Gnomes and Fairies

[Formendacil]

Perhaps I should have seen it coming, but a side-question I had on The Book of Lost Tales Read-Through has produced what I already think deserves its own thread, because of a point brought up by Galadriel55.

First, what I wrote:

Originally Posted by Formendacil

I also have another question to ponder, one that comes down to linguistic taste: how do you feel about the Book of Lost Tales terminology? And I don't mean the prose here (though that is far game to discuss); I'm thinking more of the vocabulary: the use of "fairies" as a synonym for "Elves," the use of "gnomes" at all. I get a huge kick out of Tombo the gong myself, though it does not "feel" very Middle-earth to me.

Then, Galadriel55:

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Once again, I can't comment very much on this having never read the book, but I have seen several such excerpts (thanks to you educated Downers ). The use of gnome and fairy really bugs me. It does not bring the right image to mind. Especially the word gnomes - Russian has adopted that word to refer to little people (like garden gnomes), and in LOTR the word is actually used to signify Dwarves. Gnom Gimli is a perfectly sound combination. Gnom Legolas makes me doubt my sanity. Each time I have to remind myself that gnomes are Elves, or at one point I think it referred specifically to the Noldor, but either way they are not Dwarves and are nothing like Dwarves (and each time I encounter that word first thing that comes to mind is something akin to Andvari, but also eager to make mischief and craft things like a LOTR Dwarf.).

And on top of that there's the common modern meaning of "gnomes" and "fairies" - a meaning significantly different from what it once used to be. On one hand the choice of name is a bad thing, since the modern image interferes with how the reader understands the character. But on the other hand, for careful readers it revives the idea that fairies and princesses and etc are not what Disney makes them out to be, but the lore behind them is much deeper (and quite different!). Seriously, though - have you never heard of a child saying "that can't be Cinderella, she doesn't have a blue dress"? The same goes for fairies. They don't have to be little winged sparkly things fluttering around, and people need a reminder of that.

Continuing the main thrust of the Gnomes/Fairies/How-do-you-like-them? discussion, part of the reason I brought it up in the first place is that, yes, the connotations of "gnomes" and "fairies" brings up the diminutive and the modern connotations. But... before The Lord of the Rings made its influence felt on the collective vocabulary, that's the way we felt about "Elves" too.

I suppose this can only come down to a "what-if" scenario, but although I've never reread the HoME to the extent of the LotR, I *have* read it (or parts of its earlier volumes, which are the relevant ones here) that I can slide between the normal meanings and the early-Tolkien meanings without too much difficult. Personally, I regret the loss of "gnomes" more than the loss of "fairies."


The second point I wanted to make, and the one that really pushed me into opening this as a separate thread is the note of translation. Galadriel55 says that Russian uses "gnom" to translate "dwarf," so my question is: do other translations do this?

(Actually, my first question was "what about the use of 'gnome' in The Hobbit, but in Googling that to catch the exact quote, I ended up discovering that the reason I couldn't remember it by heart is because I've never read it--it was only there in the first edition and second editions. It was revised for the third edition, contemporary with the LotR's second edition, but even so, 1966 is fairly late; The Hobbit had been out for nearly 30 years by then and had seen a few translations.

These translations include the Portuguese one, O Gnomo from 1962, published four years before the references to gnomes were removed from The Hobbit!

Here's Wikipedia's table of The Hobbit translations, whence comes my information. Interestingly, this translation would be replaced in 1995 by separate (Brazilian and Portugal-Portuguese) translations that would change O Gnomo to O Hobbit. Russian seems to be in the clear; the earliest translation noted on this list dates to the 1970s.

I'm curious. People of multi-linguicity help me out: does English have an absurd number of names for small, "faerie" creatures (Elves, Fairies, Dwarfs, Gnomes--and now Hobbits) that need to be translated, or is this a function of most languages? I'm especially curious about those which are farther from being cognate to English, ones that don't share as closely the same mythological roots.