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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5740049" data-attributes="member: 2205">No, that's just exactly not true.  In fact, it's the opposite of true.  The word gnome was coined by Paracelsus in the 16th century.  The old Norse couldn't possibly have used the term because it didn't even exist yet.  In any case, it's also just flat out wrong.  The Norse used local words alb and dverg which were cognates with english words elf and dwarf.  There wasn't any such word as gnome.Yeah, according to Paracelsus.  He most likely created the word, so sure, he was trying to make it inclusive--even if what he was describing was exactly the same as what had been used for centuries already as dwarfs or elfs in folklore.  In any case, nobody else used it until the late 1800s at best when as part of the Romanticist genre, the word was kind of rediscovered and used haphazardly here and there to apply to small fairy or elf-like beings.  But only haphazardly.  It's completely wrong to suggest that elves and dwarves were a type of gnome; gnome was a much later term that was only very occasionally used as an alternate for them.  Actually, more specifically, it was used as an alternative for goblin but since there wasn't the sharp division between elf, dwarf and goblin that modern fantasy makes, it kind of picked up a few associations with the elves and dwarves as well.And it wasn't really until the last fifty years or so saw a proliferation of mass produced garden gnomes that the term really gained enough traction to really be used seriously in the same breath as elf, dwarf or goblin anyway.I'm really curious where you got this idea.  Sure; I don't do folklore or linguistics professionally, but I've been interested in it for twenty five years or more, and everything I've ever read anywhere suggests the exact opposite of what you propose, and the provenance of the word gnome is fairly well known.  You're just plain wrong here.</blockquote>

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