Post by delrick on Mar 3, 2012 1:31:07 GMT -5
I have a tendency to over-research my characters, and for Delrick, I really wanted him to be more than "I exported a gnome from World of Warcraft". It's not really good form to bring all the baggage, and lore from one venue to another like that.
So while there's a whole lot of backstory I haven't written yet, which involves places and events far scattered and away from the copyrights of Blizzard Entertainment. I thought I'd go back to basics and read up on the "archetypal" gnome.
Turns out, gnomes are a fairly modern invention. They first show up in the writings of medieval alchemists (which plays right into the setting of the dream, now doesn't it?) The earliest mentions relate them to the practice of using the poems of the Roman poet, Virgil as a divination tool. Virgil was considered by alchemists to be a powerful mage, and a pagan precursor to Christ. According to alchemical lore, he gave his students a dictum and an incantation, with which they could summon an elemental creature of vast knowledge... A "gnome".
The physician and alchemist, Paraclesus, described the gnomes as earth elemental beings, lovers of low places and workers of metal and gems. His gnomes moved through rock and stone as easily as a person walking above the ground, and know the locations of treasures long buried. His gnomes are like mankind in miniature: "They are witty, rich, clever, poor, dumb like we who are from Adam."
For Paraclesus, each elemental being had it's element through which it passed "as if it were air", and a "soil" upon which it grew crops. Just as humans grew their crops on the earth, the gnomes, used water as their "soil". So inadvertently he was ascribing them the use of advanced hydroponic gardens (although surely he didn't mean it that way)!
Gnomes soon became conflated with all manner of magical beings, such that the term lost all meaning. A gnome is a form of pixie, or a goblin ("Gob" being the king of gnomes), or worse yet, a kind of troll. For hundreds of years, the word "gnome" could have been used as a synonym for a host of beings too plain, or in some cases just too ugly to be fairies or elves. It was a sad time to be a gnome, indeed, for the gnome was a creature without it's own identity.
Hope came in the Dutch and Norse stories of "nisse" and the Swedish "tomte". Here the gnome was once again a thing of its own, a small, bearded, elderly (for the most part) little man, almost entirely recognizable as the gnome in his modern form. He has four fingers on each hand, and sometimes his ears are pointed. His eyes glow in the dark, and he had an uncanny ability to seem almost invisible.
These gnomes are agricultural guardians, keeping watch over farm animals and caring for wildlife. They will look after abandoned farms and are generous and kind (albeit in a very discreet and invisible way) to good farm-folk. The gnome walks unseen through the farm, putting things in their proper place if left out (very fond of things being in a "proper" order), tending to the animals if he thinks they're neglected even slightly, pulling pranks on farmers of poor skill or bad demeanor... The horses can see them, and gnomes pay special attention to horses. If your horse seems especially healthy, and its mane seems to be braided when you didn't remember doing it, that's your local gnome at work.
Christianity twisted the good efforts of gnomes, however, and having a tomte about your farm began to be seen as a sign that you were in league with "ungodly" spirits. Once again, the gnome falls by the wayside, disused and abandoned.
And then the modern writers discover the gnome. It's a grab bag. A cornucopia of ideas and themes. Gnomes can be good, or evil. agrarians or technologists. They have magic, or science. They are wise, foolish, sober, prankish, severe, gentle... A gnome is whatever you say it is, mostly because at one point or another gnomes have been confused with every fantasy creature in existence.
So, alas, there is no "archetypal" gnome. I'm left with a mish-mash of cast-away ideas. I feel in the end, like Johaness Kepler, upon discovering that the laws of planetary motion did not fit with the neat perfect circles he's imagined, but instead left him only a dustbin of "ovals".
So, I have a blank slate, and my character is a cypher.
But here's what I can do. I can cast my gnome as a sort of agrarian technologist, who comes from a long tradition of building in and maintaining lost places where the larger races no longer live. So for thousands of years gnomes lived in secret, and most people really had no idea what a gnome was. The stories got confused, so when one travels around, you hear odd, and sometimes entirely fictionalized accounts. The spelling of the name even gets mangled. So even in this land a "nome" is something most people never encounter, and although my own gnome bears little resemblance to the native form, most people wouldn't even know.
Of course, not of this "research-y stuff" has a direct bearing on my character. It's just a springboard for ideas. Alchemists can summon gnomes, for example, but then Paraclesus also says that a gnome so summoned is ALWAYS female. So, despite years of being summoned hither and yon over in another RP environs, there's a mountain of legends that suggest that male gnomes aren't summonable (at least through the spells passed down through age-old traditions of alchemy).
