Obviously, a goblin did it.

Human beings have been blaming unseen creatures for life's minor disasters for a very long time.

Before malfunctioning electronics, missing socks, mysteriously relocated eyeglasses, and passwords we absolutely wrote down somewhere, there were strange noises in the walls. Milk spoiled unexpectedly. Tools disappeared. Horses became agitated in the night. Something knocked over the bucket.

And when no ordinary explanation presented itself, folklore provided one.

Sometimes it was a fairy.

Sometimes a brownie.

Sometimes a kobold, boggart, hobgoblin, imp, or household spirit.

And sometimes it was a goblin.

The goblin has never been one particular creature. That may be exactly why it has survived.

So What Exactly Is a Goblin?

Good question.

Folklore's answer is essentially:

It depends.

Unlike vampires or werewolves, goblins don't come with a particularly reliable instruction manual.

There is no universally agreed-upon goblin anatomy, behavior, habitat, or dress code.

Depending on the century and storyteller, a goblin might be tiny or nearly human-sized. Ugly or merely strange. Hairy, wrinkled, green, gray, brown, or apparently whatever color the illustrator had left.

Some live underground.

Some inhabit forests.

Some move into houses.

Some guard treasure.

Some torment travelers.

Some perform household chores.

Some appear to have no occupation whatsoever beyond making everyone else's day considerably more complicated.

Even the word itself has wandered through history.

The English goblin came through medieval French forms such as gobelin, appearing in stories about troublesome supernatural beings. Its deeper origins are uncertain, although the word became part of a much larger European vocabulary for creatures occupying that uncomfortable space between fairy, demon, spirit, and household nuisance.

And that uncertainty suits the goblin perfectly.

A goblin is less a species than a job description.

Its job is trouble.

Goblins Weren't Always Little Green Men

Ask someone today to draw a goblin and there is a good chance you'll get a small green creature with pointed ears, sharp teeth, and questionable personal hygiene.

Medieval Europeans would not necessarily recognize him.

Older folklore didn't standardize goblins into one appearance. They were supernatural beings first and physical creatures second. Their appearance changed according to local traditions, individual storytellers, and whatever behavior the story required.

Some descriptions made them grotesque.

Others made them almost human.

They could be dwarfish, animal-like, shadowy, misshapen, or simply uncanny.

The now-familiar green goblin owes much more to later fantasy art, games, films, and popular culture than to a single ancient tradition.

For centuries, the frightening thing about a goblin wasn't that everyone knew exactly what one looked like.

It was that nobody did.

The House Was Full of Things You Couldn't Explain

For much of history, home was a considerably stranger place than it is today.

There was no electrical hum.

No refrigerator kicking on.

No plumbing shifting behind drywall.

No central heating system making inexplicable noises at 2:17 in the morning.

But houses still creaked.

Animals moved in walls.

Wind slipped through gaps.

Wood expanded and contracted.

Objects disappeared.

Food spoiled.

Candles went out.

Things fell.

And occasionally someone woke up absolutely certain that something had been standing in the room.

We now have explanations for many of those experiences.

Our ancestors had explanations too.

Theirs were simply more interesting.

Across Europe, folklore filled homes and farms with supernatural residents.

Brownies in Scottish tradition might secretly perform household work when treated properly.

Boggarts could make household life miserable.

Germanic traditions included kobolds, beings associated with homes, mines, and ships depending upon the story.

Other traditions offered elves, sprites, hobs, imps, and innumerable local spirits.

These creatures weren't identical to goblins, and collapsing them all into one category erases what makes individual traditions interesting.

But they shared a useful function:

They explained the unexplained.

Someone Moved My Things

This may be the goblin's greatest contribution to civilization.

The supernatural explanation for missing objects is remarkably persistent.

Something is where you left it.

Then it isn't.

You search.

You accuse innocent family members.

You question your memory.

You become increasingly irritated.

Eventually the object reappears somewhere you are absolutely certain you already looked.

Modern explanation:

You overlooked it.

Folklore explanation:

Tiny supernatural criminal.

We will leave the reader to decide which is more satisfying.

