Volante Opera Productions released a complete commercial demo recording of this work.  CDs and scores are available from their website.

The text for The Fall of Gondolin was the most difficult of all the Silmarillion texts to formulate.  It was also the text which drew upon the most disparate sources.  The first (and the only) complete full-length text was a revision of an even earlier draft made by Tolkien as early as c1920, and never revised; it is this text, with a very antique style, which is included in Volume II of Christopher Tolkien’s edition of The Book of Lost Tales.  There then followed a number of abridged versions culminating in the early 1930s with a severely foreshortened text, part of the Quenta Noldorinwa, included in its original form in The Shaping of Middle-Earth (Volume IV of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle- Earth).  This was the final complete version of the story that Tolkien ever wrote, and forms the basis for the text ultimately published in The Silmarillion in 1977.  In the early 1950s, shortly after the completion of The Lord of the Rings, he began to write a newly extended retelling of the story, but this covered only the childhood of Tuor and his journey to Gondolin; the whole of the tale of the fall of Gondolin was therefore missing.  Finally he expanded some parts of the earlier history of Gondolin, most specifically the story of Maeglin, and these expansions were also included in the published text of The Silmarillion.

The consequence of this rather fragmentary textual history meant that extreme measures had to be resorted to in order to construct a connected and unified libretto for the musical setting.  For the prologue, for example, the chorus sing a poem entitled The Bidding of the Minstrel which was originally written as part of the Tale of Earendel, which Tolkien never ever made any move towards completing; the text in the epilogue was drawn from the same source.  But both poems had been subsequently revised several times, and the later revisions at least conformed to the same style as the remainder of the Silmarillion texts which were being employed.  But the early Fall of Gondolin text from c1920, written in an altogether different style, formed the only basis for any text for Tuor’s words to Turgon, Turgon’s reply, or the fall of Gondolin itself.  There were no other alternatives; and the passages in question had therefore to be subjected to some delicate rewording to remove anachronistic stylistic elements.

The text for the Prologue, as has been noted, came directly from The Bidding of the Minstrel and, apart from cutting, needed no alteration.  The final words of the Prologue, spoken by Ulmo to Turgon, came from The Silmarillion.  The First Triptych, treating of the story of Maeglin, also came from the same source.  Since this was a late addition to the original tale, it required very little revision to fall into line with the remainder of the cycle.  It may perhaps be noted that the passage describing the courtship of Eöl and Aredhel, which mirrors the poem Tolkien published in the 1960s as part of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, echoes musically the setting I made in the 1970s of Shadow–Bride as an independent song for mezzo-soprano, viola and piano.

The Second Triptych draws very largely on the “later Tuor ” describing Tuor’s childhood, his meetings with Ulmo and Voronwë, and his journey to Gondolin.  The lengthy sections of the 1950s text describing Tuor’s childhood are subject to severe pruning, reduced in effect to the highly compressed account written in the 1930s to form part of the Quenta Noldorinwa text.  The encounters with Ulmo and Voronwë, one of the most graphic parts of the later rewriting, are treated at length and form the main substance of Scene Four.  Scene Five reverts to an earlier text, The Horns of Ulmo, written even earlier than the original Gondolin text but several times revised; the form used in the cycle is a substantively cut version derived from the 1930s revision quoted in The Shaping of Middle-Earth.  In fact even the later revised text refers several times to an earlier version of Tuor’s meeting with Ulmo, where the encounter took place not under the cliffs of storm-swept Vinyamar but in the quiet and peaceful meadows of the Mouths of Sirion; this meant that the cutting had to be carefully shaped to weed out elements at discrepancy with the later version, which of course was the one employed in Scene Four.  The remainder of the text of Scene Five and the opening of the Scene  Six were drawn directly from the later Tuor, again cut.

The final section of Scene Six, from the entry of Turgon, is the point at which the final rewriting of the later Tuor  was abandoned, never to be resumed.  The only text here, as has been noted, is that of the 1920s text.  Elements were introduced as far as possible from the later Tuor (for example, the quotation of Ulmo’s words) and the remainder was discreetly modernised.  But basically this explains the fact that Idril has nothing at all to sing in the First or Second Triptychs; there was no text at all for her to sing!

Nor was there much in what could be used to form a text for the Third Triptych.  Here the Quenta Noldorinwa account was curt in the extreme, and provided no text at all for dialogue; and the only version which did was the early Fall, which had both stylistic and narrative divergences.  There was nothing available which could be used for a love duet between Tuor and Idril, and it is after all the love between these two which provided the main raison d’être for the whole narrative!  Such a desperate problem demanded desperate solutions.  The whole of the love duet which constitutes Scene Seven was therefore drawn from a poem written by Tolkien in the 1920s or 1930s which was a  Hymn  to Eärendil  sung by Aelfwine (the later discarded narrator whose original function was to act as a guide to The Silmarillion texts).  Eärendil, of course, is not yet born in the original (he is the son of the couple singing the duet); yet the whole context of the poem, a song in praise of the Blessed Realm, is not a wholly unlikely subject for a duet between a couple whose ultimate destiny is to be to dwell in that land.  The very brief Scene Eight, the shortest in the whole cycle, is drawn entirely from modernised texts based on the early Fall.

