Once & some time ago, while dreaming up other things, an image came to mind of very little folk living in a damp and ancient wood. I wondered about the sort of ways these tiny forest masters might make their homes, and how they would spend their time.

I did a few quick (and now lost) sketches, imagining these little gnomish fellows at a variety of tasks:

• Mending a mouse’s broken tail,
• Placing a baby finch in a grass-weave basket and carrying him back up to the nest from which it fell,
• Collecting wild berries and leaves,
• Helping possums to set up traps (presumably to ward off wild cats).

But there was one activity that seems to me both idyllic and daft. I thought, “Perhaps they may like a fireplace to gather around.” Yet, in the stead of perhaps more conventional building materials such as stones, I sketched them using something more unexpected: wood, by way of a felled tree’s stump.

I wanted to explore the concept, so I started with someone’s very nice drawing of a tree stump I found online:

Then, I added lines on top to visualize what it might look like:

I also made a small excercise of the idea in clay:

Click for full-size.

Click for full-size.

Now you’re probably thinking it unwise; or that it may be a short-lived actvitity to place a flame inside of a tree’s stump. I can only think they would not do so if it didn’t work quite well, so spare your naysaying should you happen upon such a chimney.

The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus.

It is often claimed to descend from the Greek γνώσις (gnosis), meaning knowledge.

It more likely comes from genomos (earth-dweller), in which case the omission of e is, as the OED calls it, a blunder.

Paracelsus includes gnomes in his list of elementals, as earth elementals. He describes them as two spans high, and very taciturn.

Click for full-size.