Текст книги "The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two"

Автор книги: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

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Bansil At the occurrence on p. 184 only, Bansil > Banthil in Tuor B.

Cristhorn From the first occurrence on p. 189 written Cristhorn (not Cris Thorn) in Tuor A; Cris Thorn Tuor B throughout.

Bad Uthwen < Bad Uswen in Tuor B. The original reading in Tuor A was (apparently) Bad Usbran.

Sorontur < Ramandur in Tuor B.

Bablon, Ninwi, Trui, Rыm The original text of Tuor A had Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, and (probably) Rome. These were changed to the forms given in the text, except Nineveh > Ninwл, changed to Ninwi in Tuor B.

Commentary on

The Fall of Gondolin

§ 1. The primary narrative

As with the Tale of Turambar I break my commentary on this tale into sections. I refer frequently to the much later version (which extends only to the coming of Tuor and Voronwл to sight of Gondolin across the plain) printed in Unfinished Tales pp. 17–51 (‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’); this I shall call here ‘the later Tuor’.

(i) Tuor’s journey to the Sea and the visitation

of Ulmo (pp. 149–56)

In places the later Tuor (the abandonment of which is one of the saddest facts in the whole history of incompletion) is so close in wording to The Fall of Gondolin, written more than thirty years before, as to make it almost certain that my father had it in front of him, or at least had recently reread it. Striking examples from the late version (pp. 23–4) are: ‘The sun rose behind his back and set before his face, and where the water foamed among the boulders or rushed over sudden falls, at morning and evening rainbows were woven across the stream’ ‘Now he said: “It is a fay-voice,” now: “Nay, it is a small beast that is wailing in the waste”’ ‘[Tuor] wandered still for some days in a rugged country bare of trees; and it was swept by a wind from the sea, and all that grew there, herb or bush, leaned ever to the dawn because of the prevalence of that wind from the West’—which are very closely similar to or almost identical with passages in the tale (pp. 150–1). But the differences in the narrative are profound.

Tuor’s origin is left vague in the old story. There is a reference in the Tale of Turambar (p. 88) to ‘those kindreds about the waters of Asgon whence after arose Tuor son of Peleg’, but here it is said that Tuor did not dwell with his people (who ‘wandered the forests and fells’) but ‘lived alone about that lake called Mithrim [< Asgon]’, on which he journeyed in a small boat with a prow made like the neck of a swan. There is indeed scarcely any linking reference to other events, and of course no trace of the Grey-elves of Hithlum who in the later story fostered him, or of his outlawry and hunting by the Easterlings; but there are ‘wandering Noldoli’ in Dor Lуmin (Hisilуmл, Hithlum)—on whom see p. 65—from whom Tuor learnt much, including their tongue, and it was they who guided him down the dark river-passage under the mountains. There is in this a premonition of Gelmir and Arminas, the Noldorin Elves who guided Tuor through the Gate of the Noldor (later Tuor pp. 21–2), and the story that the Noldoli ‘made that hidden way at the prompting of Ulmo’ survived in the much richer historical context of the later legend, where ‘the Gate of the Noldor…was made by the skill of that people, long ago in the days of Turgon’ (later Tuor p. 18).

The later Tuor becomes very close to the old story for a time when Tuor emerges out of the tunnel into the ravine (later called Cirith Ninniach, but still a name of Tuor’s own devising); many features recur, such as the stars shining in the ‘dark lane of sky above him’, the echoes of his harping (in the tale of course without the literary echoes of Morgoth’s cry and the voices of Fлanor’s host that landed there), his doubt concerning the mournful calling of the gulls, the narrowing of the ravine where the incoming tide (fierce because of the west wind) met the water of the river, and Tuor’s escape by climbing to the cliff-top (but in the tale the connection between Tuor’s curiosity concerning the gulls and the saving of his life is not made: he climbed the cliff in response to the prompting of the Ainur). Notable is the retention of the idea that Tuor was the first of Men to reach the Sea, standing on the cliff-top with outspread arms, and of his ‘sea-longing’ (later Tuor p. 25). But the story of his dwelling in the cove of Falasquil and his adornment of it with carvings (and of course the floating of timber down the river to him by the Noldoli of Dor Lуmin) was abandoned; in the later legend Tuor finds on the coast ruins of the ancient harbour-works of the Noldor from the days of Turgon’s lordship in Nevrast, and of Turgon’s former dwelling in these regions before he went to Gondolin there is in the old story no trace. Thus the entire Vinyamar episode is absent from it, and 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 (The Silmarillion pp. 126, 238–9) is lacking.

