The Goblin is the small, ugly, malicious sprite of European folklore: a grotesque little creature, mischievous to malevolent, that haunts homes, mines, forests, and lonely places, playing nasty tricks, causing trouble and harm, greedy and grasping, and generally a thing of petty evil — the dark and ugly cousin of the fairy and the kin of the German [kobold] from which it takes its name. It is the malicious little sprite, the petty monster of folklore.
The Ugly Little Folk
The Goblin (the English word derives, by way of French gobelin, from the German [kobold] and related to Greek kobalos, a rogue or knave-sprite) is a creature of European, especially Western European, folklore — one of the dark and ugly members of the great fairy family. Where fairies may be beautiful, goblins are grotesque: small, misshapen, ugly little beings, often described as wizened, swarthy, big-headed, sharp-featured, with mischief or malice in their faces. They range from the merely troublesome and prankish to the genuinely wicked and dangerous.
The Mischief and the Malice
Goblins are, at best, mischievous nuisances and, at worst, malevolent little fiends. The household goblin (like the [kobold] or the soured [boggart]) plagues a home with petty torments — knocking, breaking things, hiding objects, souring milk, tangling hair, frightening the inmates. Others haunt the wild and the dark, leading travellers astray, luring and tricking the unwary, and doing harm where they can. Some are greedy hoarders of gold; some, like the mine-goblins (the knockers, the kobolds of the German mines), haunt the underground; some are man-eating or child-stealing monsters in the darker tales. They are generally creatures of petty evil, spite, and greed — the small change of the supernatural threat.
The Goblin in Lore and Literature
The goblin has been an enormously productive figure in literature and imagination: the wicked, grotesque goblin-merchants of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” the goblins of George MacDonald and the fairy-tale tradition, and above all the goblins (and their kin the orcs and hobgoblins) of Tolkien and the vast modern fantasy that followed, where goblins became a standard race of small, wicked, warlike monsters. Across all these the core remains: the goblin as the small, ugly, malicious supernatural creature, mischievous to evil, the dark mirror of the fair fairy. In the Goblin, Europe gave form to the malicious little sprite — the grotesque, mischievous-to-wicked creature of home and mine and wild that torments, tricks, and harms, the petty monster and ugly cousin of the fairy folk.