You know what a goblin is. You know you do. A goblin is small - so small that it might as well be invisible, living in the cracks between floorboards and only coming out at night to move your keys so you can’t find them in the morning. Or perhaps that’s not it - a goblin is a monster, after all, much more monstrous than that, a furry little creature that’s ninety percent teeth, the sort of thing that a witch would gladly have as a familiar in her service, feeding it drops of spoiled milk to keep it loyal. Or maybe that’s not it at all - a goblin is a phantasm, it seems, a ghost with no shape or form, difficult to see, hard to pin down. The term itself is a ghost, flitting on the edge of meanings, only coalescing into a fixed form in the twentieth century. It even enters the written record as a ghost - the first attestation of the word comes from Oderic Vitalis’s Historia Ecclesiastica, where it is a sort of poltergeist haunting the French department of Evreux.1
The etymology of the word is suggestive; the French gobelin could come from the Greek kobalos, meaning a rogue, or it could derive from the German kobold, a type of mining spirit; kobold itself could descend from the Latin cubile replacing the Proto-Germanic *gub, meaning fire, suggesting an origin as a house or hearth spirit.2 These mining spirits are fairly well-attested in German lore; in Di Animantibus Subterraneis, Georgius Agricola describes them as looking like diminutive old men who mimic the work of human miners.3 The connection to dwarves is immediately obvious, and though the dwarves of fantasy fiction are fairly distinct from goblins - and generally relatively benign - the older dwarves of mythology and folklore were distinctly not. In the Lacnunga, an Anglo-Saxon medical text, one of the magical remedies is a charm beginning ‘against a dwarf’; the poem describes the dwarf acting as a sort of incubus, riding someone as they sleep, and prescribes an invocation of the Seven Sleepers as a cure.4 The tommyknockers of Cornish folklore, reputedly the ghosts of long dead Jewish miners5, were said to punish rude and greedy miners6; similarly, the German kobold was believed to switch precious ores for useless, noxious ones.7 During the early modern era, kobolds will pick up more negative traits; both Martin Luther and Olaus Magnus, author of Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, explicitly associate them with the devil and witchcraft.8 So perhaps that’s the origin of the goblin - a particularly malicious mutation of the mythological dwarf? There is a history of dwarves and goblins being interchangeable, and goblins will retain dwarflike traits deep into their literary history, as seen in Harry Potter and The Princess and the Goblin.
A woodcutting from Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
But the actual usage of the word ‘goblin’ in English obscures it again; it is unfixed, lacking even the vague outline of a mining spirit of its German counterpart. The Discoverie of Witchcraft9 and The Terrors of the Night10 mention them while listing supernatural creatures, but leave them otherwise undefined. The Bibliotheca Scholastica and Pandaemonium, or The Devil’s Cloyster use the word to describe other supernatural creatures; the Bibliotheca defines the Latin ‘cacodaemon’ as a hag or goblin11, and the Pandaemonium says that a naiad is “a sort of old fashioned goblin.”12 In a collocation analysis of the usage of various words for supernatural creatures in early modern English, Michael Ostling and Richard Forest found that “goblin and fairy often appear in definitional or synonymizing phrases (e.g., ‘the fairies are spirits’), or, in contrast, are used in ‘indiscriminate pairings’ (e.g., ‘ghosts and goblins’) that serve to index a twilight domain of the spooky, the eerie, and the unknown.”13 The word goblin is more of a signifier of a mood than a specific creature.
