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!