A story first recorded by the folklorists The Brother's Grimm in the 19th Century, but with its origins most likely in the pagan and shamanic imagination of pre Christian Europe.

Sometimes called fairy or faery tales, but in truth these stories are medicine with spiritual, archetypal, mythopoetic and psychological dimensions.

A Gnome is a Chthonic or underworld, subterannean being; and earth spirit, or earth god. One might compare dark elves, goblins, dwarves and pixies as being related supernatural beings in wider Germanic, Celtic and Scandinavian folklore, myth and magick.

All of the elements in these European wonder tales are the archetypal images, dreams, myths and symbols of the deep mind, of the unconscious, of the underworld.