Gnomish* was associated with the Lost Tales narrative of the exiled Elves, the Gnomes or Noldoli, who left Valinor and wandered in the Great Lands. To phonetically reflect this sense of exile in Gnomish, Tolkien chose to have this language resemble the sounds of Welsh, a language spoken by an exiled people who had been forced out of their lands by the Anglo-Saxons and made to live as the wealas (the Old English word for 'foreigners' and the origin of the name Wlesh) in their own lands.