On the Persistent Fiction of the Gremlin Homeland

There is no Gremlin homeland. This ought not require saying, yet maps intended for schoolchildren continue to print speculative labels such as Ancient Gremlin Territories over whatever tract of wilderness their authors consider sufficiently mysterious.

Gremlins do not form territorial nations because, with very few exceptions, they do not tolerate living in substantial numbers among their own kind. Their reproductive cycle alone should have discouraged the theory. A Gremlin clutch may contain several dozen eggs, and upon hatching the young scatter almost immediately in a frenzy of competition for food, concealment, and anything else they can carry away before one of their siblings attempts to carry away the same thing. The behaviour has sometimes been described as evidence of congenital savagery, usually by observers who have never considered what Human civilisation would look like if forty infants emerged simultaneously from a nursery capable of running, biting, and opening cupboards.

Adult Gremlins are considerably more sociable, provided the society in question consists primarily of somebody else. They live comfortably among Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Aesir, and practically anyone who is not another Gremlin. Even in cities containing thousands of them, they seldom form Gremlin districts in the manner of immigrant populations; they distribute themselves. None of this is the residue of some ancient Gremlin nation destroyed. It shows only that if one attempted to found a Gremlin nation, most of its citizens would leave.