This is almost certainly completely wrong, the smurfs get their hat designs from the type of hats that gnomes and dwarves and goblins usually wear in germanic folklore, the most well known of all being the garden dwarves, whose design also inspired the dwarves in snow white. The design of garden dwarves is quite recent and apparently come from miners. The hats were filled with straw to protect the miner's head from the ceiling.

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amiga386 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

But the article does cover that. German gnomes (Kobolde, especially Hödekin) are usually depicted with pointy hats, or at least ones that curl backwards. The smurf hats are clearly wearing Phrygian caps.

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cubefox 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

A quick Google image search for "garden gnome" and "gartenzwerg" shows that both types are quite common. But they originally didn't necessarily have the hats common today. These are the oldest surviving garden gnomes according to [1]:

Schloss Mirabell: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mirabellgarten_%E7%B... (1690-1695)

Schloss Greillenstein: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schloss_Greillenstei... (around 1700)

1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartenzwerg

	▲	Cerium 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		A simple thanks for sharing these images. I had no idea that garden gnomes could be so artful, interesting, or powerful as those in these two images.

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fvdessen 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

the first smurf drawings had pointy hats, the curve is most likely a stylistic evolution.

https://www.lm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/schtr...

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larsiusprime 4 days ago | parent [-]

That’s still arguably a classic Phrygian cap design. Whatever or not that was the intention/inspiration, it does resemble them - the hats you just showed are not perfectly conical, there’s a flip at the top.

	▲	adfm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The article does state that the Smurfs and the French got the wrong hat and that it's supposed to be a conical pileus rather than the crooked phrygian. "In Rome, a freed slave had his head shaved. Then, they would wear a pileus, in part to keep their head warm. The hat was a sign of the slave’s freedom/liberty. Somewhere along the line in the French Revolution, they adopted the freed slaves’ head gear as their own symbol of freedom, but picked the wrong one." Fun fact: You can see a pileus on the Ides of March coin reverse from 43 BC, minted by Brutus to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ides_of_March_coin People have been using silly hats for political purposes for millennia.

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dankwizard 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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sbierwagen 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not AI. Indexed in 2020 by the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201001000000*/https://www.pipe...

Why GPT writing sounds like the median lazy blog post of five years ago is left as an exercise for the reader.

	▲	5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	jama211 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But facts? That goes against the hive mind

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pgsandstrom 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What, you think the article was written by AI? Why?

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Cthulhu_ 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's 2025, you can flip a coin and be correct half the time, and no consequences if you're wrong.

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jama211 5 days ago | parent [-]

Looks like there are consequences, they’re being called out, which is good

	▲	fkyoureadthedoc 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Being called out anonymously and never thinking about it again, that's gotta sting

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quietbritishjim 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess because it is full of guesswork and devoid of real factual research (at least for the main headline question). But it turns out that bloggers looking for content and lacking any skill are also capable of writing plausible-sounding slop.

	▲	jama211 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn’t call this article slop