The southward-flying swans (seven, not three, in the later Tuor) play essentially the same part in both narratives, drawing Tuor to continue his journey; but the emblem of the Swan was afterwards given a different origin, as ‘the token of Annael and his foster-folk’, the Grey-elves of Mithrim (later Tuor p. 25).

Both in the route taken (for the geography see p. 217) and in the seasons of the year my father afterwards departed largely from the original story of Tuor’s journey to Gondolin. In the later Tuor it was the Fell Winter after the fall of Nargothrond, the winter of Tъrin’s return to Hithlum, when he and Voronwл journeyed in snow and bitter cold eastwards beneath the Mountains of Shadow. Here the journey takes far longer: he left Falasquil in ‘the latest days of summer’ (as still in the later Tuor) but he went down all the coast of Beleriand to the mouths of Sirion, and it was the summer of the following year when he lingered in the Land of Willows. (Doubtless the geography was less definite than it afterwards became, but its general resemblance to the later map seems assured by the description (p. 153) of the coast’s trending after a time eastwards rather than southwards.)

Only in its place in the narrative structure is there resemblance between Ulmo’s visitation of Tuor in the Land of Willows in a summer twilight and his tremendous epiphany out of the rising storm on the coast at Vinyamar. It is however most remarkable that the old vision of the Land of Willows and its drowsy beauty of river-flowers and butterflies was not lost, though afterwards it was Voronwл, not Tuor, who wandered there, devising names, and who stood enchanted ‘knee-deep in the grass’ (p. 155; later Tuor p. 35), until his fate, or Ulmo Lord of Waters, carried him down to the Sea. Possibly there is a faint reminiscence of the old story in Ulmo’s words (later Tuor p. 28): ‘Haste thou must learn, and the pleasant road that I designed for thee must be changed.’

In the tale, Ulmo’s speech to Tuor (or at least that part of it that is reported) is far more simple and brief, and there is no suggestion there of Ulmo’s ‘opposing the will of his brethren, the Lords of the West’ but two essential elements of his later message are present, that Tuor will find the words to speak when he stands before Turgon, and the reference to Tuor’s unborn son (in the later Tuor much less explicit: ‘But it is not for thy valour only that I send thee, but to bring into the world a hope beyond thy sight, and a light that shall pierce the darkness’).

(ii) The journey of Tuor and Voronwл to Gondolin (pp. 156–8)

Of Tuor’s journey to Gondolin, apart from his sojourn in the Land of Willows, little is told in the tale, and Voronwл only appears late in its course as the one Noldo who was not too fearful to accompany him further; of Voronwл’s history as afterwards related there is no word, and he is not an Elf of Gondolin.

It is notable that the Noldoli who guided Tuor northwards from the Land of Willows call themselves thralls of Melko. On this matter the Tales present a consistent picture. It is said in the Tale of Tinъviel (p. 9) that

all the Eldar both those who remained in the dark or who had been lost upon the march from Palisor and those Noldoli too who fared back into the world after [Melko] seeking their stolen treasury fell beneath his power as thralls.

In The Fall of Gondolin it is said that the Noldoli did their service to Ulmo in secret, and ‘out of fear of Melko wavered much’ (p. 154), and Voronwл spoke to Tuor of ‘the weariness of thraldom’ (pp. 156–7); Melko sent out his army of spies ‘to search out the dwelling of the Noldoli that had escaped his thraldom’ (p. 166). These ‘thrall-Noldoli’ are represented as moving as it were freely about the lands, even to the mouths of Sirion, but they ‘wandered as in a dream of fear, doing [Melko’s] ill bidding, for the spell of bottomless dread was on them and they felt the eyes of Melko burn them from afar’ (Tale of Turambar, p. 77). This expression is often used: Voronwл rejoiced in Gondolin that he no longer dreaded Melko with ‘a binding terror’—‘and of a sooth that spell which Melko held over the Noldoli was one of bottomless dread, so that he seemed ever nigh them even were they far from the Hells of Iron, and their hearts quaked and they fled not even when they could’ (p. 159). The spell of bottomless dread was laid too on Meglin (p. 169).

There is little in all this that cannot be brought more or less into harmony with the later narratives, and indeed one may hear an echo in the words of The Silmarillion (p. 156):

But ever the Noldor feared most the treachery of those of their own kin, who had been thralls in Angband; for Morgoth used some of these for his evil purposes, and feigning to give them liberty sent them abroad, but their wills were chained to his, and they strayed only to come back to him again.

