• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1385 0

of his harping (in the tale of course without the literary echoes of Morgoth’s cry and the voices of Fëanor’s host that landed there), his doubt concerning the mournful calling of the gulls, the narrowing of the ravine where the incoming tide (fierce because of the west wind) met the water of the river, and Tuor’s escape by climbing to the cliff-top (but in the tale the connection between Tuor’s curiosity concerning the gulls and the saving of his life is not made: he climbed the cliff in response to the prompting of the Ainur). Notable is the retention of the idea that Tuor was the first of Men to reach the Sea, standing on the cliff-top with outspread arms, and of his ‘sea-longing’ (later Tuor p. 25). But the story of his dwelling in the cove of Falasquil and his adornment of it with carvings (and of course the floating of timber down the river to him by the Noldoli of Dor Lómin) was abandoned; in the later legend Tuor finds on the coast ruins of the ancient harbour-works of the Noldor from the days of Turgon’s lordship in Nevrast, and of Turgon’s former dwelling in these regions before he went to Gondolin there is in the old story no trace. Thus the entire Vinyamar episode is absent from it, and 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 (The Silmarillion pp. 126, 238–9) is lacking.

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 Túrin’s return to Hithlum, when he and Voronwë 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 Voronwë, 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 Voronwë to Gondolin (pp. 156–8)

Of Tuor’s journey to Gondolin,