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Some other points concerning the story of Gondolin may be noticed. The escort of Noldoli, promised to Tuor by Ulmo in the Land of Willows, of whom Voronwë (in S given the Gnomish form of the name, Bronweg) was the only one who did not desert him (II. 155–6), has disappeared; and ‘Bronweg had once been in Gondolin’, which is not the case in the Tale (II. 156–7). – In the Tale Tuor wedded Idril when he ‘had dwelt among the Gondothlim many years’ (II. 164); in S this took place three years after his coming to the hidden city, in The Silmarillion seven years after (p. 241). – In the Tale there is no mention of Meglin’s support of Turgon’s rejection of Ulmo’s bidding (cf. The Silmarillion p. 240: ‘Maeglin spoke ever against Tuor in the councils of the King’), nor of the opposition of Idril to her father (this is not in The Silmarillion). – The closing of Gondolin to all fugitives and the forbidding of the people to leave the valley is mentioned in S but not explained.

The sentence ‘Meglin … purchases his life when taken to Angband by revealing Gondolin and its secrets’ shows almost certainly, I think, that an important structural change in the story of the fall of the city had now entered. In the Tale Melko had discovered Gondolin before Meglin was captured, and his treachery lay in his giving an exact account of the structure of the city and the preparations made for its defence (see II. 210–11); but the words ‘by revealing Gondolin’ strongly suggest the later story, in which Morgoth did not know where it lay.

Lastly, there is a development in the early history of Tuor: that he became a slave of ‘the faithless men’ in Hithlum after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Moreover Tuor’s parentage is now finally established. Huor has been mentioned in a rewritten passage of S (§9), but not named as father of Tuor; and this is the first occurrence of his mother Rían, and so of the story that she died seeking Huor’s body on the battlefield. It cannot be said whether the story of Tuor’s birth in the wild and his fostering by Elves had yet arisen.