New Tolkien soon - The Fall of Gondolin to arrive in August 2018

JRR Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin, his tale of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces which The Lord of the Rings author called “the first real story” of Middle-earth, will be published in August, The Guardian reports.

According to HarperCollins, Tolkien saw The Fall of Gondolin as one of his three “great tales” of the Elder Days, along with Beren and Lúthien and The Children of Húrin. The latter title was also a bestseller, after Christopher Tolkien completed the text left behind by his father and published it in 2007. All three became part of The Silmarillion when it was published in 1977.

John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War, said the story was written by Tolkien while he was in hospital and convalescing directly after the Battle of the Somme.

– It’s a quest story with a reluctant hero who turns into a genuine hero – it’s a template for everything Tolkien wrote afterwards. It has a dark lord, our first encounter with orcs and balrogs – it’s really Tolkien limbering up for what he would be doing later – Garth said

The story follows one of the Noldor, Tuor, who sets out to find Gondolin, but later witnesses the destruction of the city.

Garth said The Fall of Gondolin contains Tolkien’s “biggest battle narrative outside of The Lord of the Rings”, but he predicted the “capstone” of the book would be the “exquisite” piece of writing in which Tolkien attempted to tell the whole story again, in the novelistic style of The Lord of the Rings.

– In the first (finished) version of the story, you feel like you’re reading The Iliad. This one, which is unfinished, is more naturalistic – Garth said.

Edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, and illustrated by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings artist Alan Lee, its announcement came as a surprise even to Tolkien scholars: Christopher Tolkien, who is now 93, had described Beren and Lúthien in a preface as “(presumptively) my last book in the long series of editions of my father’s writings”.

Tolkien

The Fall of Gondolin

Christopher Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien