What is the name of the first story in J.R.R. Tolkien’s collection Unfinished Tales?
Answer
Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin
The first story in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales is “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin.”
Unfinished Tales was edited and published by Christopher Tolkien in 1980, seven years after his father’s death. The collection presents incomplete narratives from different periods of Tolkien’s mythology, together with editorial notes that explain variant versions and difficult source material.
“Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin” opens the book’s First Age section. It follows Tuor, a Man chosen by the Vala Ulmo, as he travels to the hidden Elven city of Gondolin. The story expands an episode that Tolkien had developed in several forms but never completed into a final published narrative.
Other well-known pieces in the collection include “The Quest of Erebor,” “The Hunt for the Ring” and “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields.” Those titles are sometimes mistaken for the opening story because they connect directly with more familiar events from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.