Goblins: History & Myth
This is the first entry in the Guide to Goblins series. Click the link to check out the rest.
What is a goblin? In D&D, it feels obvious--goblins are those weird little green guys that make up low-level cannon fodder for adventurers. They're the go-to easy-to-kill bad guy. They're usually cowardly and frequently serve as comic relief. They often are servants of the more organized and threatening hobgoblins, which can be actual threats--ex: the hobgoblin legions of the Red Hand of Doom, a beloved 3rd edition campaign path that has been adapted for 5e.
But what actually are these things? What's a goblin vs a hobgoblin vs a bugbear, which are all classified as goblinoids in D&D? Are D&D goblins different from Tolkien goblins? Why are Harry Potter goblins so antisemitic, and do those tropes get inherited in D&D and other TTRPGs? Are the problematic parts of goblins engrained in their historical roots, or are they something that later authors have added that we can remove by looking back at their mythological backing?
Modern Depictions of Goblins
Goblins in Harry Potter
Let's get the worst depiction of goblins out of the way first. There's been a lot of discussion over many years about J.K. Rowling's goblins as antisemitic caricatures. While Rowling also has a lot of other discriminatory public stances, especially against trans people, I'm going to focus specifically on the depiction of goblins here and not get into all the other horrible stuff she has posted.
A lot of very notable figures have weighed in on the goblins in Harry Potter, with Jon Stewart calling them antisemitic in 2023, though he would later say that he did not believe Rowling herself was antisemitic. Defenders of Rowling say that some elements of the goblin trope--their appearance, the idea of them being "greedy" and "shifty"--are rooted in goblins' folkloric depictions, and whether or not those depictions are antisemitic does not reflect poorly on Harry Potter. But, as others have pointed out, traditional folklore goblins are not responsible for money lending, banking, and minting coins. Conflating an often antisemitic trope (the way goblins are depicted) with those goblins controlling the banking industry, a common antisemitic conspiracy theory, is an antisemitic act. Meanwhile, the 2023 Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy centers around a goblin uprising and was widely criticized for its antisemitic tropes. Even a key artifact in the game bears a striking resemblance to a shofar, a traditional Jewish instrument.
But, still, Harry Potter was hugely influential in the media landscape, so let's look at what characteristics of goblins we can identify so that we can compare that to the mythological origins. Here's my list:
Goblins in Tolkien
First, in Tolkien, goblins and orcs are the same thing. The Tolkien Gateway, a leading wiki that is well-respected among Tolkien scholars, notes that "it is used synonymously with 'Orc'. It is said to be a translation of Orc in a note on languages and runic letters in The Hobbit." (source). Tolkien derived his word, orc, from the Old English word for demon, and used it believing that "it refers to a kind of evil spirits."
Tolkien's orc-goblins, while also noted as racialized, as not caricatures of Jewish people as Rowling's are. Orcs in Tolkien's works are described as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes," and Tolkien describes them as "Mongol-type" (Asian) in their physical influence, according to his letters. So again, still a very racist caricature but not an antisemitic one. They are also varied in their overall appearance, though fanged mouths and long arms are also common.
According to The Hobbit, goblins of Middle Earth were "capable at tunneling and mining, surpassed only by the most skilled Dwarves"--an idea of mining and underground work that we also saw with Rowling's goblins and their underground bank vaults. Tolkien's orcs/goblins are not particularly greedy. The Tolkien Gateway describes orcs as "pitiless" and that they "took pleasure in all kinds of cruel and wicked acts; they did evil deeds for their own amusement, purely for the sport of it," but makes no mention of gold as a motivating factor. They also associate with wolves and wargs, which they ride.
So, here's our running Venn diagram:
Goblins in D&D
Part of the problem with trying to look at goblins in D&D is that they have varied over time and in the differing setting books for worlds in D&D. Goblins in Eberron are very different from goblins in the Forgotten Realms. For this post, I'm going to focus on the "default" presentation of goblins in 5th edition, using their descriptions in the 5e Monster Manual and other sourcebooks, as well as the Wandering Monsters series done as part of the 5e design process by James Wyatt, which was a fantastic article series now only available on the Internet Archive.
