Analyzing the Downfall of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings & Silmarillion: How Modern Fantasy used Gnomes to DESTROY the Noldor - A Rant

And non I'm not kidding

Just to warn everyone this will be a massive rant. Why? Because I hate Gnomes. I know this might come as a shock to those who know of my love for Mythic fiction, and see the username I have but seriously I hate the race. I see it in a work of fiction and I rage-quit.

I have since I was a boy. There’s Dragonlance books I’ve never read and will never read again if I so much as see the name ‘Mt-Nevermind’. If I see a Gnome I will not read. I hate the jokes, hate the way they can’t string two sentences together, and can’t seem to contribute anything beyond jokes to a story. And these aren’t even clever jokes but in the vein of fart-jokes and being a ‘brainiac’ who can’t see sarcasm or understand witticism and metaphors and the like and who cause the other characters to cringe or laugh at them.

But it wasn’t always like this. There’s a race of Gnomes from fiction that I love. One that I cherish and carried over in some manner into my own works (such as Brotherhood of the Gemstone & Olympnomachi).

It is an interesting fact that Tolkien invented the Noldor-Elves, for his Silmarillion and that they are the race of Elves to whom Elrond son of Earendil belongs to, and that the likes of Gil-Galad also belonged to them as he was their King. At one time the Noldo as they are also named were amongt the mightiest of kingdoms in Beleriand long before the Middle-Earth kingdoms of the 2nd & 3rd Ages.

Fans of the Silmarillion have long held the Noldor in high regard, appreciating the care and majesty of Tolkien’s writing as he developed a history that is almost unequaled in the whole of literary history.

This is as true to-day as it was in the 70s when the Silmarillion first came out. It happened also that Tolkien had developed the Noldor not to be only the ‘High-Elves’ of DnD but also the and get this, it’ll blow your mind if you’ve never read Tolkien; Gnomes. But don’t take my word for it, the likes of

G. K. Sá Earp

and

Patrick Lawrence

will confirm that yes, the Noldo are Gnomes, Tolkien calls them such in the History of Middle-Earth and in a variety of other places.

Quite why this was, is not immediately clear as he seems to have decided to treat them as a race of fairy-folk that is to say ‘Elves’. We must bear in mind Elves are simply the Norse word for what the Celts might call ‘Fairies’, for this reason we have good reason to basically regard them as one and the same.

The thing about Tolkien’s efforts to publish on the Elves was that he wanted to create a series of ‘fairy-stories’ or ‘Faerie Stories’ or you might say ‘Elf-tales’, but the idea was to weave together fay, Elf and Gnome together into a series of different clans so to speak. To expand and breathe new life into them that there might be a grand mythology of fay that was directly tied to the English people also.

It happens though that just as he wove this together, the dark forces of subversion were already at work in the 80s.

Much as I love Dragonlance, and love Dungeons and Dragons (or DnD if you will), one thing they’ve done that I despise is they have deconstructed the Noldor. They have deconstructed Gnomes.

Gnomes under Tolkien were the Noldor, and they were the most innovative, the most inventive of the races of Arda. The majority of their traits though were folded into those of the High Elves of later ‘Fantasy’ fiction, with the Gnomes claiming the great innovativeness and resourcefulness to an extent of the Noldor.

Except there’s one problem; Gnomes in Dragonlance and DnD are total Retards. Yes, I said it. Sure, some might say they’re an expy for autistic people, but the thing that’s taken isn’t the hard-working, slightly socially awkward and inventive high IQ of the autistic but rather a total and blinding stupidity to the world around them, a lack of awareness that they need an army, a culture and a proper ruler. No Gnomes must have only Science, be utterly unaware of the real world and have a ‘Life-Quest’, which is the only thing they care about.

I may be a Dragonlance fanboy, but back in the day I remember cringing through the chapters of Mt-Nevermind, wishing it would end. The appearance of a Gnome in the Legends trilogy almost made me throw down the book, and when Raistlin killed the Gnome I only felt bad for Tas, otherwise I cheered him on.

I hated Gnomes.

In DnD I could not understand why they were there. ‘Just fuse them with Halflings’, I’d say and others would react with horror, ‘but you can’t do that!’

The thing is though that over the years I discovered Tolkien, and how he designed his race of Noldor so that I came to understand them better and even came to love the race as he envisioned them.

Now having said that, if anyone borrows from the Garden Gnome folklore go ahead, that stuff is hilarious with this being one piece of lore I believe Harry Potter did quite well, with having Garden Gnomes be little more than butt-monkeys to be laughed at. Those were not inspired by Tolkien, but Garden statues and folklore dating back to the 19th century, in the same way Tolkien was inspired by the same era’s folklore.

The difference though is that Dragonlance took more inspiration from the stories of Arda, gave the Gnomes the inventiveness of the Noldor, but made them the dumbest race. They have names several sentences long, tend to list off their many ancestors (remind you of any race?) except where this is a fascinating aspect to Tolkien’s Legendarium, Dragonlance uses it to sneer at them and mock. It is unnerving how they treat it as cringe and have characters squirm and shriek with horror when Gnomes go to introduce themselves.

We’re meant to laugh at, and mock the Gnomes, and meant to regard them as butt-monkeys where once they were the most terrifying and wondrous of creatures in Mythic fiction. The very traits Tolkien attempted to inspire respect towards, DnD tore down.

