I wonder how he’d feel known Ing that his concepts of orc and elf and dwarves now dominate fantasy
He eventually gave up on that and used "Noldor", a term he'd been kicking around for a while in various contexts. That's much more comfortable, but he kept using "gnome" way longer than seemed reasonable.
What do you mean by "high-class" here? Do you mean they're Calaquendi, or are you saying they were esteemed greater than the other houses?
So his gnomes were not of the, aehm, garden variety.
The Vanyar (also Calaquendi) were probably "higher" than the Gnomes, but they were never seen in Middle-earth again. We learn very little about them, and I don't think they're even passingly alluded to in The Lord of the Rings. Some of the Gnomes returned to Middle-earth, so they outrank everybody who never left.
He renamed the Gnomes "Noldor", and most of The Silmarillion is about them (and the Men who hung out with them). They came back to Middle-earth to retrieve the Silmarils, which had been stolen by Morgoth (the Big Bad of the First Age, and Sauron's boss).
Galadriel is one of the very few we meet who were part of that go-and-return trip. It was a nasty business, and that's why her turning down the Ring and returning to the West was such a big deal. (Though she wasn't part of the story at the time they were called Gnomes, and she had to be retroactively inserted into it. He never did finalize that story, and we're left with a conflicting mess of unpublished stories.)
All children of Feanor (the main contingent of the Noldor) are dead by the end if the first age).
The few Noldor that outranked Galadriel left by the end if the second era after the last alliance of men and elves and the war with Sauron.
[1] which I think is also half Teleri.
Yes, Galadriel's father, Finarfin, was of the Noldor, and he married Earwen of Alqualonde, the daughter of Olwe, who was one of the two leaders of the Teleri.
This makes it sound like most Noldor were children of Feanor or that most of them followed Feanor and his sons, but that's not the case. The sons of Feanor and their followers were first to Middle-Earth - is that what you mean by 'main'? It's stated a few times that there weren't as many of them. The Noldor were an entire people, and most were neither Feanor's children nor followers of his children. (They were technically all under Feanor as high king of the Noldor for a time, though.) This is from the Silmarillion, describing their travel through Valinor on the way to Middle-Earth:
> Fëanor and his following were in the van, but the greater host came behind under Fingolfin; and he marched against his wisdom, because Fingon his son so urged him
and then after those who didn't follow Feanor cross to Middle-Earth in the north, many die, but there are still more of them:
> for the agony of those that endured the crossing of the Ice had been great, and Fingolfin held the sons the accomplices of their father. Then there was peril of strife between the hosts; but grievous as were their losses upon the road, the people of Fingolfin and of Finrod son of Finarfin were still more numerous than the followers of Fëanor,
Tolkiens Elves are more like superhumans - better, more beautiful, more heroic than ordinary men. They are more like how people in antiquity and premodern times thought of the ancient heroes and kings of the heroic age.
While much have been made of Tokiens fascination of Northern European folklore, his outlook is still pretty classicist and Return of the King is basically a fantasy about the re-establishment of the Roman Empire.
...of course it might also be that the elves in the "Silmarillion universe" i.e. today's Middle Earth were always like the latter, and the playful elves from the Hobbit where another glimpse from the hypothetical "standalone Hobbit universe" before the Hobbit got moved to Middle Earth.
Earlier dwarves vs Tolkien dwarves vs more modern examples don’t seem that different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)#Norse_mytholo...
Elves are easier to argue but Santa workshop elves, Harry Potter elves, D&D elves, etc are all quite different.
1870: https://freevintageillustrations.com/enter-an-elf-in-search-...
He did say in a letter that Hobbits had pointy ears seemingly a nod to existing tradition, while elves had leaf shaped ears whatever that meant.
Also, while reading The Hobbit, I've always felt like goblins aren't the little pitiful creatures we imagine today, but are a bit taller and muscular, like smaller modern orcs with more human proportions. It's not based on any description Tolkien, it's just how I imagine those creatures through the way they are told.
Last but not least, in the Hobbit his dwarfs (as it's how it should be written, according to the author) were a bit more "cartoonish" than the idea we have of them today: they wore colored hoods (much like garden gnomes), one had a blue beard, it's not said that they wear armor (and it's logical to think they didn't)...
All in all, even though he greatly and directly influenced today's fantasy, it's not exactly his concepts of orcs and dwarfs, at least, that dominate fantasy, but rather the interpretation that some later artists had of his concepts.
I'm not a Tolkien expert, though, so if anyone knows better, I'd love to be corrected.
He did slip it in with Dwarrowdelf as the name for Moria.
The goblins in the Hobbit are clearly the smaller orcs “in a kids story” where the evil isn’t clearly described. The Lord of the Rings makes this pretty clear that they are “Mirkwood/Moria orcs”.
One thing that’s common is dwarves now apparently are all Scottish in movies and that didn’t come from Tolkien (if anything his dwarves would be Norse).