Gnomes?

[Fred Skin]

I can't find any info about gnomes in ITL, even though they are listed in the index (Gnomes, 86) and there isn't any errata about it.

It's no big deal, I just noticed it while looking to see if there is any info on air travel

[hcobb]

ITL 86: "Earth elementals are sometimes called gnomes, although this name is also applied to certain dwarves."

As for air travel I have a most interesting adventure coming up about a village in the sky and how they get around.

[Fred Skin]

Oh! That makes sense

[Droll]

"this name is also applied to certain dwarves" parallels Tolkien's resorting to the use of the term Petty Dwarves in his setting for the first age. In his case, he resisted the more distinctively popular Gnomes because when he'd originally begun to conceive of Middle Earth he'd attached that name to what he later on revised to be the Elves, feeling that gnome reflected a degree of settled knowledge and refinement in the same vein as the Gnomes of Zurich from Illuminati lore, and especially in the appellation of gnomic literary forms. He was concerned that the term elf would denote a spritely figure of fun in the popular imagination, even as he himself was wont to use it in his Father Christmas letters.
As Petty Dwarves, Tolkien's racial characterization is what we'd likely see being pertinent to Gnomes overall. Though inheriting some dwarvish traditions, they harbored a dislike of Dwarves; having, "some said," been banished in ages past from their eastern enclaves. Those enclaves were ensconced in the mountain range that would constitute nearly the shoreline of the remade Middle Earth's second age after the western country was drowned beneath the waves when the Valar had to geologically rout out Morgoth's stronghold of Thangorodrim. The Petty Dwarves' further interactions only brought more distrust of Elves whom they despised equally to Orcs, & High Elves principally, since: "Nargothrond was first found and its delving begun by the Petty- Dwarves, long before Finrod Felagund came over the Sea" to displace them again. Their temperament equates roughly to Poe's figure of Hop- Frog: more passionate and furtively free living in the gypsy manner underneath, but of a hard outward reservation and possessiveness like to the Dwarves.
So they aren't heard of in the main after their lands are lost in the cataclysm that ends the first age. Perhaps on Cidri they're encountered with rarity due to some similar circumstance.