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Review: The Fall of Gondolin by JRR Tolkien — the last tale from Middle-earth
Tolkien’s early story of an elven city is heavy with the shadow of the Somme, says John Garth
John Garth
August 24 2018, 5:00pm, The Times
It is a long lifetime since readers of The Hobbit in 1937 first heard of Gondolin, which “dragons and goblins destroyed . . . many ages ago”. The words hark back 20 years earlier to the first tale of Middle-earth JRR Tolkien ever wrote, while recovering from trench fever after the Battle of the Somme. That tale opens this book.
A lone wanderer, Tuor, is handed a divine mission to find the hidden city of Gondolin and urge its elven denizens to ready themselves for battle. Complacent in their glory, they ignore the warning. Mortal Tuor weds the elven-king’s daughter, but Gondolin’s location is treacherously revealed to its enemy Melko, a satanic tyrant.
Tuor’s epic was part of a longer sequence of tales written from 1917 until interrupted after the war by family and academic life and other projects. In 1926 Tolkien began the whole cycle again in a potted summary that he enlarged and enriched around 1931. This book extracts the all-too-brief Gondolin segments of these two versions, as well as a 1951 attempt to rewrite the Tuor epic in all its original fullness, a flawed gem.
As editor, Tolkien’s son Christopher guides us lightly through the long evolution of the Gondolin idea. Alan Lee, perhaps the artist most closely associated with Middle-earth, provides evocative watercolours. But the original 1917 epic alone justifies the price of admission. Never did JRR Tolkien more energetically celebrate his “high-elven” culture. Never did he write a more sustained account of battle. With dragons and fiery balrogs galore, the attack on Gondolin makes Peter Jackson’s souped-up cinema battles look like tabletop games.
Forged in the heat of youth, the tale lacks the depth and granular detail of the maturer Tolkien. The prose is clear but archaic, unleavened by the hobbit voices of later works. But Tuor, the lone mortal man in this elf-centred epic, anticipates Bilbo and Frodo — a reluctant hero unexpectedly burdened with a weighty and perilous mission. We can also see in him something of Tolkien, pitched into war at 22 just as he was finishing his Oxford degree.
Gondolin’s battlements and gorgeous liveries have little to do with modernity. However, Melko embodies sheer machine-minded materialism — the true enemy of soldiers of all nations in the First World War. The claustrophobia and the devouring fires carry the tang of trench life and the flamethrower. The dragons, startlingly, owe more than a little to the tanks that had made their military debut on the Somme.
The city of Gondolin portrayed by Alan Lee
The city of Gondolin portrayed by Alan Lee
There is prescience too in the spell of bottomless dread, a sort of mind control, that Melko casts on his slaves, a spell that still haunts escapees. The first of the 20th century’s totalitarian states was born in Russia the year this tale was written.
By the time Tolkien returned to the story, a Second World War had come and gone and the Cold War had begun. Finishing The Lord of the Rings, outgrown from its origins as a Hobbit sequel, he had convinced himself it would never be understood unless its ancient history was published simultaneously. So he set about a quixotic project to rewrite the chronicle he now called The Silmarillion, as well as the fuller version of Tuor’s story.
With language honed by long years and an immeasurably enriched vision, he never bettered the rising of the sea-god Ulmo in a storm as told in the 1951 version published here. It is a tantalising testament to what might have been. As Tuor reaches the very gates of Gondolin and sees “before him at last the vision of his desire of dreams of longing”, Tolkien stopped. His momentum had collapsed after he had seen that no publisher would seriously entertain his impracticable dual publication scheme. Instead, The Lord of the Rings was published alone in the mid-1950s.
Isolation was Tolkien’s Achilles’ heel. The Hobbit and its sequel had been completed with the sterling support of CS Lewis, but the heyday of that friendship was over. Readings of The Lord of the Rings to their Oxford circle, the Inklings, were vetoed by the obstreperous Oxford don Hugo Dyson with his now notorious cry: “Oh no, not another elf!” Children had grown and flown the nest. Old age, amid a tidal wave of Sixties fandom, left Tolkien finally shipwrecked on the shores of his invented world and unable to climb its mountains. When he died aged 81 in 1973, a lifetime’s unfinished work was left in disarray.
From this wreck Christopher Tolkien, like Tuor leading the refugees of Gondolin, has rescued something both less and more than his father envisioned. The Silmarillion published in 1977 is a mosaic expertly constructed using fragments from different strata. Those strata have since been explored progressively in Christopher’s scholarly 12-volume History of Middle-earth. Its value, I think, has scarcely yet been realised.
But in The Fall of Gondolin — as with Beren and Lúthien, published last year – he has laid out the evolution of a single idea, cutting the commentary to a minimum, for the Middle-earth fan who simply relishes more story. Now 93, Christopher says emphatically that this is his last book of his father’s writings. So, with a fanfare of elf-trumpets and a blaze of dragon-fire, an astonishing father-and-son literary double act finally bows out.
John Garth