THE FALL OF GONDOLIN / J. R. R. Tolkien / Book Review / Brian Lee Durfee

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one television program in the history of the entire universe. I am Brian Lee Durfee, author of The Forgetting Moon, The Blackest Heart, and The Lonesome Crown. All three books published by Simon and Schuster's Saga Press today.

[00:00:20]I'm going to be reviewing The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien.

[00:00:30]Um last month I was in England and I visited Tolkien's grave in Wolvercote, England there. And I It just inspired me to just read something Tolkien when I got back. Anyway, um >> [clears throat] >> this Fall of Gondolin book, it's uh edited by Christopher Tolkien, which is J.R.R. Tolkien's son.

[00:00:56]It's Let's talk about the cover first cuz you know I love graphic design and cover illustration.

[00:01:01]It's got a great cover by Alan Lee, the illustrator that did all the work on the movies and he's basically the Tolkien illustrator.

[00:01:12]It's got a great picture of our main character, Tuor.

[00:01:17]It's either pronounced Tour or Tuor.

[00:01:20]It's t u o r. But anyway, we got the character Tuor overlooking the city of Gondolin. He's gone on a mighty quest to find this city and here we have an illustration.

[00:01:32]We've also got a cool illustration of um this god of water back here.

[00:01:40]There's tons of illustrations by Alan Lee throughout this book and every one of them is just absolutely magical and magnificent. In the back of the book there is a fold-out map.

[00:01:59]Let's see, where is it? Where the [ __ ] is it? There it is. I knew it was there somewhere.

[00:02:03]And then there's a genealogy chart of some of our kings and heroes.

[00:02:08]Um so what is the Fall of Gondolin?

[00:02:12]Well, it's if you read The Silmarillion, there was an abbreviated version of this story in The Silmarillion, which Christopher Tolkien took all of his father's notes and expanded into expanded this story of The Fall of Gondolin into a much bigger novel here which we've got. Not only is this got the novelization of The Fall of Gondolin, but it's also got about 150 pages of notes and different versions and different endings and different parts of the story that are in the backside of this book. So >> [clears throat] >> this book this can be found in The Silmarillion. Now in my review of Beren and Lúthien, which is also a similar thing, abbreviated story in The Silmarillion that Christopher Tolkien expanded on, I kind of liked the abbreviated Silmarillion version of Beren and Lúthien.

[00:03:12]Whereas I actually kind of liked the expanded version of The Fall of Gondolin. I thought this was an awesome book. I liked this one expanded upon this story. Uh it's um this story is one of the great tales of the First Age of Middle-earth.

[00:03:34]Um like, you know, there was Beren and Lúthien, there was The Children of Húrin, there was Now there's in The Fall of Númenor. Now there's The Fall of Gondolin.

[00:03:44]Um it's one of Tolkien's oldest creations. I believe in the beginning of this book Christopher says it might be kind of the first story in the world of Middle-earth that Tolkien was working out when he was in a hospital bed after World War I. And so the themes of this book are very war-centric. Um they're they're kind of based on World War a little bit. Just um sort of these grotesquery mech- mechanized creatures assaulting this city or something like that. Um and it's a beautiful city basically raised, destroyed by fire. That's kind of the plot of this. Starts out of kind of a quest with our main character Tuor or Tuor. Um and we end up with kind of like this sudden catastrophic loss of an entire civilization. Uh it's mythic, it's atmospheric.

[00:04:44]Uh this noble city that we are going on a quest to find, it's kind of like a noble city like Troy. It's an Elven city, an Elvish city.

[00:04:56]It's It suffers betrayal and ruin.

[00:05:00]Uh there's doomed heroes in this book.

[00:05:02]There's treasure halls, magical peoples, hidden realms, dragons.

[00:05:10]And there's the one of a scene that took my breath away in this was involving an elf an Elven character named Glorfindel, who was prominent in The Fellowship of the Ring.

[00:05:23]And as I was reading this massive epic fight that Glorfindel was having with a Balrog, I just realized how ancient and epic and how far into the depths of history Tolkien really took these stories. Like he pulled this heroic Elven character out of this book, like from the First Age of Middle-earth, and put him clear into The Fellowship of the Ring, which meant that Frodo wasn't just saved in The Fellowship of the Ring by just some random elf. He was saved by an ancient war hero, thousands of years old.

[00:06:06]Just It's this kind of stuff. I I'm a nerd, I'm a geek. I I like this kind of stuff. I like finding out these little threads of Middle-earth history, the First Age, the Second Age, all the ages that are in this.

[00:06:22]Um so Tuor is Tuor or Tour is our main character. He's a mortal, he's a kind of a heroic character, and he's kind of entering into an Elven destiny, an Elvish destiny, kind of like Aragorn did. Um uh the this the ancestry is very cosmic in a way of importance.

[00:06:50]Tuor is the cousin of Túrin.

[00:06:53]Um he's guided into Gondolin by El- El- Ulmo. I thought a lot of these things I just can't pronounce. Uh the this hidden city, he achieves greatness in the city. He weds Idril, who I Again, I'm probably mispronouncing that. He has a son Eärendel Eärendil, and maybe you remember the light of Eärendil that Tolkien that little Frodo gets from Galadriel and uses in the when he's fighting Shelob, you know. All of this stuff ties in. This is This is what I love about the ancient lore of The Lord of the Rings. I mean, we get the original trilogy and The Hobbit, but all of that is based upon a foundation that you can find in these other little stories that Tolkien wrote, and it's magnificent. Um the basic plot is of this story is this guy Tuor.

[00:07:50]He finds Gondolin.

[00:07:52]He He He makes it his home, and then the bad guy Morgoth of Angband Angband mounts a devastating attack on this city using Balrogs and dragons and orcs and It's the It's the Fall of Gondolin. It's a tragic kind of a tragic tale. Um it reads a bit like The Silmarillion and it kind of reads like you're reading the King James version of the Bible {slash} Lord of the Rings. It's It It very It moves quickly. Uh the tone and the prose harkens back to a very ancient age. Uh and it's So if you like that, you like it. If you don't I mean, if you find the prose in just The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers and Return of the King hard to get through, which some people do, I don't know why. I think it's magical and lyrical.

[00:08:48]Um this is all of that ramped up to 10. And either like it or you don't. I think it's great. I love it. I love being swept away back into Middle-earth on these little tales, these little extra adventures, these little prequel stories that have more epicness to them than almost The Lord of the Rings does.

[00:09:12]I really like this one. Of Of the three that I've read, Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin is probably my favorite of those smaller prequel novels to The Lord of the Rings. I'll just say that. I absolutely adored this book.

[00:09:29]Especially since I just came from Tolkien's grave just a month ago.

[00:09:35]Paid homage to the man.

[00:09:37]Decided to read one of his books.

[00:09:39]There we go.