This nebulousness will continue deep into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The titular goblin of The Goblin’s Moonlight Walk takes the shape of an anthropomorphic cat.14 In The Ghost, the Gallant, the Gael, and the Goblin, the goblin is an ill-shaped creature covered in polka dots, unclothed except for a bow tie and a walking stick.15 In “The Six Goblin Eggs” in Prince Ubbely Bubble’s New Story Book, the goblins look like ugly children; they hang themselves on bacon hooks using their imp-like tails.16 The goblins of The Goblin Market are physically inchoate: “one had a cat’s face / one whisk’d a tail / one tramped at a rat’s pace / one crawled like a snail.”17 And the goblins of “The Goblins of Emmaburg” in Ruins of the Rhine aren’t described at all; they most resemble the goblin poltergeist originally described by Oderic.18 Johnnykin and the Goblin has one creature specifically referred to as “Goblin,” but also uses “goblin” to mean any imaginary creature.19 The first English edition of The Communist Manifesto infamously translated the german word gespenst as “frightful hobgoblin,” as did the first English translation of Grimm’s Fairy Tales - a later edition also identifies Rumpelstiltskin, called a mannchen in German, as a hobgoblin. Folklore studies from this era are equally unhelpful - most follow the pattern of British Goblins, using the word as a catch-all for any kind of supernatural creature.20
An illustration from The Goblin’s Moonlight Walk
The Goblin Market and The Princess and the Goblin are the only works from this era whose descriptions of goblins really stick. The former was written by Christina Rosetti in 1862, describing a pair of sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who must overcome the temptations of a goblin market’s wares. As noted, the physical descriptions of the goblins in The Goblin Market are polymorphic - this isn’t the source of the standard fantasy goblin’s appearance. But this is one of the earliest and most prominent accounts of a goblin as a conniving dealmaker or merchant, alongside the English translation of Rumpelstiltskin.
Various interpretations of what these goblins and their fruit are have been suggested, the most obvious being sexual; when the goblins approach, Laura warns her sister “[...] we must not look at goblin men / we must not buy their fruits: / who knows upon what soil fed / their hungry thirsty roots?”21 The fact that the goblins are referred to as men is telling, particularly when paired with the fact that all of their mentioned victims (Laura, Lizzie, and Jeanie) are women. Laura’s invocation of phallic roots growing in yonic soil, and the scene at the end in which she resists eating the goblin’s fruit so that her sister may lick the fruits’ juices off of her mouth are equally telling; Jeffrey Cohen in his essay Monster Culture (Seven Theses) notes in Thesis VI that “the monster is linked to forbidden practices, in order to normalize and to enforce.”22 Even if we link the goblins’ fruit to some other sort of desire, like for drugs, religious heresy, or literal food, this stays true.
George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872, gives us our first recognizable fantasy goblin. These goblins are defined by their disfigurements; they (mostly) lack toes, their prince’s name is “Harelip,” and their queen is described quite unflatteringly when Curdie, one of the protagonists, sees her: “Her nose was certainly broader at the end than its extreme length, and her eyes, instead of being horizontal, were set up like two perpendicular eggs, one on the broad, the other on the small end. Her mouth was no bigger than a small buttonhole until she laughed, when it stretched from ear to ear—only, to be sure, her ears were very nearly in the middle of her cheeks.”23 Despite these descriptions, the illustrations in the first edition of the book turn them into bog-standard dwarves, complete with beards and the dwarf’s cap; the connection between goblins and dwarves remains strong at this point, especially considering that these goblins live underground and harass miners.
