Gnome

Region/Culture: Western Europe (Renaissance alchemy; Germanic mining folklore)
Mythos: Germanic Mythology, European Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Elementals
Mythical Attributes: An earth elemental able to move through solid rock and packed soil as easily as a person walks through open air, keeper of the metals, gems, and buried hoards of the underground.
Role in Mythos: One of the four elemental spirits of Renaissance alchemy, assigned to earth, who works the ore veins and guards what lies beneath the ground.
Relation to Humans: Gnomes keep to the deep earth and want little to do with people, slipping out of human company whenever they can. Where they surface in mining tradition they may guide, warn, or quietly hinder the miners who share their tunnels.

The first sign is a sound, and it comes from the wrong direction. A miner working a seam half a mile inside the mountain hears a small steady tapping in the rock ahead of him, where no other man is cutting and the stone has not yet been opened. The air down there is cold and close and smells of wet iron. His candle gutters. He lifts it to a blank wall and the tapping goes on behind it, patient and deliberate, the sound of someone at work on the far side of solid stone. The old miners knew that sound. Somewhere in the rock, a gnome was cutting a crystal loose.

That was the gnome’s labour and its whole reason for being: to move through the deep earth and tend what grew there. It opened the veins of ore, split the gems from their beds, and shepherded the slow gathering of metal in the dark. The ground was full of treasure and the gnome was its keeper, working a foreman’s hours at a job no one had assigned it, in a place no light reached.

The creature in its tidy modern form was born in the sixteenth century, in the writing of a restless Swiss physician and alchemist who called himself Paracelsus. He laid out a scheme of four spirits, one for each of the old elements, and gave each a household. Water had its undines, air its sylphs, fire its salamanders, and earth its gnomes. They were not gods, and they were not demons. They were a fourth kind of thing, material beings of flesh that needed food and sleep and clothing, yet lacking the immortal soul that was supposed to separate a man from an animal. Paracelsus set them halfway between the two and left them there.

Where the word came from is not certain. Some trace it to a Greek term for an earth-dweller; others think Paracelsus simply coined it, and he used it interchangeably with the old name for the pygmies, the tiny people of classical legend. The idea underneath the word was older than his book. German miners had long told of the Bergmännlein, the little men of the mountain, small underground workers who were blamed and credited for whatever happened in the shafts. Paracelsus took those mine-spirits, gave them a rung in his cosmology, and the gnome as a category was made.

In his telling they stood about two spans high, not much longer than a hand, and they were taciturn to the point of rudeness, peeling away from human company whenever they could manage it. Later folklore aged them into the shape that stuck: a small wizened man, gnarled as an old root, with a long beard and a sober face, dressed for work. They looked like grandfathers shrunk down and left to harden underground.

The strangest thing about them was how they travelled. Earth was to a gnome what open air is to a person. It walked through rock and packed soil without effort, parting the stone in front of it and closing it behind, the way a swimmer moves through water. A wall was not a barrier. It was simply the stuff the gnome lived in. This is why the tapping in the seam never came any closer and never broke through. The gnome was not trying to reach the miner. It was only passing, and the rock was its road.

All of this made it the guardian of everything valuable in the ground, the gems and the ore and the old buried hoards, and earned it a reputation among miners as something worth staying on good terms with. A gnome that liked you might lead you toward a rich vein or knock a warning into the wall before the roof came down. A gnome that did not might let you dig in the wrong direction for a year. They were not cruel, for the most part, but they were not sentimental either, and they had been underground a very long time.

Its powers all ran out of the earth it owned. It could pass through any rock or soil as though it were not there, find the metal and the crystal hidden in the dark, and read the deep ground the way a sailor reads weather, knowing where the stone was sound and where it would give way. It worked without tiring and lived, by some accounts, far past the span of any man. In its own element it was nearly impossible to corner.

Its limits were the mirror of all that. The gnome belonged to the underground and could not safely leave it. Sunlight was the danger the old lore kept insisting on: caught above ground in the light of the sun, a gnome would turn to stone, the way a dwarf does, the earth taking back what had wandered out of it. It was shy almost to helplessness around people, and the wrong kind of attention could drive it off for good. And it had no soul, which in the very scheme that made it was the one thing it could never dig its way toward. The cheerful red-capped figure now standing in a million flowerbeds is a long and peculiar descent from a creature that lived inside stone and was afraid of the sun.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a gnome?

A gnome is the earth elemental of Renaissance alchemy, a small spirit assigned to the element of earth alongside the undine of water, the sylph of air, and the salamander of fire. Gnomes live underground, move through solid rock and soil, and act as guardians of metals, gems, and buried treasure. They were first set out as a category by the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in the sixteenth century.

Who first described gnomes?

The gnome in its familiar form was described by Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century Swiss physician and alchemist, who placed it among his four elemental spirits. He built the idea on older German mining folklore about the Bergmännlein, the little men of the mountain. Paracelsus classed gnomes as material beings, between an animal and a spirit, that needed food, sleep, and clothing but had no immortal soul.

Where do gnomes live and what do they do?

Gnomes live deep in the earth, in rock, soil, and the tunnels of mines. They tend the underground world by opening veins of ore, cutting crystals and gems loose, and guarding hidden treasure. In mining tradition a gnome might guide a miner to a rich seam or knock a warning before a collapse, or it might hinder anyone it disliked.

What is a gnome’s weakness?

A gnome’s chief weakness is sunlight. According to the old elemental lore, a gnome caught above ground in the sun’s rays turns to stone, just as a dwarf does. Gnomes are also bound to the underground, intensely shy of humans, and can be driven away by unwanted attention, and in their original scheme they possessed no immortal soul.

Are gnomes the same as the garden gnome?

The modern red-capped garden gnome descends from the folkloric gnome but is a much later and softer version. The original gnome was an earth elemental and mine-spirit that moved through stone and feared sunlight, not a cheerful lawn ornament. The garden figure took shape in nineteenth-century Germany, long after Paracelsus first named the creature.