The Fall of Gondolin

by J.R.R. Tolkien

It is finished, if still partly unrevised, and is, I suppose, in a condition which a reader could read, if he did not wilt at the sight of it. As the estimate for typing a fair copy was in the neighbourhood of £100 (which I have not to spare), I was obliged to do nearly all myself. And now I look at it, the magnitude of the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion. My estimate is that it contains, even without certain necessary adjuncts, about 600,000 words. One typist put it even higher. I can see only too clearly how impracticable this is. But I am tired. It is off my chest, and I do not feel that I can do anything more about it, beyond a little revision of inaccuracies. Worse still: I feel that it is tied to the Silmarillion. You may, perhaps, remember about that work, a long legendary of imaginary times in a ‘high style’, and full of Elves (of a sort). It was rejected on the advice of your reader many years ago. As far as my memory goes he allowed it a kind of Celtic beauty intolerable to Anglo-Saxons in large doses.1 He was probably perfectly right and just. And you commented that it was a work to be drawn upon rather than published. Unfortunately I am not an Anglo-Saxon, and though shelved (until a year ago) the Silmarillion and...