The hymn to Ilúvatar which opens Scene Nine is another alien import.  The text is given in full only in early drafts for The Lost Road, Tolkien’s novel of Númenor abandoned in the 1930s; in the final drafts for the novel it is already heavily cut.  But the original text is a hymn suitable in most respects to have been sung by the people of Gondolin.  The occasional references to Númenor were either cut or substituted with other text.  The linguistic discrepancy was more intractable. Tolkien’s Elvish language was a continually evolving and growing thing, and only became more ossified after the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, which meant that defined texts were finally established.  But the 1930s Elvish used in the hymn was considerably different from that used in the later post-1954 text, which also included the Elvish hymn to be used in the epilogue.  I made some very desultory efforts to regularise some of the spellings (Anor for Anar , Ithil for Isil ) to bring them into line with the Elvish words (Sindarin rather than Quenya) which readers of The Lord of the Rings might anticipate.  But other discrepancies inevitably remained; my only consolation would be that Elvish of any variety is not a language in common use among choral societies or concert audiences.

The remainder of the text for Scene Nine consists of sections of modernised dialogue drawn from the early Fall and two brief passages of narrative drawn from the Quenta Noldorinwa.  The text for the Epilogue is somewhat different.  The foreground text, Idril’s farewell to Tuor and his departure over the Sea, is in fact in direct contradiction to the story (where Idril sails to the Blessed Realm with Tuor) given by Tolkien in all the manuscripts after 1926.  But the text comes from an earlier tradition, and the poem, The Happy Mariners, although given in a quite late revision probably intended for publication in the 1960s, was originally called The Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl, and formed part of the Tale of Earendel abandoned in the 1920s.  And there the story was quite definitely that Tuor left Idril behind when he sailed for the Blessed Realm; indeed, one of the notes for The Tale of Earendel identifies the singer of the song with Idril herself.  And the singer of The Happy Mariners, whoever they may ultimately have been, refers quite specifically even in the latest revisions to Gondobar, a name which Christopher Tolkien correctly observes is only ever used as another name for Gondolin and which has therefore no significance to the later story and is otherwise inexplicable.  It is on that admittedly rather indefinite basis that I have made the dramatic alterations to the epilogue which form the final text, but which do in their own way echo Sam Gamgee standing alone on the shores of Middle-Earth at the end of The Lord of the Rings where Frodo makes his own similar journey across the Sea.  

The Elvish poem which is sung simultaneously in the distance is, of course, the same as the voices Frodo hears on his voyage.  The text, apart from its relation to the Sea, has no connection with Gondolin at all.  It was published as part of Tolkien’s book of essays The Monsters and the Critics and in fact relates to the Fall of Númenor, some three thousand years in the future in the history of Middle-Earth.  But it does describe the journey of a lonely ship across the Ocean; and its final words, “Who shall see the last morning?”, chimes in perfectly with the song of the abandoned Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl, Idril, who looks in vain across the water seeking sight of the Blessed Realm.   

It will be noted that the final text for The Fall of Gondolin, apart from a fleeting mention in the very first bars of the Prologue, contains no reference to Eärendil as the son of Tuor and Idril, and as the messenger to the Valar whose mission will bring about the War of Wrath and the ultimate fall of Morgoth.  The tale of Eärendil, indeed, should be the last part of any complete Silmarillion cycle.  But, apart from Bilbo’s song in the house of Elrond contained in Book II of The Lord of the Rings, various fragmentary drafts from the 1920s which in any case refer to a totally different version of the story, and several other tangentially connected poems most of which had already been cannibalised to serve as text for The Fall of Gondolin, it seemed to me at the time of writing that there was no material whatsoever to work on, and that some elision was therefore essential to bring the incomplete cycle to a required conclusion.  It might be implied that it was Tuor ’s mission to the Blessed Realm which brought about the intervention of the Valar and the destruction of Angband; it might be suspected that the fall of the Balrog saved the Elves from further war; it might be supposed that the fate of the Silmarils was other than Tolkien’s late additions to the Quenta made explicit.  Those who knew Tolkien’s work would not be misled.  Those whose knowledge extended no further than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings would hopefully be satisfied.  And those who understood the problems would possibly forgive.

But since I came to this determination in 1998, I subsequently returned to Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil in a full-length song setting for tenor and orchestra using a text incorporating revisions apparently made by Tolkien himself after the publication of the version in The Fellowship of the Ring; and then, as will be seen, eventually wrote the final segment of the cycle in the form of The War of Wrath, bringing the whole to a conclusion of a very different nature. Those issues are explored further in the introduction to The War of Wrath itself.

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PAUL CORFIELD GODFREY