The Fall of Gondolin

The Fall of Gondolin was published in 2018, edited by Christopher Tolkien, and it collects the versions of the story his father wrote over many years. The tale belongs to the First Age, and it is one of the three long narratives of that period, alongside The Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien. It was a best-seller when it appeared.

The city was founded by King Turgon, hidden carefully enough to stand for centuries before it was betrayed and destroyed. There is another version of it in The Book of Lost Tales, and all three of the great tales are summarised briefly in The Silmarillion, which came out in 1977 and gave most readers their first sight of the material.

Tolkien began the story in 1917, while he was in the army, and the first version was written out in barracks on the reverse side of a sheet of marching music. It is one of the earliest pieces of the legendarium he set down on paper, coming after the 1914 tale The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star, and the book lets the reader see how the telling of it changed as he returned to it.