The Fall of Gondolin Part I: A Professor (a Girl) and a World

The Fall of Gondolin
By JRR Tolkien
Edited Christopher Tolkien
Part I: A Professor and a World

I know, you're asking why on Earth would I sit down and review a work by the most well-known fantasy author and the guy who created an entire genre of fantasy because he bloody well felt like it? Because readers, with everything going on in the world right, I figured a display of how my presumption and pretension quite literally knows no bounds might be amusing (And he’s right. They know no bounds. In fact, if you look at the length of this review you will note that he attempts to ape Tolkein’s literary style.{I am merely trying to be thorough}) Additionally, a reminder that even in the most frightening of times that we can save ourselves if we keep our heads and our hearts might be worthwhile right now. So let's turn to it, I'll start by looking at Professor Tolkien himself (Oh god… Come on Bro, everyone reading your reviews knows this. A hit movie was literally made about his life {We provide the author’s information as available. Always!}.).

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein of the Orange Free State, which was annexed by the British Empire in 1902 and is currently the Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa. His parents, Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel were English, having moved to the Orange Free State when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British Bank (Ah, Meta-colonialism. Wherein British settler-colonists colonize the dutch/french/german settler-colonalists). Tolkien had a single brother named Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien. When he was 3 years old, his mother took him and his younger brother to England, for a long family visit. His father was supposed to join them but died of rheumatic fever in South Africa (Back before the invention of antibiotics, strep throat could actually kill you. And now, thanks to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we could go back to those storied days of yesteryear. Although, it is worth noting that half a million people develop rheumatic fever right now due to the lack of such basic drugs as amoxicillin. Oddly enough, mostly in the areas economically and socially devastated by the scourge of colonialism.). Mabel took her sons and moved in with her parents and homeschooled the boys. Professor Tolkien by all accounts was a talented pupil, learning to read and write at the age of four, and spent a lot of time learning botany. His greatest interest, however, was in languages. Mabel was disinherited by her parents when she converted from the Baptist Church of her parents to Catholicism, they also cut off all support for her children (Dicks). Four years later Mabel died of acute diabetes (Fun fact: the dude who figured out that diabetes could be treated with insulin sold the patent for one canadian dollar so that the treatment would be accessible. Now, in the USA, people die because the cost makes them ration insulin until they die.) and Professor Tolkien was sent to live with Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory (basically a small chapel). Professor Tolkien spoke well of the man he referred to as Father Francis, saying that it was from him that he learned charity and forgiveness.

While there, Professor Tolkien attended King Edward's School (a private school founded by King Edward in 1552) and later St. Philips. He failed his first test to enter King Edward's at the age of seven but passed on his second try. It was here that three events that would be incredibly important for the Professor and the rest of us occurred. First, in his early teens, he had his first encounter with a constructed language. Animalic - a language invented by his cousins - was replaced by the more complex Nevbosh that the Professor, his cousin Mary, and others hammered out. The Professor was not entirely satisfied by Nevbosh and went on to invent Naffarin. This is not something he would stop doing as any fan could tell you. The second was when he and three of his friends founded the T.C.B.S (Tea Club Barovin Society), now this was mostly them talking in a tea shop or smuggling tea into the library (Because they were all British, they needed that tea. Like Victorian cocaine… except they also had cocaine.). Others would join over the years. This was Tolkien’s closest social group and he would stay in close contact with them until death did they part (And oh boy was there some death!). They shared their writings with each other, their thoughts and hopes. Even after leaving school, they would write to each other often and meet up to hold “councils". The third was that Professor Tolkien met the literal love of his life, Edith Mary Bratt. He was 16 and she was 3 years older than him, both of them were orphans and they spent a lot of time together, which ended up with them deciding they were in love. Father Francis was less than amused at the idea of his charge falling for an older, protestant woman (Gasp!) and was decidedly less thrilled at the nosedive the Professors grades took. As such Father Francis ordered Professor Tolkien to have no contact with Edith until he was 21 and then he could do as he liked. The Professor obeyed to the letter. I have to admit I am somewhat mystified by this obedience but this may be because as a number of my friends could tell you, obedience has never been my strong suit. He wouldn't contact her for three years...

That said when he turned 21, he wrote Edith and in a letter told her everything that had happened, stated that he still loved her deeply and proposed. He had no job, no money, and few prospects. Edith was living with a family friend and was engaged to a brother of one of her school friends. She wrote back as such but asked him to come and visit her, which he did and after a day together she had broken off the engagement and returned the other man's ring (It’s so sappy and sweet…{Not if you’re the other guy or his family}). It was 1913, and although no one knew it, they were a year away from being shattered in the First World War. Professor Tolkien was less than thrilled to leave Edith, interrupt his college education and head off to war (Which means that he had far more sense than many young men at the time.{Which offended British society deeply, but then most of these people thought of war as a game}) and instead entered a program to delay enlistment until he finished his degree. He passed his finals in July of 1915, graduating with honors and was commissioned within days as a second Lt in the Lancashire Fusiliers. His letters to Edith show him as being rather unimpressed with the British Officer Corps (Look, officers are terrible all the time, but Edwardian British officers? Fuck me sideways…{You can look at my review of 1914 for some extra details folks, all I’ll say is Marines treated that way would mutiny} Russian officers were so bad that even the Cossacks in Russia let the February Revolution happen.). He married Edith after finishing his training in 1916 and after a couple months was posted to France. He compared leaving Edith to death (Well, um… it was WWI so… Take an entire generation of young men. Then go and ask Tom at Blendtec if they will blend. The answer is, as always, yes. Oh! Tommy smoke, don’t breathe this!).

