Frequently at Halloween time one hears of trick-or-treaters costumed as "ghosts and goblins." It's a nicely alliterative phrase, but in forty years of being a trick-or-treater, a homeowner, and a parent, I've never seen any one dressed up as a goblin.
What is a goblin, anyway? The mighty Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word may come from ancient Greek "Kobalos" meaning a wicked person or spirit. It may also be related to the Germanic word "Kobold" meaning a mischievous spirit which haunted mines. (One prank kobolds played on German miners would be to replace good ore with an inferior metal -- the worthless stuff was called "cobalt.")
In Katharine Briggs's Encyclopedia of Fairies she describes goblins as "evil and malicious spirits, usually small and grotesque in appearance." A slightly less wicked goblin might get a friendly nickname -- "Hob" (short for Robert), giving us "Hobgoblin."
Modern roleplaying gamers know goblins well from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. In D&D and other games, goblins are classic "mooks" -- low-powered opponents whose chief purpose is to get slaughtered by player-characters. This version is of course based on the goblins of Tolkein's The Hobbit, in which a dozen dwarves and a hobbit, with a little help from their wizard buddy, are able to defeat and escape from a whole mountain full of goblins.
Whatever their derivation, goblins seem pretty well-defined -- they're ugly little bastards who cause trouble. They're personifications of entropy and chaos. They're the grinning, malicious flip side of the beautiful, seductive kind of fairy. Even in Tolkein, the goblins were chaotic and spiteful.
And that, I think, solves the mystery of the Halloween goblins. There's no need for anyone to dress up as one, because on Halloween night the streets are full of small, grotesque beings, and there's still an undercurrent of malice in their demands for treats to avoid a trick. On Halloween, we all are goblins.
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