The Shaping of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien

The son of Dior, Auredhir (II. 240) has disappeared. The ‘vain bargaining’ between Dior and the Sons of Fëanor perhaps refers to the passage in the Tale (II. 241) where Dior asserts that to return the Silmaril the Nauglafring must be broken, and Curufin (the messenger of the Fëanorians) retorts that in that case the Nauglafring must be given to them unbroken. In the Tale Maglor, Díriel, Celegorm, and Cranthir (or the earlier equivalents of their names) were killed in the battle (which there took place in Hithlum, where Dior ruled after his father); but in S, as first written, the story takes a very strange turn, in that the Fëanorians did get their hands on the Nauglafring, but then so quarrelled over it that in the end ‘only Maglor was left’. How the story would have gone in this case is impossible to discern.

15 and 16

      The two sections describing Gondolin and its fall are discussed together in the following commentary.

      At the beginning of §15 the brief reference to the story of Isfin and Eöl shows development from what was said in the Lay of the Fall of Gondolin (III. 146): for in the poem Isfin was seeking, together with her mother, for her father Fingolfin when she was entrapped by Eöl in the dark forest. The larger history has evolved since then, and now Isfin ‘was lost in Taur-na-Fuin after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears’. We can only surmise how she came to be there. Either she left Gondolin soon after its settlement bent on some purpose unrecorded, or else she was lost in the retreat from the battle. (It is, incidentally, a curious aspect of the earlier conception of Gondolin’s foundation that there were women and children to people it as well as warriors; for one would suppose that Turgon had left the old men, the women, and the children of his people in Hithlum – why should he do otherwise? But in the outlines for Gilfanon’s Tale there are references to Turgon’s having ‘rescued a part of the women and children’, and having ‘gathered women and children from the camps’ as he fled south down Sirion (I. 239, 241).) Meglin is still, as in the poem, ‘sent by his mother to Gondolin’, while she remained with her captor.

      In the account of Gondolin and its history S is fairly close to the tale of The Fall of Gondolin, but there are some developments, if mostly of a minor kind. There is first a notable statement that ‘Ylmir’s messages come up Sirion bidding them [i.e. the host of Turgon retreating from the battle] take refuge in this valley’; this is unlike the Tale, where Tuor speaking the words of Ulmo in Gondolin says: ‘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’ (II. 161, 208). Here in S we have the first appearance of the idea that the foundation of Gondolin was a part of Ulmo’s design. But Tuor’s journey is as in the old story, and the visitation of Ulmo is in Nan Tathrin, not at Vinyamar. The bidding of Ulmo offers Turgon similar choices, to prepare for war, or, if he will not, then to send people of Gondolin down Sirion to the sea, to seek for Valinor. Here, however, there are differences. In the Tale, Ulmo offers scarcely more than a slender hope that such sailors from Gondolin would reach Valinor, and if they did, that they would persuade the Valar to act:

      [The Gods] hide their land and weave about it inaccessible magic that no evil come to its shores. Yet still might thy messengers win there and turn their hearts that they rise in wrath and smite Melko … (II. 161–2).

      In S, on the other hand, the people of Gondolin, if they will not go to war against Morgoth, are to desert their city (‘the people of Gondolin are to prepare for flight’) – cf. The Silmarillion p. 240: ‘[Ulmo] bade him depart, and abandon the fair and mighty city that he had built, and go down Sirion to the sea’ – and at the mouths of Sirion Ylmir will not only aid them in the building of a fleet but will himself guide them over the ocean. But if Turgon will accept Ylmir’s counsel, and prepare for war, then Tuor is to go to Hithlum with Gnomes from Gondolin and ‘draw Men once more into alliance with the Elves, for “without Men the Elves shall not prevail against the Orcs and Balrogs”.’ Of this strange bidding there is no trace in the Tale; nor is it said there that Ulmo knew of Meglin, and knew that this treachery would bring about the end of Gondolin at no distant time. These features are absent also from The Silmarillion; Ulmo does indeed foresee the ruin of the city, but his foreseeing is not represented as being so precise: ‘Thus it may come to pass that the curse of the Noldor shall find thee too ere the end, and treason awake within thy walls. Then they shall be in peril of fire’ (p. 126).