An illustration of the goblins from The Princess and the Goblin
But it is Macdonald’s conception of goblins as a discrete race of people, rather than a generic, nebulous term for a mischievous supernatural creature, that sets them apart. These goblins have a specific origin, having separated from humanity in some long-forgotten schism and degenerated because of their time spent living underground. Despite this split, they remain in many ways fundamentally human; Prince Harelip’s mother was a human from the surface, and the goblin king and queen plan to end the persecution of the goblins by marrying him to a human princess. Matt King suggests “the goblins that MacDonald presents hybridize a handful of contemporary ideas in the realms of science, folklore, and literature to create a new fictionalized interpretation of this creature. The categorization of goblins as a distinct ‘race of beings’ devolved from humans has its roots in the surging popularity of Darwinian evolutionary theory in the middle of the nineteenth century.” Indeed, the goblin’s origin brings to mind discrimination against Catholics and Jews in England, or unease about Britain’s pre-Anglo-Saxon history, a theme that Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft would later expand upon. Carol Silver connects these Victorian images of dwarves, gnomes, and goblins to new anthropological theories about Aryan people conquering and displacing a short, dark skinned race in prehistory, sometimes linking said race to Finns, Saami, or druids. When the various pygmy peoples of Africa were discovered by Europeans, they were thought to be the remnants of this pre-Aryan people, and Victorian authors responded by emphasizing both the wickedness of goblins and by darkening their skin. This evolutionary conception of goblins was even reflected in the occultism of the day; supernatural creatures were thought to have a Darwinian hierarchy based on the element they were connected to, with salamanders and sylphs being more evolved than undines and especially gnomes.24
The conception of goblins as a specific people rather than a catch-all term will set the standard for many of the goblins that follow. JRR Tolkien specifically cited Macdonald as an influence, saying of his own goblins that “they are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in.”25 Like Macdonald’s goblins, Tolkien’s goblins live underground, are ugly, and are skilled at industry and mining; the narration describes them as “[...]cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty.”26 Like Macdonald, Tolkien uses ugliness as a signifier of evil, as we will see again in the novel when the goblins are revealed to be allied with monstrous wolves called wargs, and their army’s approach is heralded by an enormous swarm of bats. But unlike Macdonald, Tolkien’s goblins are much less sympathetic; they are, from the start, both raiders and slavers. We are introduced to the goblins when the abduct Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist of The Hobbit, and some of his dwarf companions while they are resting in a cave, and they whip and beat them as they lead them below. When the goblins bring Bilbo and his cohorts before their leader, the Great Goblin, they lie, claiming that they were attacked first, and upon seeing Orcrist, a sword that was used by elves in a war long passed to hunt and slay goblins, they plan to have the dwarves imprisoned and tortured.
Tolkien also introduces a new wrinkle to the goblin tradition: the orc. Tolkien eventually grew dissatisfied with the term ‘goblin,’ writing “personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not 'goblins', not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble);”27 The Lord of the Rings will mostly use ‘orc,’ though a few references to goblins will persist (just as there are a few references to ‘orcs’ in The Hobbit). The orc emphasizes the maliciousness of the goblin archetype even further. They form the backbone of Sauron’s armies, they slew the dwarves of Moria, and they pursue the Fellowship of the Ring as they try to make their way to Mordor.
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of what, exactly, the orcs represent - and if they represent anything at all. Tolkien notoriously loathed allegory, saying “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”28 One common suggestion links orcs to people of color; in one letter responding unfavorably to a proposed film adaptation, Tolkien says that orcs are supposed to look “[...]squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”29 In “The Wretched of Middle-Earth,” Charles Mills proposes that the races of Middle-Earth correspond to a real-world hierarchy, with the orcs representing “the threatening subordinate class within, the Islamic peril to the East, and the restless multitudes of the colonized South.”30 But others, such as John Garth, have connected orcs to Tolkien’s experiences in the first World War, suggesting that they are an attempt to make moral sense of his experiences there by creating an enemy that was actually irredeemably evil, unlike the Germans he faced during his time in combat, who he had felt sympathy towards.31
Tolkien himself continually vacillated on the exact nature of orcs. The Lord of the Rings gives us a few moments of insight into their character and history, such as when a group of orcs complain about the rule of the “big bosses,” and both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings take the viewpoint that orcs were corrupted from elves. But in his later, unpublished manuscripts, Tolkien toys with the idea that orcs were bred from men, and are actually mindless automatons - perhaps as a way to justify their status as irreproachably evil in The Lord of the Rings.32
This thread - the orc, and implicitly the goblin, as an enemy that can be killed without guilt - will be picked up by fantasy literature and in particular by fantasy games that follow Tolkien. In the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, goblins and orcs are both included in the game’s Monster Manual, a compendium of enemies designed to challenge players of the game. Tolkien appears to have meant for goblin, hobgoblin, and orc to have been largely interchangeable, but Gary Gygax, one of the game’s creators, groups them separately, giving them each distinct cultures and appearances. Here, goblins are described as being a tribal society dominated by the strongest among them, living underground and indulging in slaving and torture. Orcs are described fairly similarly, though they are noted to bully goblins if any are nearby. The main difference between the two at this point is their physical appearance: goblins look fairly human, wearing vaguely European armor and having red or orange skin, while the orc is illustrated as some sort of pig-man, and has brown or greenish-brown skin.33 This will quickly become the standard for orcs and goblins, but since Tolkien never described either as having green skin, it raises the question: where did this trait come from?
