this will most likely go all nutty in transit, so here is the web addy too. kath (I was trying to find that little NP <nosepicker> Gnome and found this.) <G> http://www.grayweb.com/gnomes.html Gnomes Round about A.D. 1200, the Swede Frederik Ugarph found a well-preserved wooden statue in a fisherman's house in Nidaros (now Trondheim) in Norway. The statue was 15 cm. (just under 6 in.) high, not including the pedestal. Engraved on the pedestal were the words: NISSE Riktig Storrelse which means "Gnome, actual height." The statue had been in the fisherman's family as long as anyone could remember, and Ugarph succeeded in buying it only after days of negotiation. It is now part of the Oliv family collection in Uppsala. X-ray tests have proved the statue to be more than 2,000 years old. It must have been carved from the roots of a tree that is no longer known; the wood is incredibly hard. The letters were carved many centuries later. The statue's discovery and dating illustrate what gnomes themselves have always said-that their origins are early Scandinavian. It was only after the Great People's Migration beginning A.D. 395 that gnomes appear in the Low Lands-probably in 449, when the Roman outpost of Britannia fell to the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes. Some evidence of this comes from the statement of a pensioned Roman sergeant, Publius Octavus, who owned a villa and farm in the woods outside Lugdunum (now Leiden, in Holland). He had married a local woman and so did not return to Rome. It was pure luck that his property was spared destruction at the hands of the barbarians. Publius Octavus wrote the following description in A.D. s470: "Today I saw a miniature person with my own eyes. He wore a red cap and blue shirt. He had a white beard and green pants. He said that he had lived in this land for twenty years. He spoke our language, mixed with strange words. Since then I have spoken with the little man many times. He said he was a descendant of a race called Kuwalden, a word unknown to us, and that there were only a few of them in the world. He liked to drink milk. Time and again I saw him cure sick animals in the meadows." In the chaotic times up until 500, after Odoacer, king of the Germans, had disposed of the last ruler of the Western Roman Empire, the gnomes must have established themselves in Europe, Russia, and Siberia, although exact information is lacking. Actually, gnomes find writing history uninteresting, or at least pretend to, but it is rumored that they have certain secret records. In his book of 1580, Wunderlich mentions that in his time gnomes had maintained a classless society for more than 1,000 years. Except for their own chosen king, there were no rich, poor, inferior, or superior gnomes. This is perhaps why they made use of the Great People's Migration to begin afresh. It all sounds plausible until he tells of a map (now lost) of a gnome king's palace and adjacent gold mines; apparently slave labor was used in the mines, and sometimes there were slave revolts. Using our scant information as a guide, we must conclude that gnomes gradually sought more contact with the people they lived among, and that they were completely integrated into our society 50 to 100 years before the reign of Charlemagne (768-814). 1 Sometimes Gnomes are not pretty... Since "Nisse" is the Norwegian word for "Gnome", it is obvious that their population extends farther that a single language, so it stands to reason that they are fairly widespread. "How widespread?" you ask. I'm not certain, however I did find this map showing their habitat on the North American continent, as pointed out by a gnomish teacher: In Kharkov, people enjoy telling this story. Just outside their town lived a certain Tatjana Kirillovna Roeslanova. She was seventy years old but still had a pretty, straight nose and shining white hair which she parted in the middle. She had been exiled from Moscow by the secret police; her husband was dead and she was without resources. Nobody was allowed to employ her, so to make a livelihood she bought a cow with money from secret friends. Then she did something that Soviet authorities prefer not to see, but tolerate through necessity. She supplied ten houses on the outskirts of the town with milk-they would, otherwise, have had to travel so far for their milk that it would no longer be fresh when they returned. Tatjana lived in a shack in the middle of a small vegetable garden and spent the days grazing her cow along the roadside. There are hundreds of thousands of these one-cow businesses in Russia. The economic consequences of removing them would be so great that the government turns a blind eye. And so Tatjana grazed her cow by day, was continually affectionate to her, and at night brought her into a corner of the shack for milking. In the opposite corner of the shack, behind a black cloth, a number of religious icons were hidden. Tatjana had managed to smuggle them from her large Moscow house, and daily she prayed before them. The cow gave 20 liters of milk a day; but there was a six-week dry period when she was expecting her calf (every year she was sent to a bull owned a sympathetic farmer) and Tatjana had to reckon on this period in stretching her earnings over the entire year. Although Tatjana had once been a well-to-do lady, she accepted her lot and made the best of it. She always sought out new roads, searching for the best grass for her cow, but usually returned home through the same dense alder thicket not far from her shack. In the center of the wood were a few large boulders. Under the boulders lived two gnome families with nearly adult children. Every day Tatjana stopped in the woods and picked up from under a bush a small, artfully made pitcher half the size of a jam pot. She filled it with milk from a few squeezes of the cow's udder and put it back under the bush. She did this every day, even during the scorching Russian summer heat, or biting cold, or snow, or fog and rain. And each morning following, the pitcher stood in its place again-empty and scrupulously clean. One evening while closing the small shutters outside her shack Tatjana fell and broke her ankle. She dragged herself inside but could do nothing more. The next day she managed to milk her cow, but by evening the beast was bellowing hungrily though Tatjana had given her all the bread in the house. The next day an ambulance stopped in front of the shack (one of Tatjana's customers had alerted the health service). A grumpy doctor examined her ankle hastily and, with the help of an attendant, rushed her off to the hospital. She pleaded with them to do something for her cow, but they shrugged their shoulders and drove on. None of her neighbors dared do anything for fear of the police. In the hospital, Tatjana wept for her cow. Everyone she asked for help either shook their head or shrugged their shoulders. Her ankle was put in a plaster cast, and she was told that she would have to stay in the hospital for eight weeks because it was a complicated break. Tatjana worried herself sick over the cow, but soon news from home reached her. As soon as the sun had set on the second day after Tatjana's accident, the shack door opened, the cow walked out and, without a tether, followed a gnome, who took her to the best grazing areas along the road. Just before sunrise she returned. In the meantime, all the empty milk cans belonging to Tatjana's customers had been collected-along with the money that was left in advance to pay for the next morning's milk. In the shack, the cow was milked by the two strongest gnomes, and the filled cans were back at their respective addresses as the sun began to rise. When Tatjana arrived home eight weeks later, with her ankle in a smaller plaster cast, she wept again, but this time from happiness and gratitude. There the cow stood, the picture of health, and beside the ancient samovar on the wooden table lay the milk money for eight weeks and two days, neatly stacked. When she went to bed that night, thinking about how she would be able to shuffle along the road the next day, she worried aloud that she would not be able to go very far. "No need to," a voice behind her said. And when she turned around she saw five gnomes standing behind her humble bed. "We've come to get the cow;" the eldest said, critically looking at her plastered foot. "There is no question of your walking long distances for the time being. You go to sleep now and we'll take care of the rest. We hope you don't mind if we fill our own pitcher?" Immediately the others ran off to gather the empty cans, and the eldest gnome, clearing his throat, took the cow on her way. 2 1. Gnomes, Wil Huygen & Rein Poortvliet, 1976, Unieboek B. V./Van Holkema & Warendorf, Bussum, Nederland 2. Ibid.