Have Goblins Just Had a Bad Press?
Goblins are humanoid, but always seen as grotesquely ugly and often small. As they have no particular skills, they do not keep themselves neat and socially acceptable; their only acquaintance being others of their kidney. Hence they are renown for being unkempt, unwashed, smelly and generally hideous of teeth and claws.
Goblins are known, not only to be mischievous, as can be the elves, sometimes, but, also, the goblins are, besides being greedy, downright malicious and vengeful. They are specifically greedy for silver and gold jewellery. Goblins also have magical abilities, but are not as adept as the elves. They live underground, but not in magnificent halls, as the dwarves. Rather, the goblins live in half burrows, or damp caves.
The word Goblin is said to be medieval, and to come from the Middle English, \”gobelin\”; which comes from the earlier Norse word, kobold. Other words for goblins are brownies, gnomes and imps. Hobgoblins are specific trickster goblins from the realms of Middle Earth that are now England and Scotland.
Tolkien based his own goblins in The Hobbit, on George MacDonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin”.
An account has recently come to light in the records of a small village, in Northumberland. The problems started when the mayor’s secretary’s documents all came out in green ink, no matter how carefully he mixed his inks. After a week of this, the mayor found that his mayoral robes had become two sizes too small for him and he was forced to wear his old robes. Worse happened when the village’s certificates of marriages and births started to go missing. At this point the village realised that they had a visiting goblin and that they had better appease him with offerings. They mayor refused to be influenced by what he said was nonsense.”, “The problems became an issue when the goblin spread his attentions to the rest of the village. Fires went out, mid cooking. Crops grew blight and the village council was embarrassed when they came to a council meeting, one day, to find that there was a cow standing on their meeting table. Still the mayor refused to make an offering to the goblin.
One morning, the mayor left for work and, kissing his wife, he found that her her smooth, golden hair, had become fizzy, brown and stuck up in ugly elf locks. “My dear, you really mustn’t let yourself go like this. I have my reputation as a mayor to uphold”. He left for work, while he wife fled sobbing to her room to dress her strange hair.
The following morning, when the mayor came to kiss his wife, as he was leaving for work, he reeled away from her when she looked up at him with the most terrible squint. “My dear, you really must get some spectacles, as your skenning is most unpleasant.”
On the Sunday, when the mayor came down in his best suit, for church, his wife came to join him, and she was in tears. Under her hat, her face was now covered in the most dreadful collection of buboes and lumps. This was in addition to her squint and terrible hair. The mayor reeled back, in horror. He ran up to his iron money chest and took out twenty pieces of gold. The mayor hurried back to his mayor’s room, in the village hall and left the pieces of gold on his desk, in a pile.
The following morning, his wife was returned to her usual self, the mayor’s robes fitted him and the pieces of gold were gone from his desk.
This goes to show that goblins do not give up, in their malice, and that they should be taken seriously.