Anthology - Kender, gully Dwarves, and Gnomes

1. An assumed name, for the danger I undergo in writing this will be apparent to all but the most unenlightened reader.

2. With all due respect to the distinguished professors involved in the dispute touched upon above, the editors have insisted that I use abbreviated names in order to condense the present document from its unwieldy (but certainly more courteous) length of approximately 3,000 pages.

3. Details of the present state of the discussion may be found by the interested reader in PHILOSOPHIKA GNOMIKON MMXVII (323 A.C.), pp. 675, 328–682,465. I have my own opinion, but shall not give it here, for I am equally patriotic.

For again the dignity of this Guild — indeed, the dignity of gnomes everywhere — has been insulted by outsiders. A Gnomish philosopher once said (and in saying it, could rest assured that somewhere, some human would claim the saying as HIS own and nobody would know otherwise), "The history of a war is written by the victors." Not all of the victors, mind you, but only those who escape the war with the least carnage and the most coinage, a most unfortunate circumstance for Gnomish philosophers, writers, and artists, only recently righted by last month's publication of Volume I of the PHILOSOPHIKA GNOMIKON, an eminent journal which I hope will soon publish this article in its entirety. Surely the first two thousand or so volumes of the PHILOSOPHIKA have already filled considerable blanks in the recorded history of Krynn, and surely they will continue to do so, barring censorship or organized neglect on the part of others I could name… but I digress from the issue at hand, from that most ungracious insult that is our present concern.

The recent War of the Lance has inspired endless commentary, memoirs, speculations, and apologies, but how many of these documents have thrown light upon the Gnomish contribution to the deliverance of Krynn from the hands of the enemy and the domination of the Dragon Highlord?

None!4 Ours, it seems, is a marginal people, foot

4. None, that is, except for those contained in the PHILOSOPHIKA GNOMIKON, from which the author would be grateful to hear of any advance payment and royalty arrangements that might be involved in publishing this article in full — untouched, as the saying goes, by human hand.

noted in history as a race of toymakers and tinkers. For again one of our foremost poets, visionaries, and military heroes is overlooked, drowned in a flood of self-serving ink. Nowhere in the pages of LEAVES, or in the CHRONICLES for that matter, is there mention ofArmavirumquecanonevermindquiprimusabpedibusfatoprof ugif,5 poet and philosopher, an equal and honored Companion in his own right, completely forgotten in favor of a large supporting cast of elves6 and gully dwarves7, in favor of the highly overrated Gem-stone Man, who is said to have used his highly overrated Gemstone to plug up some metaphysical leak the Companions had imagined because it seemed like good mythology at the time.

But lest we sound nervous or bitter in our attempt to set history right, we shall emphasize the positive — the timeless contribution of Armavir, as we shall call him — the author of most, if not all, of the poetry and songs contained in the CHRONICLES. For the elves have assigned this poetry to the pen of one Quivalen Soth8 (for me to imply any relation between this fictitious poet and the infamous Lord Soth might be libelous, so

5. See note 1 above. Henceforth in the text, I refer to our hero as "Armavir."

6. A race of tree surgeons and thieves. True history also has its footnotes.

8. Not "Quivalen Sath," a deceitful (and typically elvish) name change. For evidence see "Song of Huma," as first printed in CHRONICLES, I, pp.

I shall not do so); the kender are as indifferent to who wrote the poetry as they are to anything of honesty and high seriousness; the dwarves as indifferent as they are to anything nonarchitectural or nonmetallic;

and the humans seem to be represented on the issue by Caramon Majere (who at last report believed an ode to be a form of salted cracker) and his wife Tika (of whom, alas, I thought better than this betrayal, this INSULT!). Surely, the poet deserves an account less treacherous, less indifferent, less ignorant. But I grow bitter again, galled by the fading light in my chambers and the endless dripping of the faucets on the south wall, placed there generations ago for Reorx knows what purpose but to gall me with their dripping. I shall fix them this instant; mine is a long and unbearable story, made even less bearable by the perpetual accompaniment of water torture.

As I sit again, I mistrust the passage above, the self-pity that you, my philosophical fellows, may well read into my complaints of neglect, of poor lighting, poor plumbing. I am not a self-pitying gnome, a whiner; my duty is to the name and reputation of Armavir, regardless of my discomfort, of the water knee-deep in these chambers, of the scant light in the chamber from the holes through which, in a far better time than ours, wires and helmets dangled with hope and promise. His biography and the notes toward an annotated text of his poetry will be my testament, the testament of our people that the tides of history shall not overwhelm us before we recover these songs as our own.

II. Of Armavir The Poet

A poet is not born but made, as another Gnomish philosopher once said,9 and our Armavir was no exception. Born in the midst of the great Gnomish Industrial Revelation (267 A.C.), he was a pampered and protected child who could have expected a Life Quest in keeping with those of his family — a career as an optical illusion inventor or a winch facilitator. Instead, as he said once in a playful moment, he became a topical allusion vendor and a wench facilitator — translated ungraciously by one human,10 who never understood his sensitive and generous poetic soul, as "a gossip and a skirt-chaser."

As the youngest of three children, Armavir's life was scarred by early tragedy, his father entangled and dragged to death through a malfunctioning pulley system while facilitating a winch (rumors abounding that he was tied to the fatal rope by a jealous husband), an older brother mistaking the reflection of an onyx ornamental pool for actual water and, clad only in swimsuit and water wings, plunging to his death from atop a fifty-foot stalagmite, an older sister (who, alas, promised in her meager thirteen years to be the genuine beauty of the family) catapulted to her untimely end by an experimental steam-powered seesaw. Needless to say, it was the lad's mother (the charming and still activeQuacumqueviamvirtutepetivitsuccessum

9. And in saying so, assured another gem that would fall from the mouth of a human!

10. Otik Sandahl the Innkeeper. I quote not to give merit to what the innkeeper has said, but to show how petty and unforgiving prejudice can shape history. We historians strive to be generous; after all, I have forgiven Otik's watering the beer in the Inn of the Last Home.

feminadiranegat)11 who removed him early from the rough life of mirrors and exploratory physics, leaving him forever with a mistrust of mirages (his poems, as well the reader knows, circle obsessively, skeptically around the image of foxfire) and an even greater mistrust of simple machines.

Isolated by circumstance, by maternal decision, the lad found his chief source of delight in the conversations around him: the retelling of the legends of Krynn we all remember from childhood, those stories beginning with the famous phrase, "The elves tell it otherwise, but this is how it happened"; the recitals of name-histories and genealogies (it is rumored that young Armavir went sleepless for a month to hear three genealogies in their entirety, and that he was "never quite right afterwards");12 but most of all he enjoyed the gossip, of which his mother was chief author, editor, and judge.