Eldonnis lived a standard life for a gnome, oxymoronic as that may be. He wandered the world once as an adolescent, settled down in a far flung community, married, separated, and repeated that process a few times over a century and change. On the way, he picked up a few stories, a few tricks, and a lot of friends.
His latest leg of travel led him to an out-of-the-way grotto of a handful of gnomes, no more than two-dozen still around. To his horror, they were all in various stages of bleaching, especially the older members. He quickly found out that there was a curse chaining everyone born in the grotto to never leave, due to (allegedly) some ancestor's transgressions against a powerful fey. Or deity. Or fiend. The story changed often, and it seemed like reframing that story was one of the ways the gnomes of the grotto held on.
Eldonnis was driven to help the community, and did so buy scouring nearby lands, finding interesting things, and bringing them back to the grotto for the gnomes to fascinate over. He did this for quite some time, but eventually ran out of new things; the eldest of the grotto gnomes had seen most things already, and Eldonnis was just one gnome. Hearing the opportunity of the new world, he set off to find new and interesting things in an entire new realm to bring back for the grotto, in the form of letters, trickets, baubles, and songs.