Scholars Gone Mad

[mtvessel]

Jun-Jul 2019
The Fall of Gondolin - J.R.R. Tolkien, ed Christopher Tolkien – HarperCollins, 2018 / Tolkien, Maker of Middle Earth - Catherine McIlwaine - Bodleian Library, 2018
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Note: In a slightly disturbing case of precognition, I wrote this shortly before hearing the sad news of the death of Christopher Tolkien. May he rest in peace.

The Fall of Gondolin is the final volume of Christopher Tolkien's extensive collections of his father's Middle Earth off-cuts. I have only read a couple of them, but having seen the exhibition Tolkien, Maker of Middle Earth and read the accompanying book, I can see that he was a chip off the old block in his scrupulous scholarship and slightly crazed attention to detail.

The tale is set at the end of the First Age of Middle Earth and tells of the man Tuor, who, after escaping thralldom, goes wandering around the western edge of Beleriand. He meets the sea god Ulmo, who directs him to find Gondolin, the hidden city of the Noldorin elves, and tell its founder and leader Turgon to prepare for war with the dark lord Morgoth. Assisted by Voronwë, a Noldorin elf that he meets in his travels, he eventually finds the secret entrance that leads to the city and delivers his message. Turgon ignores it, but Tuor hangs around, falls in love with Turgon's daughter Idril and has a child called Eärendel. Then bad things happen as the consequences of Turgon's inaction hit home.

The story in its original form is essentially a novella and is told in seventy pages or so. It is written in the high fantasy style of The Worm Ouroboros, with deliberately archaic language, which has the merit of compressing the action at the expense of depth of characterisation (it also uses the term "Gnome" to describe the Noldor elves, which doubtless has an etymological origin but causes a distracting cognitive dissonance, given that gnomes are traditionally diminutive underground dwellers). Interestingly, it tells the story of an epic hero who fails in his god-given task and has to deal with the consequences - not something that has been done very often since.

Of course Tolkien was not happy with his original version and wrote several variations, either as prose summaries or as incomplete tales, and Christopher Tolkien diligently presents and comments on each one. The last of these, written in 1951, has a style much closer to The Lord of the Rings, with simpler and more poetic language, but was abandoned at the point where Tuor arrives in Gondolin.

It is a bit bizarre to have a book that essentially consists of the same story told several times with minor variations, but like the many versions of Road Show in Stephen Sondheim's Look, I Made a Hat, the insights into the evolving editorial choices of the artist have a certain weird fascination. And Tolkien was most certainly an artist, as Catherine McIlwaine's book Tolkien, Maker of Middle Earth illustrates very well. Like the exhibition on which it is based, it is an interesting collection of drawings, maps and paintings which show Tolkien's artistic evolution from his early, strange, fantastical sketches to the stylised but beautifully detailed and, for me, powerfully evocative illustrations for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Which, come to think of it, mirrors the evolution of his writing style.

In some ways the most interesting pictures in the book are the least consequential: the elaborate and colourful doodles that Tolkien made in the columns of newspapers as he was solving the crossword. In their complexity and craftsmanship, they illustrate the fact that Middle Earth could be seen as the product of a madman. The level of thought and effort applied to a non-existent world must have seemed to his colleagues like scholarly attention to detail taken beyond all reasonable sense. But, like millions of other readers, I am very glad of Professor Tolkien's insanity, and the equally misplaced but, in its way, equally glorious editorial work of his son.