The illustration for the goblin in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1e Monster Manual
The answer lies not in fantasy, but science-fiction. Green skin and clothing have been used to denote the supernatural in the Anglosphere since the High Middle Ages,34 and the phrase “little green men” has been around since at least the 1830s. Like goblin, “little green men” wasn’t used to mean anything particularly specific; an account in Penny magazine describes a man in Ireland encountering fairies called “little green men,”35 The Theosophist lists them among supernatural creatures but does not describe them,36 and Billy Reed and the Giants uses the term to describe trolls.37 So as extraterrestrials enter the popular consciousness, it’s not particularly surprising that they default to the color green; that’s already the standard skin color for anything paranormal in the English speaking world. Especially noteworthy are the are the covers of various science-fiction magazines popular in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s, Amazing Stories featured two short stories illustrated by green-skinned humanoids on its cover: Manly Wade Wellman’s “West Point, 3000 AD” and Richard Sharpe Shaver’s “I Remember Lemuria.” The cover for the issue featuring “I Remember Lemuria” is especially noteworthy: the imprisoned creature, with its green skin, exaggerated features, and pointy ears looks uncannily like what we would call a goblin today. But it’s not a goblin - it’s probably a dero, the race of “degenerate robots” that Shaver claimed lived underground and implanted negative thoughts into the minds of humans.38
The cover of Amazing Stories featuring “I Remember Lemuria”
So how did this become the standard image of a goblin? It’s Spider-Man’s fault. In 1964, the villainous Green Goblin debuted in Spider-Man #14, written and illustrated by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Lee would’ve been around 23 when “I Remember Lemuria,” Ditko around 18, putting them in the prime demographic to be influenced by the sci-fi pulp of the era. Furthermore, the sixties was the height of the influence of comic books; even though the Green Goblin isn’t a goblin and his greenness is explicitly unusual (if goblins were green by default, “the “Green Goblin” would’ve been redundant) it became the template of the standard goblin because of the popularity of the Spider-Man comic book. And because Tolkien was vague about the exact relationship between goblins and orcs, orcs picked up the association with green skin as well, like in Tim Kirk’s 1975 illustrations for a Lord of the Rings calendar.
An illustration from Tim Kirk’s Lord of the Rings calendar
But the standardized fantasy goblin doesn’t immediately push out other versions of the goblin. Even in Dungeons and Dragons, which popularizes a lot of what we think as “default” fantasy creatures, in the first three editions goblins have red or orange skin, and either broad flat noses or no noses at all. It’s not until Baldur’s Gate III, released in 2023, that the Dungeons and Dragons goblin matches the standard fantasy version. It’s actually Warhammer, a tabletop war game, that makes the green-skinned, long nosed goblin archetypal in the fantasy gaming world. Premiering in 1983, Warhammer is set in war-torn fantasy world vaguely reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings; the initial rulebook contains a brief description of goblins, saying that they are “evil, blackhearted and mean creatures who delight in needless slaughter and torture. They live, for the most part, amongst underground caverns and caves.”39 An entry on orcs notes that they are related to goblins, but does not further elaborate on the connection. Forces of Fantasy, a supplemental rulebook released in 1984, contains further rules for running armies of goblins and orcs, both of which are classified by the book as “goblinoids.” While the descriptions are both relatively vague, the book contains multiple black and white illustrations - and the illustrations accompanying the entries on goblins, with their pointed ears, ugly exaggerated features, and bald heads are recognizable as the “standard” fantasy goblin, albeit without any mention of green skin. The second edition rulebook, released in 1984, features a horde of green-skinned monsters on its cover - presumably orcs or goblins, as they are at last explicitly described as having green skin, although goblins are noted as having a variety of skin colors.40
A goblin illustration from Forces of Fantasy
Warcraft picks up where Warhammer leaves off, to the point that popular rumor holds that Warcraft was originally intended to be an adaptation of Warcraft. The first installation in the series was released in 1994; it is a real-time strategy game centering around a war between orcs and humans, the orcs being quite obviously inspired by the orcs of Warhammer. Goblins won’t appear in the series until the second installment, released in 1995, where they are the orcs’ equivalent of the mechanically minded gnomes. As the series goes on, the orc faction will become more sympathetic; by the third game, released in 2002, they are essentially the heroes. Reexamining the villainy of “evil” races was common in the late nineties and the early aughts; Dungeons and Dragons loosens alignment restrictions in 3rd edition, and Bodyguard of Lightning, released in 1999, features a heroic orc as its protagonist.
