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.