The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [91]
The fact that Eltas speaks of the tale of Beren Ermabwed as if he did not know that it had only recently been told in Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva is no doubt to be explained by that tale not having been told before the Tale-fire (see pp. 4–7).
The teller of the tale of The Fall of Gondolin, Littleheart the Gong-warden of Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva, has appeared several times in the Lost Tales, and his Elvish name(s) have many different forms (see under Changes made to names at the end of the text of the tale). In The Cottage of Lost Play he is said (I. 15) to be ‘ancient beyond count’, and to have ‘sailed in Wingilot with Eärendel in that last voyage wherein they sought for Kôr’ and in the Link to The Music of the Ainur (I.46) he ‘had a weather-worn face and blue eyes of great merriment, and was very slender and small, nor might one say if he were fifty or ten thousand’. He is a Gnome, the son of Bronweg/Voronwë (Voronwë of The Silmarillion) (I. 48, 94).
The texts of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’
The textual history of The Fall of Gondolin, if considered in detail, is extremely complex; but though I will set it out here, as I understand it, there is no need in fact for it to complicate the reading of the tale.
In the first place, there is a very difficult manuscript contained in two school exercise-books, where the title of the tale is Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin (which bringeth in the great tale of Eärendel). (This is the only title actually found in the early texts, but my father always later referred to it as The Fall of Gondolin.) This manuscript is (or rather, was) the original text of the tale, dating from 1916–17 (see I.203 and Unfinished Tales p. 4), and I will call it here for convenience Tuor A. My father’s treatment of it subsequently was unlike that of Tinúviel and Turambar (where the original text was erased and a new version written in its place); in this tale he did not set down a complete new text, but allowed a good deal of the old to stand, at least in the earlier part of it: as the revision progressed the rewriting in ink over the top of the pencilled text did become almost continuous, and though the pencil was not erased the ink effectively obliterates it. But even after the second version becomes continuous there are several places where the old narrative was not over-written but merely struck through, and remains legible. Thus, while Tuor A is on the same footing as Tinúviel and Turambar (and others of the Lost Tales) in that it is a later revision, a second version, my father’s method in Gondolin allows it to be seen that here at least the revision was by no means a complete recasting (still less a re-imagining); for if those passages in the later parts of the tale which can still be compared in the two versions shew that he was following the old fairly closely, the same is quite probably true in those places where no comparison can be made.
From Tuor A, as it was when all changes had been made to it (i.e. when it was in the form that it has now), my mother made a fair copy (Tuor B), which considering the difficulty of the original is extremely exact, with only very occasional errors of transcription. I have said in Unfinished Tales (p. 5) that this copy was made ‘apparently in 1917’, but this now seems to me improbable. * Such conceptions as the Music of the Ainur, which is referred to by later addition in Tuor A (p. 163), may of course have been in my father’s mind a good while before he wrote that tale in Oxford while working on the Dictionary (I.45), but it seems more likely that the revision of Tuor A (and therefore also Tuor B copied from it after its revision) belongs to that period also.
Subsequently my father took his pencil to Tuor B, emending it fairly heavily, though mostly in the earlier part of the tale, and almost entirely for stylistic rather than narrative reasons; but these emendations, as will be seen, were not all made at the same time. Some of them are written out on separate slips, and of these