Edited by his son Christopher, Tolkien’s tale of a reluctant hero defending a city was written while the author was in hospital after the Battle of the Somme

JRR Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin, his tale of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces which The Lord of the Rings author called “the first real story” of Middle-earth, will be published in August.

The Fall of Gondolin will be the second “new” Tolkien work to be released in two years, following the release of Beren and Lúthien in May 2017. Edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, and illustrated by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings artist Alan Lee, its announcement came as a surprise even to Tolkien scholars: Christopher Tolkien, who is now 93, had described Beren and Lúthien in a preface as “(presumptively) my last book in the long series of editions of my father’s writings”.

“That preface had a certain valedictory quality to it – he was reminiscing about his first encounter with his father’s work,” said John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War. “But here it is.”

Garth said the story was written by Tolkien while he was in hospital and convalescing directly after the Battle of the Somme. “It’s a quest story with a reluctant hero who turns into a genuine hero – it’s a template for everything Tolkien wrote afterwards,” he said. “It has a dark lord, our first encounter with orcs and balrogs – it’s really Tolkien limbering up for what he would be doing later.”

The book, said publisher HarperCollins, sets the “uttermost evil” of Morgoth against the sea-god Ulmo. Morgoth is trying to discover and destroy the hidden city of Gondolin, while Ulmo is supporting the Noldor, the kindred of the elves who live in the city.

The story follows one of the Noldor, Tuor, who sets out to find Gondolin; during his journey, he experiences what the publisher described as “one of the most arresting moments in the history of Middle-earth”: when Ulmo, the sea-god, rises out of the ocean during a storm.

When Tuor arrives in Gondolin, he becomes a great man and the father of Eärendel, an important character in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. But Morgoth attacks, with Balrogs, dragons and orcs, and as the city falls, Tuor, his wife Idril and the child Eärendel escape, “looking back from a cleft in the mountains as they flee southward, at the blazing wreckage of their city”.

“They were journeying into a new story, the Tale of Eärendel, which Tolkien never wrote, but which is sketched out in this book from other sources,” said HarperCollins.

Timeline JRR Tolkien Show Hide 3 January 1892 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. 1896 Tolkien's father dies. His wife and sons, John and younger brother Hilary, come to England and settle in the west Midlands. Tolkien attends King Edward's School for boys, Birmingham. 1900 The family is received into the Roman Catholic church. 1904 Tolkien's mother dies. 1911 Tolkien goes to Exeter College, Oxford to study classics, Old English and Germanic languages, receiving a second-class degree which he later increases to a first. 1914 Tolkien enlists as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and writes in his spare time. 1916 Marries Edith Bratt in Warwick. He fights in the Battle of the Somme, catches trench fever and is shipped back to Birmingham to recuperate in hospital. 1918 Appointed assistant lexicographer on the New English Dictionary, soon to become the Oxford English Dictionary. 1920 Becomes reader in English language at the University of Leeds. 1922 Publishes A Middle English Vocabulary, which makes his name as a scholar in the field. 1925 Publishes a translation of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with fellow academic EV Gordon, and becomes professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. 1930 Tolkien creates an informal writing group, called The Inklings, with a group of Oxford friends – among them CS Lewis, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. They meet every Tuesday morning at a pub, The Eagle and Child, for conversation, drinking, and readings from their work-in-progress. One day, while marking examination papers, Tolkien discovers that a candidate has left one page of an answer-book blank. On it, he writes: "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." 1936 A publishing assistant reads the incomplete typescript of The Hobbit and urges Tolkien to finish it. He gives a landmark lecture, The Monsters and the Critics, which is a trenchant look at the critical tradition on Beowulf: Tolkien argues that scholars focus too much on historical inaccuracies rather than celebrating the beauty of its language. 1937 The Hobbit is published to great enthusiasm, and receives several awards, including the prestigious New York Herald Tribune prize as the year's best children's book. 1938 Tolkien's publishers seek a follow-up, and he submits The Silmarillion, his epic history of the characters that later appear in The Lord of the Rings. However, his publisher George Unwin declares it "commercially unpublishable". It finally appears in 1977. 1949 Tolkien publishes Farmer Giles of Ham, an Arthurian fairytale. 1954 The first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, is published to mixed reviews. Leading critic Edmund Wilson dismisses it as "balderdash", but poet WH Auden compares it to Paradise Lost: "For anyone who likes the genre to which it belongs, the Heroic Quest, I cannot imagine a more wonderful Christmas present... No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy." Fellow Inkling CS Lewis also gives it a rave review. 1955 The second and third parts of The Lord of The Rings are published: The Two Towers and The Return of the King. 1959 Tolkien retires from his professorship. 1962 Publishes a poetry collection, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. 1964 A collection of essays and poems, Tree and Leaf. 1965 American readers discover The Lord of the Rings via an unauthorised paperback version – and it is adopted it as the bible of the "alternative society". 1967 Publishes a fairytale, Smith of Wootton Major. 1971 Edith dies, and Tolkien returns to Oxford. 2 September 1973 Tolkien dies. 1977 The Silmarillion is finally published, edited by Tolkien's son Christopher. 1995 Roverandom, a story Tolkien wrote for his family about a dog who is turned into a toy by a wizard, is published with the author's own illustrations. 1997 The Lord of the Rings comes top in four separate polls of books of the century; The Hobbit is close behind.

Garth said The Fall of Gondolin contains Tolkien’s “biggest battle narrative outside of The Lord of the Rings”, but he predicted the “capstone” of the book would be the “exquisite” piece of writing in which Tolkien attempted to tell the whole story again, in the novelistic style of The Lord of the Rings. “In the first [finished version] of the story, you feel like you’re reading The Iliad,” he said. “This one [which is unfinished], is more naturalistic.”

According to HarperCollins, Tolkien saw The Fall of Gondolin as one of his three “great tales” of the Elder Days, along with Beren and Lúthien and The Children of Húrin. The latter title was also a bestseller, after Christopher Tolkien completed the text left behind by his father and published it in 2007.