Nonetheless one gains the impression that at that time my father pictured the power of Melko when at its height as operating more diffusedly and intangibly, and perhaps also more universally, in the Great Lands. Whereas in The Silmarillion the Noldor who are not free are prisoners in Angband (whence a few may escape, and others with enslaved wills may be sent out), here all save the Gondothlim are ‘thralls’, controlled by Melko from afar, and Melko asserts that the Noldoli are all, by their very existence in the Great Lands, his slaves by right. It is a difference difficult to define, but that there is a difference may be seen in the improbability, for the later story, of Tuor being guided on his way to Gondolin by Noldor who were in any sense slaves of Morgoth.

The entrance to Gondolin has some general similarity to the far fuller and more precisely visualised account in the later Tuor: a deep rivergorge, tangled bushes, a cave-mouth—but the river is certainly Sirion (see the passage at the end of the tale, p. 195, where the exiles come back to the entrance), and the entrance to the secret way is in one of the steep river banks, quite unlike the description of the Dry River whose ancient bed was itself the secret way (later Tuor pp. 43–4). The long tunnel which Tuor and Voronwл traverse in the tale leads them at length not only to the Guard but also to sunlight, and they are ‘at the foot of steep hills’ and can see the city: in other words there is a simple conception of a plain, a ring-wall of mountains, and a tunnel through them leading to the outer world. In the later Tuor the approach to the city is much stranger: for the tunnel of the Guard leads to the ravine of Orfalch Echor, a great rift from top to bottom of the Encircling Mountains (‘sheer as if axe-cloven’, p. 46), up which the road climbed through the successive gates until it came to the Seventh Gate, barring the rift at the top. Only when this last gate was opened and Tuor passed through was he able to see Gondolin; and we must suppose (though the narrative does not reach this point) that the travellers had to descend again from the Seventh Gate in order to reach the plain.

It is notable that Tuor and Voronwл are received by the Guard without any of the suspicion and menace that greeted them in the later story (p. 45).

(iii) Tuor in Gondolin (pp. 159–64)

With this section of the narrative compare The Silmarillion, p. 126:

Behind the circle of the mountains the people of Turgon grew and throve, and they put forth their skill in labour unceasing, so that Gondolin upon Amon Gwareth became fair indeed and fit to compare even with Elven Tirion beyond the sea. High and white were its walls, and smooth its stairs, and tall and strong was the Tower of the King. There shining fountains played, and in the courts of Turgon stood images of the Trees of old, which Turgon himself wrought with elven-craft; and the Tree which he made of gold was named Glingal, and the Tree whose flowers he made of silver was named Belthil.

The image of Gondolin was enduring, and it reappears in the glimpses given in notes for the continuation of the later Tuor (Unfinished Tales p. 56): ‘the stairs up to its high platform, and its great gate…the Place of the Fountain, the King’s tower on a pillared arcade, the King’s house…’ Indeed the only real difference that emerges from the original account concerns the Trees of Gondolin, which in the former were unfading, ‘shoots of old from the glorious Trees of Valinor’, but in The Silmarillion were images made of the precious metals. On the Trees of Gondolin see the entries Bansil and Glingol from the Name-list, given below pp. 214–16. The gift by the Gods of these ‘shoots’ (which ‘blossomed eternally without abating’) to Inwл and Nуlemл at the time of the building of Kфr, each being given a shoot of either Tree, is mentioned in The Coming of the Elves (I.123), and in The Hiding of Valinor there is a reference to the uprooting of those given to Nуlemл, which ‘were gone no one knew whither, and more had there never been’ (I.213).

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 Tъna’ (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 Kфr (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 Kфr as it is described in The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kфr (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 Voronwл 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 Elenwл was lost in the crossing of the Helcaraxл, 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 Ilъvatar, the Lord for Always, who dwelleth beyond the world’, and of the Music of the Ainur. Knowledge of the very existence of Ilъvatar was, it seems, a prerogative of the Elves; long afterwards in the garden of Mar Vanwa Tyaliйva (I.49) Eriol asked Rъmil: ‘Who was Ilъvatar? Was he of the Gods?’ and Rъmil answered: ‘Nay, that he was not; for he made them. Ilъvatar 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’ (Irildл 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 Hъrin 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 rфle 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 war 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 Eдrendil; 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 Eдrendil 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 Eдrendel.

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 Tinъviel.

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.