Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
On the other hand, you've seen the word in context in BOLT, and also in The Hobbit (from the first editions) - what do you think it adds to / takes away from the story? From your perspective, did the taking it out alter the feel of the story in any way?
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I feel I should make sure to clarify that I did not grow up on a diet of the earlier editions--nothing but the Third and later in my formative years.
Even apart from "garden gnomes" (not something I have ever really encountered firsthand even then), I knew the word from one of the Oz books--the third one, maybe? I never read the entire L. Frank Baum series, just the few that were in our local library, and did not reread them to the extent that they were drilled into my head like a Tolkien book, but I did have the initial impression of them as small, unlovely, creatures--perhaps more similar to goblins than Elves.
That said, I like the word itself. (Good catch, by the way,
Galin--without the "g" at the front, I'd never noticed the similarity in "Nóm"--Tolkien may have dropped the concept, but perhaps he hadn't quite done so without some regret.) The Grecian roots of the word work to my linguistic aesthetics, and I like the idea that there was a Common Speech word for "Noldo."
I don't know if I've been as clear I should be, so I'll put it on the record just in case: "the Gnomes" refered to the Noldor--who were the Noldoli in the Book of Lost Tales, but the term Gnome lasted past the change from Noldoli to Noldor by nearly two decades. "Gnomes" was not replaced by "Elves," but dropped, in the same way that "Fairies" was dropped as a synonym of "Elves"--but with a difference: All Gnomes (Noldor) were Elves (Eldar).
Actually, now that I think about it--even though I don't personally like the use of fairies (I'm indifferent there, whereas I genuinely miss Gnomes), I wonder if Tolkien impoverished himself potentially. If Gnomes=Noldor, and Elves=Eldar (RATHER than Quendi), Fairies could have been used to be the Common Speech/English equivalent of Quendi (the entire species).
I should pay closer attention to how Tolkien uses the two words in the BoLT as we read forward. Elves and Fairies are PROBABLY just straight-up synonyms, but I wonder if maybe there's a nuance. (Of course, Quendi subdivided into Eldar and Avari is a later, post-BoLT terminology, but there was a similar structure in the BoLT: the Elves who went to Kor and the "Ilkorins," the ones who did not).