He was heading right into the Battle of the Somme, the largest battle of the Western Front and potentially one of the bloodiest battles in history (Weeee! All because an idiot kid failed to assassinate the one powerful advocate for compromise in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, stopped to have a bite to eat, and got a second shot - pun intended - followed by a bunch of Queen Victoria’s snotlings having the mother of all family feuds! {Explain the French Republic not only involved but gleefully escalating then?}). He found himself developing an affinity for the working men who made up the enlisted ranks (who would later become the model for Samwise Gamgee) and loathing his job, as he found himself considering the work of bossing other men around to be the most improper job for any man (And he was right.). He took part in assaults on German fortifications; the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig Redoubt. Both of these were deeply prolonged engagements with attacks, counterattacks, and possession of the fortifications in question swinging back and forth in a matter of days. Edith following the Professor's movements on a map of the western front was near frantic with fear that the next knock on the door would be news of her husband's death. Meanwhile, Tolkien's unit suffered just as heavily from lice and disease as they did German weapons (More heavily, really.). In October of 1916, Tolkien became one of those casualties, contracting trench fever from the unnumbered lice that infested the battlefield (And the delightful bacterium Bartonella Quintana probably saved his life. Make no mistake, however, Papa Nurgle does not love you, so stay the fuck home, wash your hands frequently for 20 seconds with literally any soap you have on hand and don’t touch your face.{I’m stuck at home until April 30th. Don’t make it longer folks, the reviews might turn unhinged}). He was invalided to England in November of 1916, which likely saved his life, as every friend from his King Edward's days were killed in the battle except for Chris Wiseman. Professor Tolkien's battalion was almost wiped out in the Somme after he left. Professor Tolkien would spend the rest of the war alternating between hospitals and home garrison posts. It was here, despite the suffering, that one of the seeds of middle earth was planted by Edith. The Professor detailed (Exhaustively{don’t be catty}) how Edith and he went into the woods around his duty station one day and in those woods, she danced and sung for him. A memory he carried so deeply that he immortalized it in the person of Luthien, the demigoddess, who for love of a mortal man, ran Sauron out of his own fortress and would choose mortality to follow her love into the unknown darkness that awaits mortals. Which takes the whole bit about worshiping the ground she walks on to a whole new degree. Tolkien was officially demobilized in July of 1919 and released from the Army in 1920 (And somehow didn’t die from the 1918 flu. Speaking of which: Papa Nurgle does not love you. So stay the fuck home, slay the virus with soap, and do not touch your fucking face. Failure to follow these commands will bring agents of His Most Holy Inquisition down upon your heads, and you will be slowly executed for Heresy.)
Tolkien got a job with the Oxford English Dictionary working on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W (Mother of God) but was able to swiftly re-enter academia. Taking a post at the University of Leeds and becoming the youngest professor there. While there he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and worked with E.V. Gordon on a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; both of those becoming the academic standard for several decades. He would also translate Pearl, a middle English poem, and Sir Orfeo, a middle English version of the story of Orpheus; this time as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king and with a happier ending than what poor Orpheus got. In 1925 he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and with a fellowship at Pembroke College (It’s one of the constituent colleges at Oxford. Basically this means he was instant-promoted to senior faculty with tenure.{So not something we would see in these fallen later days?}). Now during all this time, he had been tutoring undergraduates privately, among them young ladies from Lady Margaret Hall and St Huges College, as most colleges weren't coed yet. Furthermore, Women's colleges were always in need of good and trustworthy teachers, since women professors were, to put it mildly in short supply (It was rather difficult for women to get PhDs). Tolkien being a rare beast, a married professor and on top of that, a man besotted with his wife was considered perfect for the job. It was during this that the Hobbit was born, when grading papers one fine day (that he was miserable over being stuck inside grading the horror that is the average undergrad's work goes without saying) and on a blank page in the middle of an essay (Ugh) he wrote, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” (you know, If I ever just had a random blank page in the middle of a lab writeup or research paper, I’d probably fill it with doodles or something too.). From this starting point, he wrote the Hobbit and the first two volumes of Lord of the Rings were written, although they wouldn't be published for some time yet. Now the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit grew from a large body of earlier works that the Professor had labored on since 1914 but before this but never published but we'll get to that.

