"An essential historical reference for Middle-earth fans," (Entertainment Weekly), the final work of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth fiction, completing Christopher Tolkien’s life-long achievement as the editor and curator of his father’s manuscripts.

When J.R.R. Tolkien sat in a military barracks in 1917, scribbling a story idea on some sheets of military music, he began to conceive of the lost world of Middle-earth. His very first creation sketched the fall of the Elven city of Gondolin. The city was founded in secret by the Elf Lord Turgon, only to be betrayed by Turgon’s nephew and destroyed by the evil Lord Morgoth. Fragments of this story have been previously published in the Lost Tales and in the Silmarillion, but in The Fall of Gondolin, it has been meticulously reconstructed by Christopher Tolkien to appear in full for the first time. J.R.R. Tolkien described it as ‘the first real story of this imaginary world’ and, together with Beren and Lúthien and The Children of Húrin, he regarded it as one of the three Great Tales of the Elder Days.