The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [130]
It is notable that Tuor and Voronwë are received by the Guard without any of the suspicion and menace that greeted them in the later story (p. 45).
(iii) Tuor in Gondolin (pp. 159–64)
With this section of the narrative compare The Silmarillion, p. 126:
Behind the circle of the mountains the people of Turgon grew and throve, and they put forth their skill in labour unceasing, so that Gondolin upon Amon Gwareth became fair indeed and fit to compare even with Elven Tirion beyond the sea. High and white were its walls, and smooth its stairs, and tall and strong was the Tower of the King. There shining fountains played, and in the courts of Turgon stood images of the Trees of old, which Turgon himself wrought with elven-craft; and the Tree which he made of gold was named Glingal, and the Tree whose flowers he made of silver was named Belthil.
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 Inwë and Nólemë at the time of the building of Kôr, 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 Nólemë, 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 Túna’ (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 Kôr (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 Kôr as it is described in The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr (I.122–3).
I have said above that ‘despite the frequent