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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeonosophy" data-source="post: 7739422" data-attributes="member: 6688049">Thanks for this article. The intro is a bit too particularly ethno-national and "rationalistic" for my taste. I mean, the attribution of fairy/elemental beings to be memories of substrate nationalities is only one of many explanations. I would mention their origin in particularly German (rather than "Germanic") medieval and early modern folklore, particularly among miners. There weren't Finnic slaves toiling away in medieval and early modern German mines - and the miners weren't seeing Finnish men running around in the rocks. And the direct (rather than the more speculative) etymological source in the Middle German language, and how it's the same word as the metal "cobalt". A more general impression is that they are folkloric "perceptions" of some class of earth elementals - a German conception of the Paracelsian "gnomes".I was expecting something more along the lines of Echohawk's monster encylopedia articles - though I understand this was limited to 600 words. I do appreciate the story about Tucker's kobolds - I didn't know that!</blockquote>