On the main point of this thread, the use of
gnome as a name for the
Noldor, a particular kind of
elf, this does not work with Paracelsus’s meaning in which gnomes are supernatural entities who, in modern sf terms,
phase though solid matter.
Paracelsus first wrote about gnomes in his paper
On Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, which I do not find on the web. But see this short article on Paracelsus’s invention:
http://blog.inkyfool.com/2010/12/par...d-rape-of.html . Paracelsus describes his gnomes as appearing as pygmies, about one foot high. Paracelsus was apparently influenced by Germanic traditions about Dwarfs. Subsequent writers of children’s fantasy accordingly sometimes used the word
gnome for magical creatures of the dwarf type.
Tolkien appears to have been the only writer to use
gnome to refer to handsome, human-sized elven folk and to have related Paracelsus’s
gnome with Greek
gnōmē, ‘saying, thought’.
Gnomic poems are poems of moral maxims and have nothing to do with the supernatural creation of Paracelsus. They have existed and were so classified long before Paracelsus wrote. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomic_poetry . Paracelsus possibly misspelled Greek
genomos ‘earth-dweller’ to create the word
gnomus.
Considering this, Tolkien was, I think wise to drop his idiosyncratic use of
gnome to refer to the Noldor. There is no genuine folklore tradition behind this use of
gnome. It is best ignored, as Tolkien decided to do, beyond his imagining the word
Nóm ‘Wisdom’ as a name given by Beornians in their own language to King Felagund and
Nómin ‘the Wise’ as their name for Felagund’s people, which Galen has already indicated.
Another Paracelsian word is
sylph, which he uses to describe a wind or air elemental. Sylphs appear in Tolkien’s the
Book of Lost Tales, page 66, among the divine followers of Manwë and Varda. Tolkien writes (emphasis mine):
… and these are the Mánir and the Súruli, the sylphs of the airs and of the winds.
Sylph may derive from Greek
silphe ‘butterfly, moth’.