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• A race of small beings that live underground. According to Paracelsus, gnomes are the most important of the earth spirits. He wrote that they move as easily through the earth as humans walk upon the ground. The sun's rays turn them into stone. Some sources say they spend the day as a toad. Gnomes appear in the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In fairy tales, the mountain gnome Rubezahl was lord over the underworld. A kaukis is a Prussian gnome.

• A gnome is a mythical creature. In certain traditions and certain kinds of magickal practice, gnomes are elemental spirits of the element of earth. In other traditions, they are simply small, mischievous sprites or goblins. According to some traditions, their king is called Gob.

• In Fairy tales the gnome is usually a creature living deep underground and guarding buried treasure, resembling a small gnarled old man. Accordingly Swiss bankers are sometimes referred to as the Gnomes of Zurich.

• The word gnome is derived from the New LatinNew Latin (or Neo-Latin is a post-medieval version of Latin, now used primarily in International Scientific Vocabulary cladistics and systematics. The term came into widespread use towards the end of the 1890s among linguists and scientists. Classicists u gnomus and ultimately from the GreekThe Greek language ( /Elini'k{/) is an Indo-European language which has existed from around the 14th century BC in the Cretan inscriptions called Linear B. Mycenaean Greek of this period is distinguished from later Classical or Ancient Greek of the 8th ce gnosis, meaning knowledge. According to myth, gnomes horded secrets knowledge just as they horded treasure.

1 Gnomes in literature

• The Gnome King and his gnome subjects nearly transformed Dorothy GaleDorothy Gale is the protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and many of its sequels. An orphan raised by her aunt and uncle in the gray, featureless landscape of a Kansas farm, she is swept by a cyclone to the Land of Oz. Like Alice, she enters a lively and her friends into bric-a-brac in The Ozma of Oz, the second book in Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series.

• The Gnome MobileThe Gnome Mobile is a musical Disney movie made in 1967. It was based on a 1936 book by Upton Sinclair entitled The Gnomobile. The children were played by Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice, familiar from their role as the Banks children in Mary Poppins. was a Disney movie.

• GnomesGnomes are the smallest humanoid species on the Discworld (a fictional flat world created by Terry Pratchett) ranging from four inches (10cm) to 2 feet (61cm) in height. There may be some confusion between the names gnome goblin and pictsie which are more feature in Terry Pratchett'sTerence David John Pratchett OBE (known to some fans as Pterry is an English fantasy author (born April 28, 1948, in Beaconsfield, Bucks), best known for his Discworld series. Biography Pratchett's first published work was the short story "The Hades Busin Discworld novels, where they are also called goblins. The Nac Mac Feegle are sometimes considered an ethnic subgroup of gnomes.

• Terry Pratchett has also written a trilogy called The Bromeliad in which a race of "nomes" explore the world beyond their home, and keep discovering it's bigger than they thought.

• The Shannara novels by Terry Brooks include the savage Spider Gnomes and the kindly Healer Gnomes.

• Gnomes are featured in many books set in various Dungeons & Dragons worlds, most notably the mechanically minded tinker gnomes of the Dragonlance setting.

• In David Brin's novel Earth, a major nuclear war is described in which many nations attack Switzerland in an effort to reclaim money from the "gnomes" (bankers), money that has been illegally smuggled out of ailing developing nations and hidden in numbered Swiss bank accounts.