Volo's Guide to Monsters (pages 40-44) gives us a whole section on goblins and their D&D brethren: hobgoblins and bugbears. These three species are related by a common god, Maglubiyet, who conquered the three different species' traditional gods and bound hobgoblins, goblins, and bugbears together. Goblins specifically are "cunning in battle... cruel in victory... [and] fawning and servile in defeat"--sharing in some ways an enjoyment of violence with Tolkien's goblins.
Goblins in Volo's Guide are fiercely hierarchical, with the strongest goblins ruling over the weaker, mirroring the way that goblins as a species are dominated by stronger goblinoids like hobgoblins. Goblins seek to "trap and capture" their enemies over outright killing, in order to have a new lowest caste to bully. Rats and wolves serve as pets and mounts, just as wolves played a role with Tolkien's goblins.
The 5e Monster Manual's entry on goblins (page 165) echoes some of these traits: "they crave power and regularly abuse whatever authority they obtain." They are motivated by greed in the Monster Manual and delight in the torture and humiliation of defeated foes. They are "ruled by the smartest or strongest" from their ranks. They are associated with rats and wolves.
This association with wolves is particularly important in D&D's descriptions, likely inspired by Tolkien. In James Wyatt's design articles from the playtest versions of 5e, he writes that goblin "tribes include wolves or worgs as pets"--making this pretty central to their design ideology.
Goblins in D&D also have an underground nature, though to a slightly lesser extent. Goblins are happy to ambush surface foes, but their ideal lair is "an abandoned mine that features two or three large chambers... with tunnels connecting them" (Volo's Guide), riddled with alarms and narrow tunnels suitable for goblins but not their larger pursuers (Monster Manual). So again, we see this idea of underground mine-dwellers spring up.
As far as appearance goes, all we get from the Monster Manual is that goblins are "small" and "humanoid." Still, we do get official art that can determine how we would describe them:
Here, goblins have a sort of yellow skin--though often this is green in other art. They have large, flattened noses, and long pointy ears. They have sharp-fanged mouths, and based on the art, I'd say that they borrow Tolkien's "long-armed" descriptor as well.
Let's update our Venn diagram:
D&D obviously takes a great deal of its goblin influence from Tolkien's depiction, though it distinguishes between goblins and orcs (a wholly different creature in D&D). It maintains a lot of the physical elements of Tolkien's goblins in its art, though it leaves behind the "slanted eyes" that Tolkien used to emphasize the weird racial elements of his work.
Still, the key commonality between all of these modern interpretations of goblins is their underground, mine-localized existence. Let's go further back into the realm of mythology to figure out why.
Mythic Depictions of Goblins
Confused Definitions
The main academic consensus that I could find on goblin folklore is that there was no mythological consensus on what made a goblin a goblin. This is not particularly unusual when dealing with folklore; oral traditions are liable to have wildly varying depictions. Yet the goblin is noted in academic scholarship for being hard to pin down.
W.A. Senior quotes David Pickering's 1999 Dictionary of Folklore, which identifies goblins as having a "grotesque appearance" and being "a mischievous breed of demon that delight[s] in playing malicious tricks upon mortals" that inhabits "houses, mines, or trees."
Annliya Shaijan of the University of Calicut writes, in her Goblin Mythology, that goblins "are nasty little creatures with a human demeanor, but much smaller in size and with horrific, deformed faces." She goes on: "the term goblin referred to any of the grotesque, small [fey creatures]. Later, it also included the sub-terrain species as well as fairies with a hurtful and malicious intent." It was used as a generic term, like faerie was, to describe a range of specific ill-intentioned creatures. Translated into German folklore, it became synonymous--or at least highly connected--with the Germanic "kobold".
D&D's James Wyatt also remarked on the similarities between goblins and kobolds in one of his Wandering Monsters articles, and was careful to note where D&D drew the dividing line between these two creatures:
Goblins ambush; kobolds lay traps. (That's a pretty subtle distinction.) Goblins pal around with wolves; kobolds live with rats and drop you into pits with scorpions or centipedes. (Plus they might live near a dragon.) Goblins live in abandoned dungeons or natural caves. Kobolds carve out their own warrens, even if they're living in a dragon's lair. They might even tunnel down under human towns and raid the cellars.
