Gnomes- Earthbound Creatures

Since gnomes and human beings are alike earthbound creatures, we will probably find gnomes—or cobolds, or goblins, as they are sometimes also called—the fairy race closest to our understanding. .

Their habitat is one few other forms of life would care for, for gnomes live down below the surface of our planet, where roots take an anchor-hold on earth. If you should chance to wonder how any creature other than a worm gets about through a medium so dense you need only consider how easily thoughts pass through the hard heads of human beings and
you will at once understand the matter. Thoughts are not of flesh, though they must live in it for us to know them, and neither are fairies.

Gnomes are immensely clever Little People, with large heads out of all proportion to their tiny bodies: Fairytales tell how they carry lamps to light them on their subterranean wanderings. This is, of course, just a way of speaking, for the light cast is not an outer brightness, but rather inner light, shed on the nature of what they find about them by their keen intelligence. They have what we might call a “knowing eye,” which understands at a glance everything it falls on: They do not need to go through a laborious process of “figuring things out.” To see a human being puzzling to solve a problem prompts them to make rather rude remarks, “What fools these mortals-be!” is, I'm afraid, only too typical of their attitude. They constantly admonish us, “O Human, awaken!” For to them anyone who has to think to get at facts is half asleep. Indeed, they consider thinking as we know it just a means of pulling oneself together from a bout of
dreaming. Since they are wide awake already, they perceive what is without having to mull it over in their heads.

Tradition has been inclined to picture gnomes as wizened, little old men with bent backs and knobby, spindly  limbs. There is more truth than fiction in this portraiture: gnomes are a very ancient race; they are tiny in comparison  with human beings (dozens can come packed in a rock like sardines in tins); and they do, indeed, gravitate to dryness,  both in their surroundings and their sense of humor. They shrink from the damp cold of the earth in which they work and from the chill creatures that inhabit it—most particularly frogs, which, being the antithesis of gnomes, fill them with loathing. Frogs are invariably pompous characters, which is something no gnome would ever let himself  become. Frogs are, moreover; rather formless creatures—soft, squashy, bulbous all over—whereas gnomes are  sharply distinct in form, and built in mind and body on the principle of spareness. This tends to make them beings "of few words," and those words pithy, frogs, quite the opposite, are garrulous and, like those with garrulous natures  wherever we find them, given to utterances of no startling significance. They drive gnomes to distraction with the endless repetition of their mindless chant. Isn't it sad that the cheery harrumphing which sounds from wet places on spring and summer nights should strike so disagreeably on the ears of gnomes that these otherwise sensible beings  shudder when they hear it! Even the thrilling note of the "spring peeper," Hylo crucifer, lacks the power to charm them.

Gnomes detest frogs for a further reason: they see in them creatures they might themselves become were they to fail even for a moment to maintain the sharp vigilance that belongs to gnomehood. Never yet has a gnome been transformed into a frog. But so neurotic are they on this subject that you could not persuade a single one of them that such a fate may not overhang him.

The tide-and-rain-related moon, is equally anathema to gnomes, who regard it as the creator and ruler of the watery element. They cannot bear its rays upon their bodies. When the moon fulls, flooding all the world with its soft light-ocean, gnomes so harden their exteriors against it that they go about on the surface of the earth looking like tiny knights in suits of armor.

But gnomes have their pleasures, too, incomparable ones, which certainly outweigh any suffering they may have to endure from moisture. These little beings, from tip-to-toe a tingling sensor, have as their own special part of fairyland the subterranean realm of metals and crystals through which they wander, tasting all manner of delights. Mortals see this realm only as a finished world—still, hard, and unchanging—hence possessing a deathlike quality. But to the subtle sensing of gnomes it is all alive, a world of moving forces, rather than of rigid matter, and still endowed with the music and colorfulness of is cosmic origin, We mortals can share this experience in part if we are fortunate enough to witness the melting down or, more accurately put the melting-up of metals. For this process wherein he frees metals from the solid state returning them to he flowing and then aeriform condition in which they existed when the world was young and they had but lately issued from primeval fire. Crystals have kept material reminiscence of their primal color. And to guess at the music imprisoned in them we have only to see the crystal-like figures produced by musical vibrations, first discovered by Ernst Chladni. Geometric form is always frozen music!

But gnomes have still more incomparable joys. They are the “knowers” among the elementals. As such, they possess a strong affinity to inner light (indeed, their very bodies are formed of the light-stuff of intelligence). So it has naturally fallen to their lot to receive a special gift of insight: the ability to see ideas as we see objects. The whole world of creative thought lies open to their observation: They behold the working of the mind of God bringing into being some new form of life—whether it takes shape as a spiral nebula or a new species of plant or animal—and they behold the working of the human mind—whether it be creating the geodesic dome, Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, Brahms's Lullaby, a philosophic insight, or countless other inspirations fully as worthy of being mentioned. Nor do gnomes fritter away this endowment, only “putting two and two together” to come out with trivial bits of understanding. Rather, they use their love of knowing as a magnet to draw down to themselves, and thus ground in our planet, the shaping thoughts that flow into evolution from the mind of God. It can scarcely be a negligible
experience to be made thus privy to divine imagining!

And how are these visions carried to their destination in the souls of gnomes? Why, they are conveyed to plants in the rays of light, and plants serve as their further conduits into earth.

-Marjorie Spock