The Macdonald-Tolkien-Gygax line of goblins is probably the most popular form of the goblin - but even as it has proliferated, other versions have persisted. Christina Rosetti’s goblin was less fixed than Macdonald’s - she kept their fairy tale character, leaving them protean and liminal. Brian Froud’s version of the goblin echoes hers. In 1978, Froud and Alan Lee wrote and illustrated Faeries, a coffee table book of fairy folklore. It features an entry on goblins, describing them as “[...] a breed of small, swarthy, malicious beings - although 'goblin' as a term is often used as a general name for the uglier inhabitants of Faerie.”41
Later, Froud will work on concept design for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, which features goblins similar to the ones he illustrated in Faeries. Likely inspired by Maurice Sendak’s Outside, Over There, which features a similar plot of a child being abducted by goblins and rescued by their42 sister, Labyrinth centers around a girl named Sarah and her attempt to save her brother Toby from the clutches of the goblin king. The goblins of Labyrinth bear little resemble to their tabletop counterparts; their skin ranges from brown to gray, some of them have animal features like horns43 or beaks, and they range in size from smaller than a baby to almost as tall as an adult. Like Rosetti’s goblins, the goblins of Labyrinth are dangerous because of what they can offer; they act as fairy tale bargainers, operating under certain rules and restrictions. At the beginning of the movie, the goblins watch and wait for Sarah to give her brother to them; in order to take him, she must offer him up by saying “I wish the goblins would come and take you away.” The whole thing smacks of a Faustian occult trade or bargain, with Jareth taking the role of Mephistopheles ready to grant Sarah’s wish, whether she likes it or not. At the end of the movie, when Sarah confronts him, Jareth reminds her that everything she has asked from him, he has granted - from his point of view, taking her brother away and acting as her antagonist was what she desired.
Jareth, the goblin king, sticks out among his vassals; he looks entirely human, and he has magical powers that the other goblins mostly don’t demonstrate. The question lingers: is Jareth a goblin at all? Is he a goblin who is a king, or just king of the goblins? His jurisdiction seems to extend over the entirety of the labyrinth - it changes shape mostly as he wills it - and at least one non-goblin, the dwarf Hogwart,44 regards him as his liege as well. Of course, the line between goblins and humans seems relatively blurry in the world of Labyrinth; Toby’s fate, if Sarah fails to save him from Jareth, will apparently be transformation into a goblin, and Jareth’s relationship with Sarah, particularly towards the end of the movie, is transparently an attempt to woo her.
Like Labyrinth, Legend has a fairy tale character lacking in most of the post-Tolkien fantasy corpus. The movie, released in 1985, follows Jack, a wild man living in a forest, and his paramour Lily. Their home is imperiled when the monstrous Darkness sends his goblin minions to kill the last two unicorns, plunging the world into an unnatural winter. Like Labyrinth and The Goblin Market, the goblins of Legend are heterogenous in their shapes; one, the lead goblin Blix, looks like the standard post-Spider-Man green goblin, but his cohorts, Pox and Blunder, do not; Pox looks like a pig, and Blunder’s countenance is entirely obscured by his armor (he is later revealed to be a dwarf in disguise). Blix is especially fairy-tale like; he speaks in rhymes, at one point describing himself as metaphorically “black as midnight, black as pitch, blacker than the foulest witch,” which also further links him and his kith with evil, much like the early modern kobold was sometimes seen as a servant of the devil.
