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Here they abode very long indeed, and Eärendel was a grown boy ere the voice of Ulmo’s conches drew the heart of Tuor, that his sea-longing returned with a thirst the deeper for years of stifling; and all that host arose at his bidding, and got them down Sirion to the Sea.

Now the folk that had passed into the Eagles’ Cleft and who saw the fall of Glorfindel had been nigh eight hundreds—a large wayfaring, yet was it a sad remnant of so fair and numerous a city. But they who arose from the grasses of the Land of Willows in years after and fared away to sea, when spring set celandine in the meads and they had held sad festival in memorial of Glorfindel, these numbered but three hundreds and a score of men and man-children, and two hundreds and three score of women and maid-children. Now the number of women was few because of their hiding or being stowed by their kinsfolk in secret places in the city. There they were burned or slain or taken and enthralled, and the rescue-parties found them too seldom; and it is the greatest ruth to think of this, for the maids and women of the Gondothlim were as fair as the sun and as lovely as the moon and brighter than the stars. Glory dwelt in that city of Gondolin of the Seven Names, and its ruin was the most dread of all the sacks of cities upon the face of Earth. Nor Bablon, nor Ninwi, nor the towers of Trui, nor all the many takings of Rûm that is greatest among Men, saw such terror as fell that day upon Amon Gwareth in the kindred of the Gnomes; and this is esteemed the worst work that Melko has yet thought of in the world.

Yet now those exiles of Gondolin dwelt at the mouth of Sirion by the waves of the Great Sea. There they take the name of Lothlim, the people of the flower, for Gondothlim is a name too sore to their hearts; and fair among the Lothlim Eärendel grows in the house of his father,39 and the great tale of Tuor is come to its waning.’

Then said Littleheart son of Bronweg: ‘Alas for Gondolin.’

And no one in all the Room of Logs spake or moved for a great while.

NOTES

1 Not of course the great journey to the Sea from the Waters of Awakening, but the expedition of the Elves of Kôr for the rescue of the Gnomes (see I. 26).

2 A korin is defined in The Cottage of Lost Play (I.16) as ‘a great circular hedge, be it of stone or of thorn or even of trees, that encloses a green sward’ Meril-i-Turinqi dwelt ‘in a great korin of elms’.

3 Tôn a Gwedrin is the Tale-fire.

4 There is here a direction: ‘see hereafter the Nauglafring’, but this is struck out.

5 On Heorrenda see pp. 290, 323. A small space is left after the words ‘it is thus’ to mark the place of the poem in Old English that was to be inserted, but there is no indication of what it was to be.

(In the following notes ‘the original reading’ refers to the text of Tuor A, and of Tuor B before the emendation in question. It does not imply that the reading of Tuor A was, or was not, found in the original pencilled text (in the great majority of cases this cannot be said).)

6 This passage, beginning with the words ‘And Tuor entered that cavern…’ on p. 149, is a late replacement written on a slip (see p. 147). The original passage was largely similar in meaning, but contained the following:

Now in delving that riverway beneath the hills the Noldoli worked unknown to Melko who in those deep days held them yet hidden and thralls beneath his will. Rather were they prompted by Ulmo who strove ever against Melko; and through Tuor he hoped to devise for the Gnomes release from the terror of the evil of Melko.

7 ‘three days’: ‘three years’ all texts, but ‘days?’ pencilled above ‘years’ in Tuor B.

8 The ‘evolution’ of sea-birds through Ossë is described in the tale of The Coming of the Elves, I.123; but the sentence here derives from the original pencilled text of Tuor A.

9 In the typescript Tuor C a blank was left here (see p. 147) and subsequently filled in with ‘Ulmo’, not ‘Ainur’.

10 The original reading was: ‘Thou Tuor of the lonely heart the