The first edition of The Hobbit, 1937, calls the high elves Gnomes. On the page. Elrond is descended from them, the swords from the troll-hoard were forged by them, and the word Tolkien uses for the most exalted, most learned, most tragic people in his entire invented cosmology is the word you now associate with a ceramic man holding a fishing rod next to a birdbath.
He kept using it. Gnomes survives in the Lord of the Rings drafts as late as 1944, deep into the writing of the Frodo-and-Faramir material, and only dies in the late 1940s when he's drafting the appendices and concedes the word is too misleading.
So when the phrase "elf liberalism is basically the same as gnome fascism" started circulating on tumblr in the summer of 2024 (tumblr user maidthings, quoting a phrase already rattling around their head, in a thread that also produced "elf liberalism probably goes insane," which is the better line), everyone treated it as a joke about vibes. Elves are wine-mom NPR listeners, gnomes are little angry men, ha. And it works as that. But the reason it works is that for about thirty years in the most influential fantasy corpus ever written, the elf and the gnome were the same guy, and the thing that split them apart was a manufacturing sector in Thuringia.
Tolkien wanted "gnome" for philological reasons. Greek gnōmē, thought, intelligence; the Noldor are "those who know," the craftsman-scholar elves, the ones who invent writing and gems and most of the plot. A gnome, to a man trained on Greek, is a knower.
The problem is that the word had a prior owner. Paracelsus, the Swiss alchemist, coined or at least popularized gnomus in the sixteenth century for his earth elementals, little people who move through soil the way we move through air. That's the folkloric gnome: subterranean, small, attached to the ground itself.
And then the ground-spirit got a supply chain.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the ceramics towns of Thuringia, Gräfenroda above all, started turning Paracelsus's earth elemental into terracotta. Philipp Griebel is the name that survives, August Heissner the other one; bearded little miners with picks and lanterns and wheelbarrows, fired and painted and sold by the gross. This is the same German toy-and-ornament belt that gave the world the mass-produced Christmas ornament, and the gnome was a product line. Folklore in, SKUs out.
In 1847 Sir Charles Isham, tenth baronet, comes home to Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire with twenty-one of them for his rockery. Isham was a spiritualist who believed the figures had a real connection to earth spirits, which makes him roughly the last man in history to take garden gnomes at theological face value. He also, and the photographs from 1897 confirm this, posed three of them holding a placard, on strike, demanding better pay and conditions. A Victorian baronet built a miniature labor action out of German ceramics in his rock garden.
His daughters hated them. After he died in 1903 they went after the collection, air rifles, the works. One gnome survived by falling into a crevice in the rockery, was found decades later, got named Lampy, and now sits behind glass at Lamport Hall insured for a million pounds.
Hold Lampy in mind. He's the whole arc in one object: working-class iconography, purchased by an aristocrat, exterminated by the next generation of aristocrats, then re-valorized as heritage once it was safely rare.
Because what happened to the gnome between Isham and Tolkien is a price collapse. Mass production made gnomes cheap, and the British suburban expansion of the 1930s gave millions of working-class and lower-middle-class households their first gardens, and the cheap ornament went into the new small garden the way the flying ducks went onto the wall. The gnome became the marker of the wrong kind of garden. The Royal Horticultural Society kept gnomes off the Chelsea Flower Show for about a century, with the explicit logic that they were tacky, and didn't relent until 2013, as a one-off for the show's centenary. The ban was a class boundary maintained with a list of prohibited ornaments, and the gnome was the named offender.
That's what poisoned the word for Tolkien. By the 1940s "gnome" no longer suggested knowledge to anyone; it suggested the pebble-dashed semi with the concrete fisherman. The Noldor couldn't afford the association. So the knowers got folded fully into "elves," a word that had spent the same century moving in the opposite direction, up through Victorian fairy painting and Edwardian children's books into Oxford philology, and the gnome was left holding the wheelbarrow.
One word goes up, one word goes down, and the sorting mechanism is retail price point.
