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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9629305" data-attributes="member: 6787503">This post is to share the current state of some ongoing light research I've been doing into some of the more common peoples of fantasy and folklore. For some time now, I've had an ongoing project to identify and pin down some of the real-world equivalents of certain setting elements of JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth novels and legendarium, and that has extended to the races with which he populated his world and has naturally, at least for me, bled over into how I think of species in D&D.A recent thread on gnomes got me thinking about them again. Dungeons & Dragons (1974) refers to gnomes as the "slightly smaller" and "more reclusive" cousins of the dwarves. Curiosity about the origins of gnomes led me to Paracelsus who also associates them with dwarves. "About the dwarfs", he writes, "you must know they are born from the earth manikins [i.e. gnomes] in the mountains" and that "[t]hey are monstra" and, thus, "are strange in size and strength".In <a href="https://archive.org/details/fourtreatisesoft00para/page/222/mode/2up" target="_blank">A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits</a>, Paracelsus describes "the four kinds of spirit-men", one for each of the four classical elements, whom he describes as "having blood and flesh and bones", being "like man" in this regard. Paracelsus has this to say about the various forms of their physical bodies:The water people look like men, both women and men. The sylvestres do not conform, but are cruder, coarser, longer and stronger than both. The mountain people are small, of about two spans. The salamanders are long, narrow and lean.Elsewhere, he says gnomes (the mountain people) sometimes "reach about half the size of man or so, sometimes more." Although the book is regarded as the origin of the concept of elementals, what Paracelsus describes seems a long way from how they are described in D&D which owes its elementals to Michael Moorcock. The Paracelsian concept, on the other hand, is more in line with descriptions of humanoids in D&D. In fact, I found the book somewhat reminiscent of this passage from the LotR:Learn now the lore of Living Creatures! First name the four, the free peoples: Eldest of all, the elf-children; Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses; Ent the earthborn, old as mountains; Man the mortal, master of horses:I found Paracelsus' "elementals" to equate fairly well to each of Tolkien's major non-human races (not including hobbits), like so:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Nymphs/undines ==> elves</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Gnomes/pygmies ==> dwarves</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sylphs/wild men ==> ents</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Salamanders/vulcans ==> orcs</li> </ul>To pick up another thread of my thinking, I've long equated the dwarves of Middle-earth with the Neanderthals, imagining the elves as the first modern humans to colonize Europe (the Cro-Magnons) and the creator of the dwarves having already placed them there in their mansions in the Misty Mountains and the Blue Mountains. If gnomes are the cousins of the dwarves, then it seems reasonable to equate them with the Denisovans, the group most closely related to Neanderthals among identified archaic humans.Yesterday, I came across <a href="https://youtu.be/sBfYpKyOhIA?si=-zuCmoVwkQhzu_0z" target="_blank">this video</a> of an interview with Christoper Bae, one of the anthropologists who erected Homo juluensis as a new species last year, and at about 26:50 he begins talking about three different populations present in the fossil record in China. This, to me, seemed to line up with the groups I was seeing in Paracelsus, Tolkien, and D&D, so here's a little chart showing the identified groups and the equivalent D&D species: <table style='width: 100%'><tr><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Homo sapiens (Modern humans)</td><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Humans (incl. Halflings) and Elves</td></tr><tr><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals)</td><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Dwarves</td></tr><tr><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Homo juluensis (incl. the Xujiayao hominin, Xuchang Man, Penghu 1, and the Denisovans)</td><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Gnomes</td></tr><tr><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Homo longi ("Dragon Man", incl. Dali Man and the Jinniushan hominin)</td><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Orcs, Goblinoids, Kobolds, and Brownies</td></tr><tr><td style='width: 50.0000%'>The Narmada Human, Maba Man, and the Hualongdong people</td><td style='width: 50.0000%'>Treants and Ogres</td></tr></table></blockquote>

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