Gnomosaurus: Gnomes in the time of the terrible lizards
One of the main things people who criticise my gnomological theories try to claim is that they're human-centric. It's been claimed that I'm trying to say that gnomes were created by humans inadvertantly, as if we manifested a mass hallucination. This is a misrepresentation of my ideas, plain and simple.
Gnomes have clearly been shaped by human beings to an extent, as evidenced by their appearance. I believe this is true, but nowhere have I said that humans created gnomes or that they need us in order to exist.
Let's think back to the time of the dinosaurs.
A time before anything resembling a human walked the Earth. Did gnomes exist in this time? Of course they did. All of the things a gnome is are things it was capable of being during the millions of years the dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Caretaker, observer of nature, keeper of the dark and wild places, and so on.
Now of course, Gnomes would look very different back then, just as our own human ancestors were different to us. We weren't there to shape their appearance into it's modern, recogniseable form.
Gnomes look as they do in the current era for a number of reasons ranging from the socio-historic to the psychic. The predominant reason is because humans are the dominant species on the planet and we have expectations of what a gnome is. We, as a collective, passively radiate an idea of what a gnome looks like, informed by folklore and culture.
When a gnome is incorporeal and wishes to take form, it takes the gnome-form, the genomomorph. It doesn't know what the gnome-form looks like before it does this. When it's incorporeal, it doesn't think in terms shapes and colours, it has no concept of physicality. It's just a sapient thought-form, it thinks in abstracts and emotions. But it can grasp onto the concept of gnomishness and ends up filling the psychic mold regarding gnome-form. In this era that means small people with prodigious beards in pointy red hats.
What would it mean in the time of the dinosaurs? I admit I'm no paleontologist, so I cannot say whether dinosaurs had a strong cultural concept of what a gnome was. Let's assume that they didn't. So let us think more simply and go back to the cornerstones of gnomishness.
In the time of the dinosaurs, a gnome would not be known as a gnome. But it would still be an earth-spirit driven by curiosity, respect, and ingeniousness whose goal is to caretake and cultivate. This is what would inform gnome-form in a time before the word 'gnome' even existed.
So what shape would this gnome-form take? It's probably very flexible. Like in our time, it would still choose to be small in form so as to not overlook the smaller parts of the world and would be dextrous in order to make good use of it's ingenuity. Unlike in our time, there is no single, worldwide dominant species who can generate a psychic field to influence non-corporeal beings' shapes.
However, it is the time of the dinosaurs so it is likely that if dinosaurs could form a collective psychic field (not being a paleontologist, I again could not say if they can do this), gnomes would've simply ended up taking a broadly sauroid form, so long as it was small and dextrous.
As to their behaviour, what would they do in this time? What does the concept of gnomishness look like in the time of the dinosaurs?
There are no mines for them to operate or gardens to cultivate, but they are still able to study and observe the wildness of the world and see all that happens out in the darkest of places across the land. They would still find respite beneath a mushroom on a rainy day or roam a tall, overgrown forest or behold the majesty of a mountain on a misty morning. Their inherent gnomishness would still be obvious if we were to behold a dinosaur-era gnome.
I have a theory that gnomes believe it is not their place to rule the world or govern it's direction. They are more than capable of overtaking humans technologically. However, that's simply not a part of gnomishness. They explore and maintain and observe. I think that's down to a matter of respect, the cornerstone of gnomeic thought, once again. Thus, in the time of the dinosaurs, they would not push beyond what the current stewars of the Earth, the terrible lizards, were capable of doing.
But I do think they were there in those times, in other forms, doing as they have always done and will do. They were here before us and though we have shaped what a gnome looks like and some of the superficial aspects of what they do, we have, by no means, created gnomes.