It wasn't the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings that first brought Tolkien's attention however, it was a lecture he gave in 1936, entitled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Before this, most critics and experts focused on Beowulf as a historical document, disdaining the fantastical elements. Instead preferring to mine the story for historical details or pre-Christian theology. Professor Tolkien quoted earlier critics who openly loathed the inclusion of monsters and dragons as unworthy of such an old tale and treated such things as extraneous. Professor Tolkien instead argued the fantastical elements were instead key to the whole narrative and Beowulf should be studied not just as a historical document but as a work of art in its own right. On top of that, he staked out his ground as Beowulf having a deep and serious theme of mortality. Professor Tolkien basically launched a stunning defense of the cultural importance of myth and the study of a myth as such as a tool to understand a culture and a people. Today we take that for granted but at the time there was a certain studied dismissal of such things. I would dare say that in some overly self-important quarters there is still such a dismissal, but you should never wave away the power of a myth over a people (Troll time: Indeed, just look at how people cleave to The Bible. It is clearly myth, but on the other hand, to dismiss it as culturally important would be the height of stupidity. You simply cannot understand anything European until you understand that book, and the history surrounding the interpretation of it.{Or the Manifesto!} The Communist Manifesto isn’t a myth. It’s a very early expression of Marx’s ideas regarding revolution, that would later be given an intellectual grounding in Das Kapital and other works, to be refined by later writers. If you want Myth, let’s talk about Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il or Chairman Mao.{Gonna disagree, the Manifesto does what a number of myths before it does. It lies out a history, divides people into an us and them, explaining who their enemies are and why they are enemies. It lays out a model of behavior for a better life. Now Das Kapital wouldn’t count as a myth in my book, as it’s an out right study of capitalism at the time. But the Manifesto? Certainly and frankly I think Marx may have been aiming for that in some part. The Manifesto is, after all, a recruiting tool meant to convince people to embrace capitalism. It is certainly treated as such by a number of communists even if you aren’t among them.}). A myth without a people dies and people without at least one myth will find themselves absorbed into peoples who haven't lost their myths. I would argue on my own that you cannot separate a culture or a people from their myths, because one feeds into the other. We also see here in Tolkien's pointing out Beowulf's concern over mortality, a mirror in his own works concerning mortality and how people grapple with it. Professor Tolkien later admitted that Beowulf was one of his most important and treasured sources. An entire generation of critics and scholars seized on Tolkien's argument with eager glee and it even generated excitement in the press of that day being written of in the New Yorker and New York Times. It helped that Tolkien developed a bit of showmanship in his presentation, beginning by belting the opening lines in the original Anglo-Saxon in a voice that students would later compare to none other than Gandalf (Unpopular opinion: Gandalf was an unconscious self-insert {Are you sure it wasn’t Beren?}). On top of all this, he published The Hobbit in 1937. However, he was soon overtaken by yet another World War and this one much worse than the last.

In 1939 he was asked by the British government if he would serve as a codebreaker and he said yes. He reported to London and took the instructional course at the Government Code and Cypher School. It was decided in October of that year that his services would not be required however and he returned to teaching. In 1945, he moved to Merton College at Oxford and became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and remained such until his retirement in 1959. He completed the Lord of the Rings in 1948, published in the 1950s, the first in 1954, Two Towers in 1955 and Return of the King in 1956. I will leave off discussing these books for a future date when we have space and time to really look into it (Thank Azathoth). Due to increasing attention and fame, Professor Tolkien took steps to preserve his privacy and his family’s, moving to Bournemouth, a seaside resort patronized by the British Upper Middle Class. He was lukewarm but Edith was thrilled as between the Professor's intellectual and celebrity status, they gained easy entry into polite society. She truly enjoyed being a society hostess and the Professor was pleased to see his beloved wife so happy. So he stayed there until she died in 1971, after which he returned to Oxford where he stayed until his death in 1972. His youngest son Christopher took over his notes and papers and would work to share the further works of the Professor with the world. We will have to postpone looking at Christopher's life (don't worry the Children of Hurin, and Bern and Luthien are still waiting for us and as I mentioned my presumption and pretension knows no bounds). The Silmarillion, the most complete version of the mythology and history of Middle Earth was published in 1977. Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle Earth, a 12 volume set was published in 1980. Thereafter there was a long silence until The Children of Hurin was published in 2007. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a poem modeled after old Norse poetry was published in 2013. The Fall of Arthur, a narrative poem composed in the 1930s setting King Arthur in the Post Roman Migration Period as British warlord fighting Saxon invaders was published in 2013. Beowulf, a translation and Commentary was published in 2014. The Story of Kullervo the retelling of a 19th century Finnish Poem was published in 2010 and reissued with additional material in 2015. The Tale of Beren and Luthien in 2017 and lastly the subject of our review The Fall of Gondolin, was published in 2018. Some writers publish less and of less quality when they are alive, and here the Professor through the work of his son is publishing good work almost 50 years after his death. That's the power of a legacy. So let's turn to that legacy (Can you imagine Christopher going through his study after the funeral? “Jesus, Dad. Now I see what was more important than helping me build that treehouse.”{Do British kids even get treehouses? I was always told that was an Americanism. That said I’m pretty sure the Professor would be all about that.}).

This was Part I of a 3 part review, join us tomorrow where we provide a brief look at the relevant backstory of the novel, Part II Context (is not) for the weak! See ya tomorrow!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders