This post is reblogged from thetolkienist.com…
Exciting news from Tolkien publishers HarperCollins: Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R.R. Tolkien and his literary executor, surprises fans the world over with another book taken from his father’s ‘Legendarium’, this time The Fall of Gondolin, to be published worldwide on August 30, 2018.
Tolkien expert Nelson Goering has put together what he expects to be the content of the upcoming title:
The book will probably start off with one of Tolkien’s earliest Middle-earth stories, originally called ‘Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin’, written in 1917 while Tolkien was recovering from trench fever during the first World War. This is in a pretty different style than his later writings, but is a pretty dramatic and exciting (and complete) story about the destruction of a major Elvish city.
The book will probably also have the lengthy fragment ‘Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin’. This was Tolkien’s attempt to retell the same story many years later, around 1951, in a more novel-like form (it’s in a similar style to The Lord of the Rings, which he’d just finished writing), and is really very good (except for the fact that Tolkien abandoned it long before he got to the dramatic sack of the city).
Both of these texts are already ‘available’, but they’re entertaining stories and it should be nice to have them in a pretty and accessible package. Though I’m already bracing for all the clever comments about money-grabbing and milking…
There will also be quite a bit more stuff, of some type or other. The book is apparently 304 pages, and the two main texts should only amount to 120 pages or so of narrative — even very generously bulked out with commentary, there will have to be more material. Some of this will probably come from the short summary versions of the tale that Tolkien wrote in the 1920s and 30s, but these aren’t very long at all. There will also apparently be a good deal on ‘the Tale of Eärendel, which Tolkien never wrote, but which is sketched out in this book from other sources’. [Source: Nelson Goering.]
The Kingdom of Memory 