The Fall of Gondolin

The book

The last hidden elvish city, betrayed from inside and destroyed in a night by dragons and balrogs. A refugee column escapes through a tunnel and over a mountain pass, and one duel on a cliff buys them the time.

Why Gustave Doré

The most purely architectural subject in the library — a city of seven gates described in obsessive built detail, then burned. Doré's Jerusalem and his Paradise Lost both do exactly this: enormous structures rendered as real places and then made the site of catastrophe.

The Fall is also, structurally, a siege plate. He cut dozens.

What to look for

The gates, in sequence, before anything happens to them. The cycle spends its first third on a city that will not exist by the end, which is how the text is weighted too.

Plates

Tumladen the HiddenThe Building of the White CityThe Seven GatesThe King's FountainTuor Comes to GondolinMaeglin in the Deep MinesThe Treason BoughtThe Feast of the Gates of SummerThe Red Light in the NorthThe Host of Morgoth DescendsThe Iron Dragons at the WallsThe Battle of the Square