Ah, I should've read past the first paragraph :p Norwegian is slow reading for a Swede and the English article on Wiki is... sparse :p I'm honestly at a loss for what "gnomelike" refers to in the first paragraph.
@Mahtamori Hard to tell, but a fun fact is that in early version of Tolkien works Noldor elves were called Gnomes. Also, people in the past didn't differentiate between various types of creatures like we do. For example modern concepts for elves and dwarves evolved from older concepts in Germanic mythology which most likely treated all manner of creatures as a single class.
I've always taken the word to mean deformed or referring to something like a pygmy or similar. When I look it up, the etymology seem to agree, not to mention that French and Latin specifically refers to pygmy stature. So from the shortest (no pun intended) description possible, having not read or heard about Peer Gynt before, sounds to me that it's a pygmy troll.
"It was the way he strode in as if he owned the place that fooled everyone. That and the fact that he kept hitting people and telling them to Mend their Ways."