Similarly, the goblins of the inexplicably named Troll 2 are completely malevolent. Operating out of the town of Nilbog (which the film feels the need to spell out is ‘goblin’ spelled backwards), the goblins function as a quasi-vegetarian cult; while they deride the eating of meat, finding it grotesque, they feel no injunction against using magic to turn humans into plants with magic and then eating them. They are led by the villainous Creedence; it is unclear if she is a goblin herself. At one point, she attacks the lead character through a mirror while in the shape of a goblin, and all goblins seem to be able to disguise themselves as human. But elsewhere she claims to be a druid, and she seems to favor a human shape even when unobserved. The tendency for goblins to have human(ish) rulers continues.
The gremlins of Gremlins and its sequel, surprisingly enough, are Rosetti-esque in their character. They are first encountered at a market, where they are bough under illicit circumstances by the main character’s father, Randall. While purchasing the first gremlin - which at this point is furry and rather cute, and is referred to as a mogwai - from its true owner’s grandson, Randall is given a set of instructions about its care. These rules follow a sort of fairy-tale logic: the mogwai hates bright lights, mustn’t get wet, and mustn’t be fed after midnight. When the second rule is broken, the mogwai births more mogwai out of its back; when the third is broken, the mogwai transform into the reptilian, alien gremlin. The main differences from Rosetti’s goblins probably come from the gremlins’ original inspiration - the World War II folklore about gremlins sabotaging machinery, which is directly referenced by a few lines of dialogue. The gremlins’ chaotic, destructive behavior might also take its cue from early reports of encounters with extraterrestrials, like the Hopkinsville goblins,45 whose name is quite telling; Carol Silver notes that accounts of aliens in the twentieth century pick up where fairy tales leave off - sometimes even directly referencing old stories of encounters with fairies, like Whitley Streiber’s Communion.
The Harry Potter novels, the first of which was released in 1997, take elements from both tracks of goblin evolution. In the first three novels in the series, goblins play a relatively minor role; they are introduced as running Gringotts, the wizarding bank, and are not particularly developed past that. Even their description is vague; in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone46 the goblin that Harry meets is described as having “[...] a swarthy, clever face, a pointed beard and, Harry noticed, very long fingers and feet.”47 An illustration created by JK Rowling, the series’s author, features Harry, Hagrid, and a goblin riding in a minecart; the goblin here is about the size of Harry, with a large head, pointed ears, and a long beard reminiscent of the stereotypical ‘Fu Manchu’ style. For the most part, Rowling’s goblins seem to draw on the old tradition linking goblins with mining spirits; the addition of banking may have been inspired by The Goblin Market or the ‘gnomes of Zurich’ nickname for Swiss bankers, but mainly seems to be Rowling’s innovation.
JK Rowling’s illustration of Harry, Hagrid, and a goblin on a minecart
That particular innovation would lead Rowling’s goblins to a dark place. While underdeveloped in the first three books, the goblins will grow more prominent as the series goes on. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire references several goblin rebellions, suggesting that the relationship between goblins and wizards has not always been a happy one, and that goblins are relatively subordinate to wizards. The movie, released in 2001, gives the series its clearest visualization of a goblin: humanoid, with exaggerated noses and pointy ears. Because of their mostly human looks and the fact that they are a race of people who control the British wizarding world’s sole bank, they seem like a stand-in for Jewish people.
Harry Potter is not the only example of goblins straying into uncomfortable territory, of course. Since The Lord of the Rings, the use of goblins and orcs as abject others - people who are deemed so evil that they can be killed without remorse - have been subject to scrutiny. Various attempts to reckon with this have been made - some works, like the aforementioned Warcraft and Bodyguard of Lightning have backed away from the idea of orcs and goblins as unquestionably evil. Others, like Dragon Age, have attempted to solve the problem by stripping their equivalent of orcs - in the case of Dragon Age, the monstrous darkspawn - of all attributes that make them seem like a stand-in for real world people and making them essentially mindless.48 Goblin Slayer, a light novel turned manga turned anime, attempts to square this circle by making its goblins as evil as it can.
