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By Root 1320 0

Idril’s power of foreseeing and her foreboding of evil to come; the secret way of her devising (but in the tale this led south from the city, and the Eagles’ Cleft was in the southern mountains); the loss of Meglin in the hills while seeking for ore; his capture by Orcs, his treacherous purchase of life, and his return to Gondolin to avert suspicion (with the detail of his changed mood thereafter and ‘smiling face’)—all this remained. Much is of course absent (whether rejected or merely passed over) in the succinct account devised for The Silmarillion—where there is no mention, for example, of Idril’s dream concerning Meglin, the watch set on him when he went to the hills, the formation on Idril’s advice of a guard bearing Tuor’s emblem, the refusal of Turgon to doubt the invulnerability of the city and his trust in Meglin, Meglin’s discovery of the secret way,* or the remarkable story that it was Meglin himself who conceived the idea of the monsters of fire and iron and communicated it to Melko—a valuable defector indeed!

The great difference between the versions lies of course in the nature of Melko/Morgoth’s knowledge of Gondolin. In the tale, he had by means of a vast army of spies† already discovered it before ever Meglin was captured, and creatures of Melko had found the ‘Way of Escape’ and looked down on Gondolin from the surrounding heights. Meglin’s treachery in the old story lay in his giving an exact account of the structure of the city and the preparations made for its defence—and in his advice to Melko concerning the monsters of flame. In The Silmarillion, on the other hand, there is the element, devised much later, of the unconscious betrayal by Húrin to Morgoth’s spies of the general region in which Gondolin must be sought, in ‘the mountainous land between Anach and the upper waters of Sirion, whither [Morgoth’s] servants had never passed’ (p. 241); but ‘still no spy or creature out of Angband could come there because of the vigilance of the eagles’—and of this rôle of the eagles of the Encircling Mountains (though hostile to Melko, p. 193) there is in the original story no suggestion.

Thus in The Silmarillion Morgoth remained in ignorance until Maeglin’s capture of the precise location of Gondolin, and Maeglin’s information was of correspondingly greater value to him, as it was also of greater damage to the city. The history of the last years of Gondolin has thus a somewhat different atmosphere in the tale, for the Gondothlim are informed of the fact that Melko has ‘encompassed the vale of Tumladin around’ (p. 167), and Turgon makes preparations for war and strengthens the watch on the hills. The withdrawal of all Melko’s spies shortly before the attack on Gondolin did indeed bring about a renewal of optimism among the Gondothlim, and in Turgon not least, so that when the attack came the people were unprepared; but in the later story the shock of the sudden assault is much greater, for there has never been any reason to suppose that the city is in immediate danger, and Idril’s foreboding is peculiar to herself and more mysterious.

(v) The array of the Gondothlim (pp. 171–4)

Though the central image of this part of the story—the people of Gondolin looking out from their walls to hail the rising sun on the feast of the Gates of Summer, but seeing a red light rising in the north and not in the east—survived, of all the heraldry in this passage scarcely anything is found in later writings. Doubtless, if my father had continued the later Tuor, much would have re-emerged, however changed, if we judge by the rich ‘heraldic’ descriptions of the great gates and their guards in the Orfalch Echor (pp. 46–50). But in the concise account in The Silmarillion the only vestiges are the titles Ecthelion ‘of the Fountain’* and Glorfindel ‘chief of the House of the Golden Flower of Gondolin’. Ecthelion and Glorfindel are named also in The Silmarillion (p. 194) as Turgon’s captains who guarded the flanks of the host of Gondolin in their retreat down Sirion from the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, but of other captains named in the tale