      The description of the Vale of Gondolin in S is essentially as in the Tale, with a few added details. As in the Tale, the rocky height of Amon Gwareth was not in the centre of the plain but nearest to Sirion – that is, nearest to the Way of Escape (II. 158, 177). In S, the level top of the hill is said to have been achieved by the people of Gondolin themselves, who also ‘polished its sides to the smoothness of glass’. The Way of Escape is still, as in the Tale (II. 163), a tunnel made by the Gnomes – the Dry River and the Orfalch Echor have not yet been conceived; and the meaning of the name ‘Way of Escape’ is made very clear: both a way of escape from Gondolin, if the need should ever arise, and a way of escape from the outer world and from Morgoth. In the Tale (ibid.) it is said only that there had been divided counsels concerning its delving, ‘yet pity for the enthralled Noldoli had prevailed in the end to its making’. The ‘Guarded Plain’ into which the Way of Escape issued is the Vale of Gondolin. An additional detail in S is that the hills were lower in the region of the Way of Escape, and the spells of Ylmir there strongest (because nearest to Sirion).

The cairn of Fingolfin, added in pencil in S, is an element that entered the legends in the Quenta (p. 107) and the Lay of Leithian (III. 286–7); the duel of Fingolfin with Morgoth does not appear in S (p. 54). – Here in S it is said that Thorndor ‘removed his eyries to the Northern heights of the encircling mountains’. In the Tale the eyries in Cristhorn, the Eagles’ Cleft, were in the mountains south of Gondolin, but in S Cristhorn is in the northern heights: this is already the case in the Fragment of an alliterative Lay of Eärendel (III. 143). Thorndor had come there from Thangorodrim (stated in the Quenta, p. 137); cf. the ‘later Tuor’ in Unfinished Tales (p. 43 and note 25): ‘the folk of Thorondor, who dwelt once even on Thangorodrim ere Morgoth grew so mighty, and dwell now in the Mountains of Turgon since the fall of Fingolfin.’ This goes back to the tale of The Theft of Melko, where there is a reference (I. 149) to the time ‘when Sorontur and his folk fared to the Iron Mountains and there abode, watching all that Melko did’.

      Some other points concerning the story of Gondolin may be noticed. The escort of Noldoli, promised to Tuor by Ulmo in the Land of Willows, of whom Voronwë (in S given the Gnomish form of the name, Bronweg) was the only one who did not desert him (II. 155–6), has disappeared; and ‘Bronweg had once been in Gondolin’, which is not the case in the Tale (II. 156–7). – In the Tale Tuor wedded Idril when he ‘had dwelt among the Gondothlim many years’ (II. 164); in S this took place three years after his coming to the hidden city, in The Silmarillion seven years after (p. 241). – In the Tale there is no mention of Meglin’s support of Turgon’s rejection of Ulmo’s bidding (cf. The Silmarillion p. 240: ‘Maeglin spoke ever against Tuor in the councils of the King’), nor of the opposition of Idril to her father (this is not in The Silmarillion). – The closing of Gondolin to all fugitives and the forbidding of the people to leave the valley is mentioned in S but not explained.

      The sentence ‘Meglin … purchases his life when taken to Angband by revealing Gondolin and its secrets’ shows almost certainly, I think, that an important structural change in the story of the fall of the city had now entered. In the Tale Melko had discovered Gondolin before Meglin was captured, and his treachery lay in his giving an exact account of the structure of the city and the preparations made for its defence (see II. 210–11); but the words ‘by revealing Gondolin’ strongly suggest the later story, in which Morgoth did not know where it lay.

      Lastly, there is a development in the early history of Tuor: that he became a slave of ‘the faithless men’