Looking back at our Venn diagram, kobolds have far more in common with J.K. Rowling's goblins than normal D&D goblins do--from their affiliation with dragons to their proximity to human towns.
But this distinction between goblin and kobold is all a difference that is not rooted in mythology, as the terms were simply different cultural versions of the same folkloric roots.
Shaijan, in studying the differences between different expressions of goblins from beyond Europe, notes that "though different goblins possessed different powers, they had some abilities and liabilities in common. Exposure to sunlight causes damage to them. The light of the sun negates the paralyzing effect of a goblin’s bite. The goblin bite is poisonous, and a victim who dies while paralyzed from the bite becomes a Ghoul. They have [a] kind of language." All of these, perhaps except for sunlight exposure, have long been abandoned by modern interpretations of goblins.
In short, the academic studies of folklore tell us that goblin is a catch-all term for some sort of mean-spirited fey or demonic creature. Typically, there is some idea of these creatures being more tricky than outright aggressive; cunning, rather than brutal. The Merriam-Webster dictionary echoes these core traits, defining the goblin as "an ugly or grotesque sprite that is usually mischievous and sometimes evil and malicious."
Underground Goblins
So, where does our common element of "mine-dwellers" in our modern media come from, if the core of goblin mythology is so much more general?
As far as I can tell, only one main category of European goblin folklore centers on mine-dwelling goblins: the Knockers or Tommyknockers of southwestern English folklore (the stories are mostly from Cornwall). As with a lot of folklore, the stories of knockers are rooted in the change to the Industrial Revolution. As mining operations in the region shifted from being family-run enterprises where safety was a priority--you wouldn't want your son being killed in a mining disaster--to an industry dominated by large corporate interests, where employees dying was simply a cost of doing business, the knockers became a friendly sort of protective spirit.
Knockers get their name from their most helpful action: they knock on mine walls to warn of impending collapse. That said, knockers were not all friendly; they were inveterate tricksters who would blow out candles and hide mining tools--likely, as with the apocryphal Captain Ludd, an excuse to tell your boss when you're being questioned about something going wrong. A tool went missing? Well, it couldn't be that you stole it; must have been the tommyknockers.
This also makes sense as a potential root inspiration for the goblins of Tolkien--and by extension, D&D and Rowling. While Tolkien was not Cornish, he certainly would have had the opportunity to hear about the tommyknockers as a mythological entity and used those as part of his inspiration for goblins--although Tolkien's goblins are most certainly not benevolent tricksters. Moreover, Tolkien did not attribute anything about his orcs/goblins to mythology beyond the name, which explains the difference between Tolkien's underground dwellers and the majority of goblin folklore.
Still, taking the tommyknockers as the mythological inspiration for the concept of the "underground goblin" gives us a new perspective. They can be friendly, emphasizing the role of "trickster" and "thief" over "murderous evil being."
Anti-semitism and Goblins
Tommyknockers have their own problematic origins. Many sources--most especially the 1851 novel Yeast, which was a Christian socialist text attacking the social system of Industrial Britain--attribute the knockers as the goblinoid embodiments of the spirits of dead Jewish people. Punished by the Romans for killing Jesus, these spirits were sent to England as slaves to work the mines, where they died. Trapped in the mines, they lead the new generation of miners to the best deposits of tin while playing their tricks.
Which... yeah! That's pretty bad.
Still, J.K. Rowling defenders are not right beyond that. While there are some other antisemitic depictions of goblins (for example, some scholars see the goblins of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market as an antisemitic allegory), most of these are not deeply rooted in folklore, and are products of adding 19th-century antisemitism into earlier mythology. Plus, certainly, the "goblins as bankers" trope of Rowling is an original invention of hers. For some non-antisemitic examples, we can look at the redcap, a type of goblin "native" to the Anglo-Scottish border, which is a mythological stand-in for the generations of border violence between the English and Scottish. So the defense that she is merely depicting goblins as they are more broadly in western folklore does not hold up to scrutiny, because of the broadness of the definition of what makes something a goblin. Tolkien's goblins are described in a way that is racist, but not antisemitic, and his version of goblins seems to dominate a lot more modern understandings of what makes something a goblin than the mythological varied goblins do. In the huge variety of goblins I've been looking into for this series, only a few are ever linked to antisemitic depictions. That said, the knockers--our prime mythological origin for the underground, mining-associated goblin trope in the Western tradition--are rooted in antisemitic myth. But I'm certainly not going to give Rowling a pass for extending the antisemitism of goblins because of this one example, even if it is an important example.
