Gnomes and Fairies

[Alfirin]

Quick Borrowing story from my childhood

When I was a kid I had a copy of an odd little pop-up book called "The Dwindling Party" , a present from a cousin who worked in Publishing (and who was unaware, that, regardless of formal, any book written by Edward Gorey is not exactly a kids book)

Anyhow The opening lines of the book are as follows

"A family once, by the name of McFizzit;
A mother, a father, six children in all;
Put on their best clothing, and went out the visit
The varied diversions of Hickyacket Hall"

The book then follows the family members as they are one by one abducted, eaten etc. by the varios monsters at the hall until only one is left."

The point is as follows, some years later I realized the name of the hall was a clue to what was going to happen (in my defense, I never learned Latin" There's no "k" in classic Latin and the "C" are always hard. And "Y" becomes "I" so the name then would become "HicIacet" or "Hic Iacet", "Here Lies" as in ("Hic Iacet Arturus Regina Temus Regina Mors.")

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Alfirin

There's no "k" in classic Latin And "Y" becomes "I" so the name then would become "HicIacet" or "Hic Iacet" …

The letter K was used in Old Latin and survived in Classic Latin in the word kalendae, after the 5th century B.C.E., which referred to the first day of each month, and in the praenomen Kaeso, used by the Julian clan. The word and name were both abbreviated as K. Accordingly K remains as a letter in standard Latin, though used seldom.

Y was in origin the Greek letter upsilon ‘plain y’ (Υ) which was originally pronounced in Greek as [u] but later pronounced as [i] but with the lips rounded, like u in modern French and ü in German. The Romans used this letter only when borrowing Greek words and names. Since the Greek sound was not a native Latin sound, the letter was generally pronounced as [i] in late Latin and in Romance languages.

Gorey’s use of the name Hickyacket is an intentional modernized misspelling of Hic iacet, replacing i with y and c with ck.

The supposed quotation Hic Iacet Arturus Regina Temus Regina Mors makes no sense to me. I think the intended quotation is the famous Hic Iacet Arturus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus to be translated something like “Here lies Arthur, former king, and king to be”.

[Alfirin]

Yes, was quoting from memory, memory failed (as I said, I never learned Latin)

[jallanite]

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’.