A Mystery

So, here is a mysterious thing I came upon today (Christmas) in reading some bits in an Encyclopedia of Fantasy I bought for our friend Nathan's kids for Christmas (his son's interest in Harry Potter is really the reason first read the books and gave them a chance after watching the first 2 movies and saying, "ok, seems like it might actually be good.") I was reading this part on gnomes and it was under the section on "elementals" and "earth elementals" so, seeing gnomes as representative of the earth element reminded me of this post where I posited Ron as being representative of the more "earth" element of the muggleness of the biological soul, along with the fact that this is ironic in a way that shows Rowling's core idea of reconciliation since he is from a pureblood family and Hermione, from a muggle family, represents the more "magic" element of the rational soul - this is all under the section "Final Ironies" in that post. The reason it reminded me of this is that the Weasleys always have to contend with garden gnomes, which would be an earth element and more "muggle" upon the fact that gnomes are an "earth elemental." BUT THEN I read on and it said that garden gnomes are NOT real gnomes, but rather a mis-nomer (sorry for the pun), and that they are really a form of dwarves. This is sort of a mystery to me on the assumption that Rowling would know they are traditionally a form of dwarf, a race which she has not really mentioned at all that I can think of ... it would have made much more sense had garden gnomes been real gnomes, for the reasons I just listed. Any thoughts from anyone?