Where to Go From Here
We've established an important sort of understanding about goblins for D&D or your roleplaying game of choice. If we want to draw from historical folklore on goblins for our games, we should reconsider a few standard tropes:
1) Goblins do not need to be evil. They should maintain their "trickster" nature--that seems to be pretty widespread in the folklore--but they do not need to be a particularly violent species.
2) Goblins should be a catch-all sort of thing. Where D&D has "goblinoid", making up Goblins, Hobgoblins, and Bugbears, perhaps we should instead think of a larger goblin category that includes D&D's cowardly, brutal "goblins"; the militaristic hobgoblins; as well as other folkloric goblins that D&D has split into other monsters, like redcaps. Is there a way to incorporate all of these into a large goblin category, without removing the utility or lore of goblins?
3) Goblins have a wide range of metaphors, from Jewish ghosts for the Knockers to "Mongol" invaders for Tolkien to symbolic representations of border violence for the redcaps. Your goblins should find some sort of metaphorical significance--it will make them richer than mere comic relief--but you should think carefully before reproducing, for example, Tolkien's or Rowling's goblins directly, as that can perpetuate stereotypes. Instead, think about what role you want goblins to fill in your world; in folklore, they are hugely varied, so you can find or invent a goblin creature that fits in the broader themes of your world.
I also want to bring in a Tumblr post that was really instrumental as I thought about goblins in my own world a while back (unfortunately, before I did all this research; my goblins are doing interesting things, in my opinion, but they aren't deeply rooted in goblin mythology... I'll have to think about how to remedy that):
The crux of this post is that goblins' reputation as thieves derives from a lack of sense of personal property. This also can fit with the sort of tribal, communal descriptions of goblins from the Monster Manual and Volo's Guide. Letting this sort of worldbuilding flourish--by building out reasons for cultural tropes that are not just "evil" or "greedy", but seeing such tropes as cultural misunderstandings--is interesting to me. This idea of communal property was a driving factor in how I built goblins into my home game's world.
So as we think more about "goblins = tricksters," which is a key part of the folklore surrounding goblins, I also want to be thinking about why that might be the impression that other species have of goblins, to avoid goblins simply being pests.
Where to Go From Here, But Concretely
The next few weeks--I'm not sure how long I'm planning for this series to run, and it's also probably likely that I'll do a post in the series, a post out of the series, and then return to the series sporadically--are going to be focused more on this idea. There's... a lot of goblins out there, in a variety of cultural traditions. Stories of monsters that folklorists have classified as "goblin-related" have sprung up not only in various forms in European folklore, but also in some Native American folklore, Asian folklore, and African folklore.
So, this series is going to dig a little deeper into these different types of goblins. My end result, I'm hoping for, is a little miniature Monster Manual supplement of my own, focusing entirely on different types of goblins inspired by real, historically-inspired, contextualized folklore.
I want to frame this as different goblin cultures. D&D tends to have monoliths: all orcs are like this, all elves are like that. This can lead us into the problematic framing of "all orcs are inherently evil," which can sometimes have racial undertones in the way these monstrous species are described. To me, one of the best ways to counter this impulse is by showcasing a variety of cultures, even amongst the monstrous species. Taking Lord of the Rings, for example, where humans might have cultural distinctions between Gondor and Rohan, we should also avoid letting our goblins be a single, monolithic culture.
So, for the purposes of the project/supplement, I want to keep the D&D framing of "goblin" as a specific thing; then, all our different folkloric "types" of goblins can be treated as differing cultural groups within goblin-kind.
Stay tuned for more goblins! As always, thank you so much for reading. You can subscribe--there should be a button on the top-right corner of the page--to have the blog delivered directly to your inbox so that you don't miss a post! Subscribers to the blog can also leave comments! You can also support the blog by buying my products--links are on the "about" page--including the Guide to Goblins once I write, edit, and release it. And of course, the best support you can offer is simply reading. Thank you again for taking the time to read over 3000 words on goblins! And to think, we're just getting started!