Working my way through the Tolkien minutiae
"The Fall of Gondolin" was pretty good.
Throughout his life, Tolkien wrote a lot of versions of different events in Arda’s history. (Arda is the name of the whole world, Middle-Earth is one continent therein). Christopher Tolkien, one of those great sons of a literary titan, made it his life’s work to collate his dad’s notes into something digestible and accessible for future generations. This had to require a ton of writing and annotation of his own, and no small amount of patience.
We should all be so lucky. Beau L’Amour and Brian Herbert have done the same thing.
Last year I read BEREN AND LUTHIEN, which has a chapter of its own in THE SILMARILLION, but later got the book treatment from Christopher. I thought it was beautiful. He put together the main story, then listed the alternate versions Tolkien wrote over the years, and closed it out with long pieces of poetry and verse.
Anyway, THE FALL OF GONDOLIN is a standalone story in the Silmarillion, and it gets a similar treatment here. Gondolin was a powerful city run by a Valar (a Vala? still not clear on the singular) called Ulmo. Or it wasn’t run by him, he just wanted it built. He revealed it to a future king named Turgon, and it lasted for generations.
Then some wanker named Maeglin (Turgon’s nephew) revealed the location to Morgoth (think of Hades here) in exchange for a chance at hooking up with his cousin Idril. That is to say, Idril was Turgon’s daughter, so yeah, pretty messed up however you slice it.
Morgoth sent in an army of balrogs and dragons to trash the place. Turgon died but Idril got away.
Like many of Tolkien’s stories, this one is about something beautiful being destroyed by something evil, aided by something weak and dishonorable. This is an eternal truth and everything I’ve read from his work carries it within. I don’t currently have plans to put a print edition in my library, but if I ever did, it’d mainly be so I can have Alan Lee’s illustrations to hand.
Anyway, this was a beautiful piece of lore and I enjoyed it. It’s mostly for the Tolkien die-hards, but if Warner Brothers is serious about adapting more Tolkien without screwing up what they’ve already made, then they should look to these one-off stories and give them consideration.
No reason why you couldn’t have Cate Blanchett come back and get in the sound booth for a little prologue-and-epilogue action like she did for Fellowship. Worth looking into.