowy Twilights) where Melko shut Men, and it is so called by reason of the scanty sun which peeps little over the Iron Mountains to the east and south of it—there dwell now the Shadow Folk. Thence came Tuor to Gondolin.’
Eärendel ‘was the son of Tuor and Idril and ’tis said the only being that is half of the kindred of the Eldalië and half of Men. He was the greatest and first of all mariners among Men, and saw regions that Men have not yet found nor gazed upon for all the multitude of their boats. He rideth now with Voronwë upon the winds of the firmament nor comes ever further back than Kôr, else would he die like other Men, so much of the mortal is in him.’
(For these last statements about Eärendel see pp. 264–5. The statement that Eärendel was ‘the only being that is half of the kindred of the Eldalië and half of Men’ is very notable. Presumably this was written when Beren was an Elf, not a Man (see p. 139); Dior son of Beren and Tinúviel appears in the Tale of the Nauglafring, but there Beren is an Elf, and Dior is not Half-elven. In the tale of The Fall of Gondolin itself it is said, but in a later replacement passage (p. 164 and note 22), that Tuor was the first but not the last to wed ‘a daughter of Elfinesse’. On the extraordinary statement in the Tale of Turambar that Tamar Lamefoot was Half-elven see p. 130.)