Tolkien’s The Great Tales Part Three— The Fall of Gondolin

It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Tolkien all along intended The Lord of the Rings to be the continuation of the stories we have in the Silmarillion and in larger and more detailed form in the 3 long tales now published in this collection, tales of the elder days or first age of Middle Earth. These tales evolved from about 1919 until the early 1950s, and in some ways it is too bad that Tolkien never completed his final rewriting of these tales, most especially of the tale of the Fall of Gondolin and its sequel involved Earendel. It is too bad because the final version of the Fall of Gondolin is well written and has the same sort of linguistic appeal as the Lord of the Rings. The earlier version read more like old English, and this was intentional as Tolkien wanted to convey the notion that it was a language and a story from an earlier time.

What we see in this volume like in the two previous ones is lots of text critical work by Christopher Tolkien sorting through the numerous recensions of these great tales, and trying to sort out a continuous narrative flow for each one. This indeed was a 40 year labor of love, for he knew his father was a tinkerer— who was constantly altering names (Melko becomes Morgoth etc.) and tweaking this or that aspect of the story line again and again. I am amazed he had the patience to sort through all the manuscripts and notes and scraps of paper and give us not only 3 stories, but multiple versions of the three stories, especially the last two in the boxed set.

Of the three tales in this box set, the most compelling and tragic and intense is the Fall of Gondolin, providing the lesson that ‘there is a tide in the affairs of men which if taken at the flood…’ can lead on to victory and good things, but if one fails to take the initiative, tragedy can follow. Darkness spreads over the land, and elves and men become isolated and refugees on the run from evil.

This seems a lesson we should be learning now when we have had leaders who first dismissed the danger of the corona virus as a political hoax, or a conspiracy theory that the virus is a man-made attempt to ruin America, or perhaps just something that will magically pass away in the heat of summer or can be cured by injecting bleach!!! The CDC and other scientists have made clear that none of this is true, and we are paying a very high price in lives by not fully following the CDC guidelines, and opening the nation too recklessly before adequate testing and contact tracing and isolating has taken place everywhere. Worse yet are those who are protesting and are in denial about what is actually happening, especially to the most vulnerable. This same sort of narcissism is at the heart of the story of the Fall of Gondolin, when king Turgon listens to the voice of his wicked relatives saying ‘nothing bad is going to happen, don’t take action against evil Morgoth, your city is impregnable, this too will pass’ and it leads to the Fall of the last great city of the Elves.

I found this story both moving, and sadly relevant to our own day. Would that we had better leaders at all levels of government who we could actually trust to tell us the truth, and not merely speculate based on hunches or one’s gut feelings.