Far too much research for an RP character, yes?
So while there's a whole lot of backstory I haven't written yet, which involves places and events far scattered and away from the copyrights of Blizzard Entertainment. I thought I'd go back to basics and read up on the "archetypal" gnome.
Turns out, gnomes are a fairly modern invention. They first show up in the writings of medieval alchemists (which plays right into the setting of the dream, now doesn't it?) The earliest mentions relate them to the practice of using the poems of the Roman poet, Virgil as a divination tool. Virgil was considered by alchemists to be a powerful mage, and a pagan precursor to Christ. According to alchemical lore, he gave his students a dictum and an incantation, with which they could summon an elemental creature of vast knowledge... A "gnome".
The physician and alchemist, Paraclesus, described the gnomes as earth elemental beings, lovers of low places and workers of metal and gems. His gnomes moved through rock and stone as easily as a person walking above the ground, and know the locations of treasures long buried. His gnomes are like mankind in miniature: "They are witty, rich, clever, poor, dumb like we who are from Adam."
For Paraclesus, each elemental being had it's element through which it passed "as if it were air", and a "soil" upon which it grew crops. Just as humans grew their crops on the earth, the gnomes, used water as their "soil". So inadvertently he was ascribing them the use of advanced hydroponic gardens (although surely he didn't mean it that way)!
Gnomes soon became conflated with all manner of magical beings, such that the term lost all meaning. A gnome is a form of pixie, or a goblin ("Gob" being the king of gnomes), or worse yet, a kind of troll. For hundreds of years, the word "gnome" could have been used as a synonym for a host of beings too plain, or in some cases just too ugly to be fairies or elves. It was a sad time to be a gnome, indeed, for the gnome was a creature without it's own identity.
Hope came in the Dutch and Norse stories of "nisse" and the Swedish "tomte". Here the gnome was once again a thing of its own, a small, bearded, elderly (for the most part) little man, almost entirely recognizable as the gnome in his modern form. He has four fingers on each hand, and sometimes his ears are pointed. His eyes glow in the dark, and he had an uncanny ability to seem almost invisible.
These gnomes are agricultural guardians, keeping watch over farm animals and caring for wildlife. They will look after abandoned farms and are generous and kind (albeit in a very discreet and invisible way) to good farm-folk. The gnome walks unseen through the farm, putting things in their proper place if left out (very fond of things being in a "proper" order), tending to the animals if he thinks they're neglected even slightly, pulling pranks on farmers of poor skill or bad demeanor... The horses can see them, and gnomes pay special attention to horses. If your horse seems especially healthy, and its mane seems to be braided when you didn't remember doing it, that's your local gnome at work.
Christianity twisted the good efforts of gnomes, however, and having a tomte about your farm began to be seen as a sign that you were in league with "ungodly" spirits. Once again, the gnome falls by the wayside, disused and abandoned.
And then the modern writers discover the gnome. It's a grab bag. A cornucopia of ideas and themes. Gnomes can be good, or evil. agrarians or technologists. They have magic, or science. They are wise, foolish, sober, prankish, severe, gentle... A gnome is whatever you say it is, mostly because at one point or another gnomes have been confused with every fantasy creature in existence.
So, alas, there is no "archetypal" gnome. I'm left with a mish-mash of cast-away ideas. I feel in the end, like Johaness Kepler, upon discovering that the laws of planetary motion did not fit with the neat perfect circles he's imagined, but instead left him only a dustbin of "ovals".
So, I have a blank slate, and my character is a cypher.
But here's what I can do. I can cast my gnome as a sort of agrarian technologist, who comes from a long tradition of building in and maintaining lost places where the larger races no longer live. So for thousands of years gnomes lived in secret, and most people really had no idea what a gnome was. The stories got confused, so when one travels around, you hear odd, and sometimes entirely fictionalized accounts. The spelling of the name even gets mangled. So even in this land a "nome" is something most people never encounter, and although my own gnome bears little resemblance to the native form, most people wouldn't even know.
Of course, not of this "research-y stuff" has a direct bearing on my character. It's just a springboard for ideas. Alchemists can summon gnomes, for example, but then Paraclesus also says that a gnome so summoned is ALWAYS female. So, despite years of being summoned hither and yon over in another RP environs, there's a mountain of legends that suggest that male gnomes aren't summonable (at least through the spells passed down through age-old traditions of alchemy).
Far too much research for an RP character, yes?