First released in 2016, Goblin Slayer is set in a world heavily inspired by tabletop gaming; the characters are all referred to exclusively by their character class, and the interstitials in the anime make reference to the gods playing some sort of game involving dice. The anime follows a character called Priestess as she joins with the titular Goblin Slayer, a relatively powerful adventurer who nonetheless focuses almost exclusively on fighting goblins. Goblins in the anime are utterly abject; in the opening scene, they strip a fallen hero and are implied to sexually assault her. Any mercy shown to a goblin is a mistake; even their children, when offered compassion, are revealed to be murderous by default. Leaving goblins alone doesn’t work, either; even though they are individually weak, if not consistently culled they become a powerful destructive force; the last part of the anime deals with the Slayer organizing a defense against a goblin horde that has been allowed to fester and grow to a nearly insurmountable size.
But despite all this, ‘just kill them all’ remains a distressing answer. The portrayal of goblins in Goblin Slayer (and in RPGs like Pathfinder) is disquieting even when the goblins bear little resemblance to any real world people. Even as the goblins engage in horrific acts of violence, they maintain enough markers of humanity to make simply killing them all a deeply disturbing answer. That they have children at all humanizes them, even if their children are as dangerous as they are. They are not mindless animals; towards the end of the anime, during the final battle with the goblins, the Goblin Lord speaks, begging for his life; previously, it hadn’t been clear if the goblins were capable of speech at all. And the basic idea of goblins being simultaneously pathetic yet still somehow an existential threat echoes real-world fascist propaganda. In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco outlines fourteen recurring ideas in fascist ideology; the eighth is “[...]by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
It is a mistake to ever think that one can create a comprehensive account of a creature of folklore; there is always some variation, some account, that risks slipping through your fingers. Goblins have, over the course of their history, shifted from ghostly poltergeists to mining spirits to duplicitous tricksters to monstrous dungeon fodder, and not always in that order. Much of what we accept as a given for goblins - like their green skin or associations with money - are relatively late additions. Just as many of our horror monster tropes were codified by film, much of our goblin mythology was codified by literature - and specifically, gaming literature - rather than folklore. The need for goblins to act as antagonists in these games led to them mostly being portrayed as evil, but modern goblins have - with a few notable exceptions - leaned towards humanization. Given the goblin’s history of shapeshifting, it’s likely to continue to change - a goblin, it seems, can be whatever you make of it.
W.A. Senior, “Golbins,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13 (2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/43308574.
Peter Alexander Kerkhof, “Germanic goblins and the Indo-European fireplace,” Indogermanische Forschungen 1 (2015): 77-86, https://doi.org/10.1515/if-2015-0005
Ronald M. James, “Knockers, Knackers and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines,” Western Folklore 51 (1992): 153-177, https://doi.org/10.2307/1499362
David E. Gay, “Anglo-Saxon Metrical Charm 3 Against a Dwarf: A Charm Against Witch-Riding?” Folklore 99 (1988): 174-177, https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1988.9716439
Ronald James notes, however, that this seems to be a characteristic added to a preexisting creature; the tommyknockers are described as looking like standard dwarves and occasionally as celebrating Christian holidays.
Ronald M. James, “Knockers, Knackers and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines,” Western Folklore 51 (1992): 153-177, https://doi.org/10.2307/1499362
Jane P. Davidson and Christopher John Duffin, “Stones and Spirits,” Folklore 123 (2012): 99-109, https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2012.643012.
Jane P. Davidson, Early Modern Supernatural: The Dark Side of European Culture, 1400-1700 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 29.
Reginald Scott, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60766/60766-h/60766-h.htm.
Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf.
