The Fall of Gondolin

The telling of these “heroic” tales from the foundational past of Middle-Earth was just not as enjoyable as the author's The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. I think it was the lack of immediacy that did it for me. I felt that I learned to know Bilbo, Gandalf, Frodo, Samwise and the rest before their adventures started in earnest, and that they were “ordinary people” (for the most part). By contrast, this story was more like reading a history book; some long-ago mythological persons populated the pages, but weren't ever fleshed out as “real” (IMO, of course). I understand that this book (and the previous ones The Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien) was extracted from the underlying “mythology” of Tolkien's sub-creation that made possible his more popular works, but I didn't feel that the story was really worth knowing, in the end.