Dwarf

The dwarf is one of the staple peoples of northern European belief, and the Norse frame gives it its grandest office: in Scandinavian cosmology the sky rests on four dwarfs stationed at the world's corners. Below that mythic ceiling runs the folklore: short but powerfully built beings who look old from birth — the males wear long grey beards, and the species is said to reach maturity at three years — living underground by preference, where they mine gold and precious stones and practice the crafts for which their name became a byword.

Their relations with daylight and with people are both conditional. Dwarfs go above ground at night; the traditions disagree about what the sun does to them, some saying it turns them to stone, others that they pass the daylight hours in the shape of a frog. They can make themselves invisible and pass through rock and wall. Treated with respect they are beneficent and will serve those who please them — the Still-people of the springs and rock-clefts under a Hessian castle are remembered exactly so, silent, kindly, and helpful — but injured or offended they turn their rage on the offender's cattle. The German names preserve the whole sociology: hill-mannikins, ground-mannikins, the Still People, the Little People.

The type shades across borders and names. In England, the old observation runs, the same beings are simply the fairies; Iceland dresses its dwarfs in red and barely distinguishes them from elves; Brittany calls the kind korrigan; Finland and Lapland give them a magnificent underground country where a mortal guest is entertained with brandy and tobacco. The Frisian dwarfs are the most domestic and the most troublesome: they fall in love with mortal women and steal them, take children and leave changelings, and at the same time lend and borrow pots, plates, and money — charging interest — help build churches, haul mired carts free, and carry pancakes out to people working the fields. Beyond Europe the word attaches to other small powers — Bes in Egypt, the smith god of the Greeks in one guise, the dwarf avatar of Vishnu — but those are borrowings of the word, not the people.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

The dwarf reads as pride of craft organized into a whole temperament: secretive, industrious, touchy about respect, and scrupulously reciprocal. Everything in the record is ledger-shaped — service for courtesy, rage for injury, loans at interest, gifts of pancakes for neighborly patience — which suggests a people for whom obligation is the basic social emotion. They hold up the sky and expect no thanks, but insult one and the cattle sicken. Read from the folklore's pattern, and marked as the inference it is.