The English translation appeared in 1896 as Among the Gnomes: An Occult Tale of Adventure in the Untersberg. It is written to sound as if a gnome is moving about.įranz Hartmann in 1895 satirized materialism in an allegorical tale entitled Unter den Gnomen im Untersberg. The Russian composer Mussorgsky produced a movement in his work Pictures at an Exhibition, (1874) named "Gnomus" ( Latin for "The Gnome"). Similarly, gnomes are contrasted to elves, as in William Cullen Bryant's Little People of the Snow (1877), which has "let us have a tale of elves that ride by night, with jingling reins, or gnomes of the mine" (cited after OED). Nathaniel Hawthorne in Twice-Told Tales (1837) contrasts the two in "Small enough to be king of the fairies, and ugly enough to be king of the gnomes" (cited after OED). In 19th-century fiction, the chthonic gnome became a sort of antithesis to the more airy or luminous fairy. Modern fiction instead uses the word "gnomess" to refer to female gnomes. The Gnomides or wives of these Gnomes or Pharyes, are little, but very handsom (sic) and their habit marvellously (sic) curious." ĭe Villars used the term gnomide to refer to female gnomes (often "gnomid" in English translations). They furnish the children of the Sages with as much money, as they have need of and never ask any other reward of their services, than the glory of being commanded. They are ingenious, friends of men, and easie (sic) to be commandded (sic). "The Earth is filled almost to the center with Gnomes or Pharyes, a people of small stature, the guardians of treasures, of mines, and of precious stones. Pope's stated source, the 1670 French satire Comte de Gabalis by Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de Montfaucon de Villars, the abbot of Villars, describes gnomes as such:
Other uses of the term gnome remain obscure until the early 19th century, when it is taken up by authors of Romanticist collections of fairy tales and becomes mostly synonymous with the older word goblin. The creatures from this mock-epic are small, celestial creatures which were prudish women in their past lives, and now spend all of eternity looking out for prudish women (in parallel to the guardian angels in Catholic belief). Gnomes are used in Alexander Pope's " The Rape of the Lock". The English word is attested from the early 18th century.
Gnome Watching Railway Train, Carl Spitzweg, 1848 Cultural references In Romanticism and modern fairy tales
The gnomes of Swiss folklore follow this template, as they are said to have caused the landslide that destroyed the Swiss village of Plurs in 1618 - the villagers had become wealthy from a local gold mine created by the gnomes, who poured liquid gold down into a vein for the benefit of humans, and were corrupted by this newfound prosperity, which greatly offended the gnomes. The chthonic or earth-dwelling spirit has precedents in numerous ancient and medieval mythologies, often guarding mines and precious underground treasures, notably in the Germanic dwarfs and the Greek Chalybes, Telchines or Dactyls. He describes them as two spans high, very reluctant to interact with humans, and able to move through solid earth as easily as humans move through air. Paracelsus uses Gnomi as a synonym of Pygmæi and classifies them as earth elementals. In this case, the omission of the ē is referred to as a blunder by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The term may be an original invention of Paracelsus, possibly deriving the term from Latin gēnomos (itself representing a Greek γη-νομος, approximately "gē-nomos", literally "earth-dweller"). The word comes from Renaissance Latin gnomus, which first appears in A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits by Paracelsus, published posthumously in Nysa in 1566 (and again in the Johannes Huser edition of 1589–1591 from an autograph by Paracelsus). 2.1 In Romanticism and modern fairy tales.
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