Dear militant George R.R. Martin fans:
Give his next book time. It’ll find the light of day eventually.
At least, that’s how it’s turned out with a long-rumored and even longer-revised entry from J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous Middle Earth legendarium, The Fall of Gondolin, which is poised to posthumously hit bookshelves this August.
Gondolin, which takes place long before the events of Lord of the Rings, centers on the founding and eventual sacking of an Elvin city by the same name, a stronghold betrayed and brought to the ground after years of dominance, which some have speculated was inspired by ancient Troy. The story — which first found paper in 1917 — is believed to have been written in part during World War I.
Who, then, dissected all those nearly forgotten pages and transcribed old notes to make sure this story found its way into the published Tolkien canon? The writer’s son Christopher, now at the tender age of 93. Junior, who was invited to his dad’s literary group by age 21 to converse on literature and fantasy with folks like C.S. Lewis and Nevill Coghill, once drew the Middle Earth map to LOTR, even correcting some of his dad’s inconsistencies.
He also wasn’t a fan of those Peter Jackson flicks. This one’s for the purists.
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