I love DnD don’t get me wrong, but there’s been mistakes made as far back as the 80s. Gnomes are also stout, tiny and utterly worthless in a realistic combat situation, and as they aren’t particularly pragmatic or capable of strategic thinking, and as they don’t have any real influence on geopolitics in Krynn they don’t really involve themselves too often in the affairs of the world.

So if they can’t do anything and only exist as a kind of anachronism, and to be a joke, what’s the point of their existence?

It seems they exist just to mock. Their lore is trash, doesn’t intersect with that of other races, doesn’t interact with them. They’re an Elvish people without the Elvishness. Meanwhile Elves are stripped of their inventiveness, their capability to be resourceful and their knack for smithing and other such skills.

Really we have one race broken into two needlessly. This was not necessary, and should not have happened. But it did happen, likely just for another spare race at first then later for the subversion.

Let us ponder then if we were to mould the Gnome back into the Elf (minus the anachronistic levels of technology), we’d basically get Tolkien’s Noldor. Now if you want dear writers, you can still give your own spin on things; the Life-Quest will have to go, doesn’t serve a purpose, but what if you restore to the Elves the single-minded drive the Noldor had and that the Life-Quest was spun from? Most of the Noldor such as Celebrimbor, or Elrond or Galadriel and so on, were very ambitious in their respective fields and devoted themselves wholeheartedly to it. This is what gave birth to the Life-Quest, so what happens is that you get a strong, driven race with a penchant for invention.

If you need a short, bumbling race you have Halflings/Kender/Hobbits/whatever/Garden Gnome, but just don’t make it a ‘Gnome’ Fairy so to speak.

What the genre needs is less ‘comic relief’ races and to take itself seriously again. What we find constantly these days, as many such as

JD Cowan

and

Fandom Pulse

and

David V. Stewart

have all pointed out is that comedy is used to tear down the genre, to subvert it, to deconstruct it until there’s nothing left. The genre needs to take itself as seriously as it once did.

The Gnome as a race contributes nothing to a world’s lore. It can’t because it is about making people laugh at the race, with there being no Secondary World that has ever managed to make them more than this.

I’ve seen them cropping up again as of late in recent books, and it has been a real source of frustration, as they had been properly laid to rest some time ago. Naturally as LOTR has begun to regain some measure of popularity in recent years, we’ve had the return of this mockery of them cropping back up.

What’s so interesting about this form of deconstruction is that it is the most sly, the most underhanded.

Comedy should kick the chin so to speak of the King, not of the peasant. The thing though is that comedy of this sort kicks the chin of not only the peasant but the culture to which he belongs to. And so it has been for decades now, where comedy is directed against the masses rather than against the ruler. It is being used to humiliate the people and the members of their civilization rather than humble the powerful.

Proof that they hate being humbled need not be supplied as proof can be seen everywhere in recent days, throughout the Occidental world (and beyond). The thing though is that the Noldor are part of our culture, and so to mock them and reduce them to tiny pissants, unable to fight, in need of protection of others and little more than scientists who burn off their beards and contribute nothing of real substance to the plot or war against the forces of evil, and a mere comic relief race IS an attempt to mock the good professor’s works.

Now if people think I’m against a stouter race full of inventiveness, and who live in villages with vast gardens or in the caves of the world, think again. What I object to is the strange isolation from the rest of the world and the weird brainlessness of the Gnomes of most fantasy. You can have a stouter people, you can world-build them up just have them have other skills, have them not be a joke but a serious part of the world.

Because as it is, Gnomes are also a strange subversion in a way of Hobbits, and what Tolkien did with them in LOTR. In there, he had them shine brighter than any man or woman did in the story, had them be representative of the average Englishman, and the courage he is capable of.

So if you must go down that way, make sure to highlight the courage, the goodness and the capability of these fellows and of how they are representative or could be of the common folk, of the ordinary person.

My argument is that Gnomes should be either Elves or Everymen. But not bumbling butt-monkeys used to deconstruct, to mock and to humiliate the average person.

Tolkien developed and imparted a race with its own language, its own social structure, tales of courage and a DNA that we could borrow from and make our own with a little tinkering. So to simply turn away from him and his example, and what he did in the genre and to piss on it isn’t really progress so much as a kind of self-immolation.

Great as Dragonlance was (and it was), great as many of its successors were we must remember that they are not perfect. No work of art truly is, as beauty exists in the imperfections as it has been said, but in this case we’re looking at a wart rather than a hastily drawn thumb or something.

And if we ‘Mythic-Writers’ are to reclaim the genre whole and complete, and set it back on the road set for it by the likes of Lord Dunsinane, Walt Disney, JRR Tolkien, Robert E Howard, David Gemmell and so many others, we must not do it with the slightest taint. It must be EXACTLY as they left it to us, it must be pure and pristine and yes our own, but it must not have elements that taint our works, and that work to undermine the themes, motifs and messages of our stories and our lore.

Every blade of grass, every piece of lore must contribute to the over-all tapestry, so to have a loose hanging hair or to tape parts of it together with scotch tape won’t do. Gnomes as imagined by WoW, by DL and DnD and other universes like them won’t do, they are symbolic jester meant to mock, and deride all while being cut off more than even the Shire was to the rest of the world. Therefore, we have an obligation to not only cut them out but to refuse to so much as dignify them with a place in our universes.

If they contribute more than comedy, include them. But for the love of the genre, don’t include any spoof race. They’re an eyesore that no reader truly loves. Remember the Professor, remember those like him and create something that won’t have your readers cringing but weeping and cheering. We owe them no less than this.