Goblin

Origins

The goblin came to English from Normandy. Around 1140 the chronicler Orderic Vitalis described a demon called Gobelinus driven out of a church at Évreux, and Old French gobelin is attested by the end of the twelfth century; English writers were using "gobelyn" by the fourteenth. The word may derive from Greek kobalos, a rogue or sprite, and it has cousins in the German Kobold and the Welsh coblyn. For centuries "goblin" was a loose word for any small, ugly, mischievous spirit — a brownie gone bad, a household imp, a bogey in the dark — rather than a species.

The Victorians gave the goblin its literary shape. Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market (1862) imagined animal-faced goblin men selling enchanted fruit. George MacDonald's children's novel The Princess and the Goblin, serialized from 1870 and published in 1872, put goblins underground: a race of misshapen miners, banished long ago, tunneling beneath a mountain kingdom to kidnap its princess, and defeated by a miner's boy who stamps on their soft feet. That image — a hostile society in the tunnels, organized, spiteful and numerous — is the one that fed J. R. R. Tolkien. His early poem "Goblin Feet" (1915) still used the word for twee dancing sprites, but in The Hobbit (1937) the goblins of the Misty Mountains are cruel artisans of war who capture Thorin's company and whom Gandalf fights with the sword Glamdring. Tolkien later told Naomi Mitchison that his orcs owed something to MacDonald's goblins, and in The Lord of the Rings the same creatures are mostly called orcs.

Into the dungeon

Games split Tolkien's single people in two. Goblins appeared in Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement (1971) and then in the white box of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) as small, weak monsters, separate from and inferior to orcs. AD&D's 1977 Monster Manual gave them tribes and dismal lairs and placed them in a family of "goblinoids" with the larger hobgoblin and the hairy bugbear. Goblins became the first thing a new The party kills: they infest the Caves of Chaos in Gygax's The Keep on the Borderlands (1979), the module that taught a generation how to run a Dungeon crawl. Games Workshop brigaded them with orcs in Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983), and Magic: The Gathering made reckless goblins an icon of its red cards.

Video games adopted both the underfoot enemy and the comic schemer. Goblins are fodder in countless dungeon crawlers and roguelikes, from NetHack onward; in Blizzard's Warcraft series they became greedy engineers and merchants, eventually playable in World of Warcraft. The screen gave them charm: Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986) filled its Goblin City with shaggy puppets ruled by David Bowie's Jareth, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter (1997–2007) made goblins proud, prickly bankers and smiths with their own views on who really owns what they make.

Variations

The goblin has become fantasy's most elastic creature. In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and its siblings goblins are a cave-dwelling beast race; in Dwarf Fortress they are a whole civilization raiding from dark fortresses; in many modern tabletop games they are a playable, chaotic people rather than a monster. The etymological knot remains too: in some books goblins are orcs, in some they are imps, in some they are something else again. What unites them is size and appetite — the goblin is always the small thing with sharp teeth that turns up in numbers, the first fight of the adventure and, just as often, its comic relief.