Re: Orcs, Elves, and the One Cliché to Rule Them A
As far as Finnish elves, gnomes etc are concerned, I know quite a bit about them (did a presentation of them in 9th grade, i.e. 15 years ago, but I can still remember nearly all of it).
There are roughly 400 differently named types of elves, gnomes, spirits and other such beings in Finnish mythology all told. When you account for all the regional differences in naming, you still have over a dozen categories of being.
The most basic type of spirit is the spirit of fire. If a fire is kindled in any location, it becomes the residence of a fire spirit. The fire spirit will resemble the person who made the fire, so it is very much like a ghost imprint of that person.
House elves are folkloristically no more than an evolution of the basic fire spirit for permanent settlements.
There were separate spirits similar to the house elf for barns, stables, saunas and any other significant type of farm building you care to name. All of these spirits were to be treated with respect and courtesy. If you didn't, they'd get majorly pissed off and all sorts of misfortune would follow. Houses and saunas burning down, cows would stop giving milk, mold would set in the grain and every otehr kind of calamity you can think of. Respectful treatment and kindness would result in the reverse of this.
There were naturally all sorts of spirits of the forests, lakes, rivers (what few of those we have), springs etc.
Most house, sauna, barn, stable etc elves are often depicted much like the gnome unit appears in Dom2, tiny, gnarled old men with long beards. The earlier fire spirits could look like anyone.
Combining folkloristic info with the Kalevala would probably give a pretty good groundwork for a Dom2 nation, but the problem would probably be in getting any material. The stuff I used for that presentation so long ago came from a book on studies of Finnish folklore that was written sometime in the 1950s and I had to make a special petition for it because the whole library network of Helsinki only had one or two copies of it. Naturally in Finnish.
Edi
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