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The description of the Vale of Gondolin in S is essentially as in the Tale, with a few added details. As in the Tale, the rocky height of Amon Gwareth was not in the centre of the plain but nearest to Sirion – that is, nearest to the Way of Escape (II. 158, 177). In S, the level top of the hill is said to have been achieved by the people of Gondolin themselves, who also ‘polished its sides to the smoothness of glass’. The Way of Escape is still, as in the Tale (II. 163), a tunnel made by the Gnomes – the Dry River and the Orfalch Echor have not yet been conceived; and the meaning of the name ‘Way of Escape’ is made very clear: both a way of escape from Gondolin, if the need should ever arise, and a way of escape from the outer world and from Morgoth. In the Tale (ibid.) it is said only that there had been divided counsels concerning its delving, ‘yet pity for the enthralled Noldoli had prevailed in the end to its making’. The ‘Guarded Plain’ into which the Way of Escape issued is the Vale of Gondolin. An additional detail in S is that the hills were lower in the region of the Way of Escape, and the spells of Ylmir there strongest (because nearest to Sirion).

The cairn of Fingolfin, added in pencil in S, is an element that entered the legends in the Quenta (p. 107) and the Lay of Leithian (III. 286–7); the duel of Fingolfin with Morgoth does not appear in S (ssss1). – Here in S it is said that Thorndor ‘removed his eyries to the Northern heights of the encircling mountains’. In the Tale the eyries in Cristhorn, the Eagles’ Cleft, were in the mountains south of Gondolin, but in S Cristhorn is in the northern heights: this is already the case in the Fragment of an alliterative Lay of Eärendel (III. 143). Thorndor had come there from Thangorodrim (stated in the Quenta, p. 137); cf. the ‘later Tuor’ in Unfinished Tales (p. 43 and note 25): ‘the folk of Thorondor, who dwelt once even on Thangorodrim ere Morgoth grew so mighty, and dwell now in the Mountains of Turgon since the fall of Fingolfin.’ This goes back to the tale of The Theft of Melko, where there is a reference (I. 149) to the time ‘when Sorontur and his folk fared to the Iron Mountains and there abode, watching all that Melko did’.