John Rider, Bibliotecha Scholastica, https://books.google.com/books?id=luIX3kxlbnkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A28908.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Michael Ostling and Richard Forest, “‘Goblins, owles and sprites’: Discerning earlymodern English preternatural beings through collocational analysis,” Religion 44 (2014): 547-572, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2014.886631
J.G., The Goblin’s Moonlight Walk, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Goblin_s_Moonlight_Walk_Written_and/c_M-o54e8U8C?hl=en&gbpv=1
W.S. Gilbert, “The Ghost, the Gallant, the Gael, and the Gallant,” https://gsarchive.net/bab_ballads/pdf/ghost_goblin.pdf.
John Templeton Lucas, Prince Ubbely Bubble’s New Story Book, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Prince_Ubbely_Bubble_s_New_Story_Book/KuuzEAAAQBAJhl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Prince+Ubbely+Bubble%E2%80%99s+New+Story+Book&pg=PA13&printsec=frontcover
Christina Rosetti, “The Goblin Market,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
Alfred von Reumont, Ruins of the Rhine: Their Times and Traditions, Translated by Charles White, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ruins_of_the_Rhine_Their_Times_and_Tradi/MOMBAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22ruins+of+the+rhine%22&pg=PA119&printsec=frontcover
Charles Godfrey Leland, Johnnykin and the Goblins, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Johnnykin_and_the_Goblins/G-9LAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=johnnykin+and+the+goblins&pg=PA5&printsec=frontcover
Wirt Sikes, British Goblins, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34704/34704-h/34704-h.htm
Christina Rosetti, “The Goblin Market,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
Jeffrey Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsq4d
George Macdonald, The Princess and the Goblin, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Princess_and_the_Goblin/UEwqAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+princess+and+the+goblin&printsec=frontcover
Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
JRR Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, April 25, 1954, https://bibliothecaveneficae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf
JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit, https://rsd2-alert-durden-reading-room.weebly.com/uploads/6/7/1/6/6716949/the_hobbit_tolkien.pdf
JRR Tolkien to Hugh Brogan, September 18, 1954, https://bibliothecaveneficae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf
JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, https://gosafir.com/mag/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Tolkien-J.-The-lord-of-the-rings-HarperCollins-ebooks-2010.pdf
JRR Tolkien to Forrest J. Ackerman, https://bibliothecaveneficae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf
Charles Mills, “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12477
John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003).
Robert J. Tally, Jr., “Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars,” Humanities 8 (2019), https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/1/54.
Gary Gygax, Monster Manual, https://www.americanroads.us/DandD/ADnD_1e_Monster_Manual.pdf.
Ronald Hutton, “Historiographical Reviews: The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition,” The Historical Journal 57 (2014).
https://www.google.com/books/edition/THE_PENNY_MAGAZINE/LFoFAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22little+green+men%22&pg=PA26&printsec=frontcover
HS Olcott, The Theosophist, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Theosophist/5Jp3FNoZgmwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22little%20green%20men%22
Winthrop Packard, “Billy Reed and the Giants,” The National Magazine 10 (1899), https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_National_Magazine/Q1I5AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22billy+reed+and+the+giants%22&pg=PA68&printsec=frontcover
Shaver believed the dero actually existed; he was likely schizophrenic.
Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell, and Richard Priestly, Warhammer: Vol 1, Tabletop Battles, (Games Workshop Ltd, 1983).
Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell, and Richard Priestly, Warhammer Fantasy Battle Rules, (Games Workshop Ltd, 1984).
Brian Froud and Alan Lee, Faeries, (New York: Abrams, 1978).
In Outside, Over There, the younger sibling is a girl; in Labyrinth, a boy.
Precluding an expected ‘well, actually';’ yes, some of those are on their helmets, but one clearly has horns growing out of its head.
It’s Hoggle!
The Hopkinsville goblins are not referred to as goblins in the original newspaper article describing them, but as ‘little men.’
Originally released as “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in the United Kingdom.
JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, https://docenti.unimc.it/antonella.pascali/teaching/2018/19055/files/ultima-lezione/harry-potter-and-the-philosophers-stone
Later expansions will push back on this idea.