Stories about mischievous household beings frequently involve exactly this sort of behavior: hiding possessions, tangling things, upsetting containers, moving tools, making noises, disturbing sleepers, and generally ensuring that nobody enjoys an entirely peaceful evening.

And there is something psychologically useful about that.

Sometimes randomness is irritating.

Giving randomness a personality makes it funny.

The missing spoon isn't evidence that you're losing your mind.

A goblin has the spoon.

The goblin is a jerk.

Problem solved.

The Goblins Beneath the Ground

Goblins were not limited to kitchens and barns.

European folklore also placed supernatural beings underground.

Mining communities were particularly rich in stories about strange subterranean inhabitants.

This isn't difficult to understand.

Historic mines were dark, dangerous, unstable places filled with unfamiliar sounds. Rocks shifted. Supports creaked. Air moved through unseen passages. Accidents could happen with little warning.

Miners developed stories about beings who lived below the earth.

Germanic mining folklore included kobolds.

Cornish miners told stories of Knockers, mysterious underground beings whose tapping could be interpreted as warning, mockery, or the sound of supernatural miners working somewhere beyond human sight.

Whether helpful or dangerous depended largely on the tradition.

Again, these weren't simply "goblins" under different names.

But they belonged to the same enormous family of ideas:

Humans enter a dangerous place.

Humans hear something they cannot see.

Humans decide something lives there.

Frankly, this remains a reasonable emotional response to hearing unexplained knocking in a tunnel several hundred feet underground.

Then Literature Got Hold of Them

Folklore creatures rarely stay where folklore leaves them.

Writers adopt them.

Artists redesign them.

Children's stories soften them.

Horror makes them frightening again.

Fantasy gives them governments.

By the nineteenth century, goblins were appearing frequently in literature and fairy tales.

Christina Rossetti's 1862 poem Goblin Market gave us goblin merchants selling irresistible enchanted fruit in a strange, sensual, dangerous marketplace.

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, published in book form in 1872, imagined an underground goblin society plotting against humans.

Later fantasy writers continued transforming them.

By the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, goblins had become a standard fantasy species, appearing in novels, tabletop games, films, television, video games, artwork, and approximately nine billion internet memes.

The vague supernatural nuisance had acquired a recognizable face.

Pointed ears.

Sharp features.

Small stature.

A tendency toward chaos.

Often green.

The folklore creature had become a character.

Why Are Goblins Usually Ugly?

This is where goblins reveal something less charming about us.

Folklore and fairy tales frequently use physical appearance as moral shorthand.

Beautiful means good.

Ugly means dangerous.

Deformity means corruption.

Darkness means evil.

It is an old storytelling habit, and not an especially admirable one.

Goblins were often described in deliberately grotesque terms because storytellers wanted audiences to know immediately that these creatures belonged outside ordinary human society.

They were other.

But modern goblins have started escaping that role.

Artists and storytellers increasingly portray them as eccentric, scrappy, chaotic, funny, industrious, misunderstood, adorable, or some alarming combination of all six.

And perhaps that version is actually closer to folklore than the generic fantasy villain.

Because the oldest supernatural household creatures weren't always evil.

They were unpredictable.

There is a difference.

Perhaps We Were Never Supposed to Get Rid of Them

Folklore creatures survive when they continue doing useful work.

Ghosts help us talk about death.

Mermaids give shape to our fascination with the unknown.

Fairies inhabit the border between the ordinary world and the enchanted one.

And goblins?

Goblins explain why life refuses to behave itself.

They are the patron saints of misplaced objects, strange noises, crooked picture frames, tangled cords, mysteriously empty cookie containers, and machines that stop working until the exact moment someone comes over to fix them.

Maybe our ancestors weren't foolish for imagining them.

Maybe they simply understood something we've forgotten.

A world in which everything has an explanation may be more accurate.

But a world with goblins is considerably more fun.

So the next time something disappears, search the obvious places first.

Check your pockets.

Look under the couch.

Ask everyone in the house.

Check the place you already checked three times.

And if it still isn't there?

Well.

You know who to blame.