#tomte

Shroom, shroom, shroom!

Three cheers for the mushroom king!! 🍄🍄🍄

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three out of the four tomtar assigned to the granholm homestead, alukoz, lamo and hagirja, as well as one of their rams, tryggwis!

the tomte city of fergrunhemr practices a traditional line of work like other tomte cities often do which involves basically working as farmhands in human homesteads in exchange for a share of the harvests (and other goods the farmers might provide in return) which are sent to the tomte city. most of the agriculture (with a few exceptions) of tomte society is kind of outsourced to individual human farms which with their assistence and reliable access to high quality fertiliser as well as livestock protection often secured more reliable harvests and made it quite worth it. the deal may also include additional trade goods from the tomte capital in order to sweeten a deal/ensure that the homestead can afford it if a year is particularly harsh.

the Fourth tomte not pictured is gullmar so basically all these guys are his friends and they live in a little "farmhand dwelling" on folke's farm. i figured he would actually need more hands to help him realistically because managing a farm is A Lot of Work

I’ve read up on why (in the original dnd manual kobolds looked like weird lizard dog people and afterwards some creators focused more on the lizard aspects while others focused more on the dog aspect, which resulted in some creators depicting them as any random animal they like) but in folklore kobolds are literally just the German version of gnomes, or the Scandinavian nisse/tomte.

They are both small and dress like the peasant class of their respective countries, they both have the ability to transform into animals and inanimate objects, though they tend to change back pretty quickly suggesting they don’t have the “stamina” to keep the illusion up for long, they act as house helpers and protectors but will turn nasty if disrespected sometimes going so far as to burn the whole house down, and they also work on ships both as helpers and bad omens. The ship thing overlaps so much that if you look up ship kobold or ship gnome (skibsnisse) you get the same pictures.

The only big difference I could find is that folklore kobolds are also known to work in mines, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some mine nisse/tomte in Norway or Sweden that I just haven’t come across yet. The Danish nisse variant is also known to have a wide variety of jobs like farmer, church helper, scribe and miller.

My general impression is that folklore kobolds are sliiightly meaner gnomes but not by much, so while I’d never tell fantasy kobold fans to change anything about their beloved creature, if I were ever to make a fantasy world I’d depict them as the bad boy relative of the nisses who are very close knit with humans, even living with them, while kobolts prefer more unsavory or unrefined humans and naturally encountering dwarfs more often in the mines, and have tomtes live in nature with more close relations to wild animals but still relatively close to humans and put them all under the species of gnome.

Pixel Joint Secret Santa made for Terff. He had listed gnomes as one of his "likes" so I figured it'd be fun to doodle a flirty one hahah.

Thank Gnome it's Friday!!

And Junefae ✨💗✨ (Which should go without saying over here!). Featuring Bumble of @tockthegnome and two of the Pillars of the Lowlands of the same series.

For Troll energy.

For reasons.

Should also go without saying that all TGnIF's this month will be focusing on queer Gnomes from Tock's world, in celebration of Pride and to build energy and heart-momentum for the release of volume 1!! As mentioned previously and in comic canon, Bumble is ace 🖤🩶🤍💜

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This painting is from last year, but it's my first time posting it online.

It depicts little child tomtar/nissar hiding in a Christmas tree. A lot of classic Swedish tree decorations are edible or contain edible things, and the taking down of the tree is referred to as plundering it. In this case I've depicted a gingerbread heart and the paper woven heart shaped basket which is normally filled with hard boiled sweets. The tomtar have been doing a little plundering ahead of time!