And once you see the split as a class split, the post-Tolkien product lines all make sense, because every fantasy property since has had to decide what a gnome is FOR, given that "small earth-person" was already taken by dwarves, and they all converge on the same answer: the gnome is a technician. D&D makes him a playable race in 1978 and can't find him a personality beyond illusionist and tinkerer. Dragonlance, 1984, gives Krynn its tinker gnomes, an entire race that is one joke about engineering committees. Warhammer had gnomes early and simply deleted them. And World of Warcraft, 2004, ships the purest version: the gnomes are refugees. Their city, Gnomeregan, was irradiated in a botched defense of their own homeland, and the survivors live in a corner of the dwarves' capital, a displaced population of engineers with no territory, valued for their skills, owning nothing.
The elf in the same period keeps his real estate. Rivendell, Lothlórien, the eternal forest kingdoms; nobody can enter without permission, dwarves get blindfolded at the border, and there is no visible economy in any of them, no farms, no trade you can point to, just the kind of effortless abundance that in any actual society means the money was made somewhere else, earlier, by someone whose name is on the gate. Galadriel calls her whole project "the long defeat." Tolkien himself, in the long letter to Milton Waldman laying out the legendarium, says the elves' sin is that they became embalmers, that they wanted to stop change itself, to keep Middle-earth as a private preserve of unfading beauty. And when the preservation finally fails, they liquidate and sail west, to a jurisdiction where their assets are protected forever.
A deathless person is a perpetual trust. Immortality in these settings does the narrative work that inherited capital does in ours: it means time is always on your side, compounding is always working for you, and you can afford a politics of patience, procedure, and tasteful regret. Elf liberalism is the liberalism of the secured. Tolerant in the abstract, cosmopolitan in self-image, and absolutely gated in practice. The blindfold at the border of Lothlórien is the most honest institution in Middle-earth.
The gnome's position is the opposite balance sheet. Skill but no land. A workshop but no rents. Everything he has, he has to keep making, and one bad decade, one irradiated city, one shift in what the big people will pay for, wipes him out. Historians of actual fascism have spent a century on exactly this class: the artisans, shopkeepers, and smallholders, the Mittelstand, proprietors small enough to be terrified, big enough to have something to lose, and convinced that organized labor below them and finance above them are jointly arranging their extinction. That's the gnome's structural position in every setting that bothers to give him one. The meme's instinct that his politics curdle nationalist (the soil connection, the racial gift for craft, the ancient claim on the underground) is just reading the class position correctly.
Here is where the joke stops being a joke. Gräfenroda, the town that manufactured the garden gnome, is in Thuringia. Thuringia is where the AfD, under its most openly extreme state leader, won a German state election in September 2024, the first far-right plurality in a state parliament since the war. The gnome's actual hometown, the small-workshop ceramics belt that lost its markets twice, once to the war and once to reunification, voted the way the meme says gnomes vote. I am not claiming the lawn ornaments did it. I am noting that the meme reverse-engineered, from fantasy-race vibes, the political sociology of the exact region that produced the fantasy race's commercial form, which suggests the vibes were carrying real information the whole time.
And the equivalence, the "basically the same" part, holds up better than the joke needs it to. Both peoples are ancient, declining, demographically doomed, and organized entirely around what they hold: the elf around land and time, the gnome around tools and skill. Both run a politics of loss management. The difference is whether the portfolio is currently safe. Elf liberalism is what gnome fascism looks like when the assets are still appreciating; the other line in the thread had it right, elf liberalism probably goes insane, because the moment the long defeat stops being long, the moment somebody actually moves on the forest, the tolerance was always a luxury good and luxury goods get cut first. Tolkien wrote that part too. The Noldor, back when they were still called Gnomes, responded to their first real dispossession with an oath of unlimited vengeance, three kinslayings, and a multi-generational war of revanche over inherited property. The most liberal-coded race in fantasy has, as its founding political document, a blood feud over stolen jewels.
Anyway. Lampy is still at Lamport Hall, behind his glass, a mass-produced Thuringian worker figurine that survived an aristocratic extermination campaign by hiding in the rocks, and is now itself landed heritage with an insurance valuation and a gift shop. And somewhere in the 1897 photographs his three colleagues are still on strike, placard up, waiting on the baronet for better pay and conditions.
#elf liberalism #gnome fascism #tolkien #garden gnomes #the noldor were gnomes this is real #class composition of fantasy races #thuringia #same as it ever was
2087
theartofmadeline
discoholicmusic
amandla
