Balgin rgumbles somthing about the youth of today having lost touch with their ancestors:
Personally my sources are traditional stories (folk tales, ancient mythologies etc) and might have glanced at a re printed medieval bestiary or two in my time.Wyverns are out of my ken but Dragon comes from the Greek Draco, the Norse Drakkr(ever wonder why there are computer games called Drakkhen, Drakkan etc ?),and I think there was some continental European (might have been French or something) involved in the word.Djiin is the Arabic word that was Anglicised into Geenie for us English people to pronounce and it sort of stuck.Efriits or Efreeti are either different words for the same thing or for different things (like the Greek Dryads,Hammadryads,nymphs,undines,gnomes,salamande rs and a lot of others that I can't remember without picking up a book).Now personally Balgin isn't you're stereotypical AD&D type of Dwarf, more of a traditional Norse Dwarf (Dveurgar or Duergar in Old Norse, interesting that TSR made an evil race of Psionic Dwarfs called Duergar and an evil race of half human, half dwarfs called Derro who'd rather steal things than make them).The Norse Duergar are also refered to as Trolls (Trolls), Alfar(elves),Liosalfar(light elves),dok alfar(dark elves) and dok(I think that's dark elves again).Now there are few distinctions between any of these as they are all taken to be other than human and elemental forces of some kind or another.Trolls in Norse mythology were also related to Giants and could be any size therefore these various names could be referring to different personal traits that were dominent in human personalities.However the lios alfar were light and air elementals whilst the duergar (or the dock alfar) were different names for the small craftsmen who lived bellow ground (in the background)and are rather like the Sami tribes of Sweden(pronounced Suomi) and I have it on good authority that they are wonderful craftsmen and that the vikings called them Dwarfs because they were about 2ft shorter (being about 5ft tall, most vikings were about 6'4" according to excavated bones) so I consider Balgin to be a small craftsman, a holder of knowledge and tough as the mountains that he is made of (thanks to Tolkien dwarfs and trolls are more readily associated with Norse mythology than most of the other aforementioned types).
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