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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morgenstern" data-source="post: 1295647" data-attributes="member: 5485">Is, or isn't? I'm not sure which way you are arguing here. The mythological gnome that has most often made my acquaintance has little or nothing to do with those seen in D&D (which is too tall by a factor of 4 IMO).If you want to make it harder for yourself to identify source material by saying "well, these hopping things sorta hunger for the living, so they're vampires of a sort..." instead of just sticking to the close matches for the text you're examining go ahead <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />, but Tolkien's elves and dwarves so thoroughtly mimic the lifestyles and cultures of the Norse elves and dwarves, that as a young gamer who had read mythology throughout his childhood and never read Tolkien until last year, I assure you that 1st ed D&D's take on them seemed awfull familiar. I always wondered where the racial antipathy between them came from though. Now that I'm older and have discovered how blatantly D&D took its concepts from J.R.R.T., I can understand the antipathy... and all the +1/+3 vs spiders swords <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />.My point is that this thread has operated in ignorance several times. There are gnomes in Tolkien's work, just not in the movie <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.  Since they -don't- resemble any of the gnomes of folklore I'm familiar with, I'm guessing that they are derived from Tolkien's gnomes with the same slavish adherance as had D&D halflings skilled at throwing rocks back in the day <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />. Someone more acquanted with will have to explore this hypothysis, but it does seem strange to me that th original D&D races would have one "original" (that is non-Tolkien) idea and only one <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />. Similarly, to say Tolkien's dwarves and elves are uniquely his creation because there are so many he could have drawn upon is just a way of showing a lack of knowledge about the body of work that influnced his work.And yes, saddly, I must conceed that a majority of modern fantasy writers seem far more inclined to rehash his work, than to go truely back to the well, as it were.(Though if one of the main characters of Wheel of Time were any more Norse, he'd have ODIN stamped on his one-eyed face <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)All in good fun,</blockquote>

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