Speaker 1: Hey everybody, and welcome to the Paranormal Portal. I'm your host,
Friend Thomas. Thank you so much for joining us today.
We've got an epic show ahead. But just remember, if
any of you have experiences you'd like to share, I'd love.
Speaker 2: To hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can either email me at Paranormal Portal Radio at
gmail dot com or head over to paranormal Portal dot
net and roll down and find the button that says
interview me, and that'll allow you to look at the
calendar of possible times and dates and find a date.
Speaker 2: That works for you.
Speaker 1: Love to hear your stories, so definitely get in touch
with me. Hey everybody, and welcome to the Paranormal Portal Podcast.
I'm your host Brent Thomas. Thank you all for being here,
and thank you all for the continued love and support.
Hope you guys are off to having a great beginning
to your summer and having a wonderful time not being
bundled up and freezing. So we got an exceptional show
lined up for you guys today. I am welcoming Matt
King who is joining me today. He is an associate
professor of history in South Florida and his book is
out there. It's called a History of Goblins, and we're
going to get into the discussion of goblins and any
historical and folklore perspective as well as how that emerges
into our culture. Now, so buckle up, folks, we're going
to dive in. Hey, Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks
for coming on, brother.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Oh it's my pleasure. I always keep the conversations very
fluid in stuff because I think an organic discussion is
much more interesting than having canned interviews. But the one
can question I always ask people is how did this
start for you? So, in other words, you're an academic,
you're and how did you decide I'm going to dive
into goblins? I just want to know more about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it came out of just my not frustration,
but I was just feeling kind of burned out on
what I had been trained on. Like my specialty is
in the Crusades in the medieval Mediterranean, so it's just
a lot of kind of violent, often and bleak texts
about people fighting each other, you know, Christians, Muslims and Jews,
and I was just like, I need a.
Speaker 2: Break from this.
Speaker 3: And in the course of my reading, I had encountered
a handful of really interesting kind of just like folkloric tidbits,
and I decided, maybe this is something worth pursuing. And
in doing just a bit of reading, I quickly kind
of started to notice what I thought was a bit
of a gap in the literature or something that I
thought I could maybe add to, which was I was
seeing all this stuff about fairies, about elves, about nature
spirits and things like that, and like sometimes and then
that there was the humble little Goblin. But I just
felt like it wasn't getting the level of attension that
it deserved, given that it was playing like kind of
a major part in a few cultural moments in the
twenty twenties, with the idea of Goblin mode going viral,
like the esthetic movement of Goblin Core, and I just
thought that, like, maybe there's something here to tease out historically,
maybe I can expand this into a larger project. And
I actually, you know, sent a few emails to academics
just being like, hey, does this sound like a decent idea,
and they said, yeah, I think this is doable. And
so that's how I arrived at it was just out
of needing a break and thinking that there's something bigger
to write and hopefully that's you know the case.
Speaker 1: Well, it is interesting, and it is one of those
terms that's largely ambiguous, kind of like a troll. You know,
it's like a troll. Well that it can mean so
many things, from somebody hanging out under a bridge that's
really got a bad attitude, or or just waking up crabby.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So they become part of our culture, these these ideas
and these these forms. But how do you how do
you even begin? How did you begin?
Speaker 3: I like your example of the troll, because that was
one that as I was like thinking about these creatures
that have now taken on different cultural meanings today, it's like,
what do we have? We have the Internet troll. That's
the way that trolls manifest like, And why is it
that that creature, this mythological creature that could you know,
or or folkloric creature that could take any number of forms.
Why is that the one that became like the worst
kind of person on the internet, right? And why is
it that goblin mode is the kind of like way
of just existing in social isolation and issuing social social
norms and things like that why is it that in
the late nineteenth century the term fairy becomes associated like
a pejorative for gay men? Like this was one of
those questions that early on kind of fascinated me. It's like,
how is it that these different folklore creatures came to
represent different things in our cultures? And why is it
that a troll becomes this, a goblin this, and elf?
This your question? Initially? Apologies, I totally just went off
on a on a side tangent thera. What was the
initial question?
Speaker 1: Well, I don't even remember how to say. I was
so into what you were saying. But just I think
it's interesting that these terms they have such a that
they have almost a generic quality to them. But you know,
how how do you start going towards the source of
all of this and diving into where does it begin?
Speaker 2: Where? Did where? Did?
Speaker 1: Where did goblin begin?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And I think the word itself is what I ultimately
decided on, because like you're right, Like, there's a couple
of ways to approach It's like one, if you are
a Christian, the elogian of like the seventeenth century, you
think none of these things are real, or you think
they're all just demons, right, and so like, ultimately, if
it's called a goblin or an elf or an orc
or whatever, I mean, that's what the dumb villagers call it.
You know, it's like Satan in disguise or it's their
own hallucinations. And so like you're like, for most of
this history, we're getting these like words that are more
or less interchangeable with one another, with some exceptions, but like, yeah,
an elf is more or less a goblin, a hobgoblin
is a night walking spirit, and there there's no like
real rhymer reason to them, with like some exceptions. I'll
like there's one book called The Boggart that Simon Jung
wrote that talks about this one particular kind of solitary
supernatural creature, primarily in like western England, and he's trying
to like isolate that word and try to understand, you know,
exactly what came to it, And in some ways, I
think with goblins, I was like, I'm I'm just look
at the word itself, like I'm gonna start with the
earliest iteration of it that we have, which is from
a twelfth century monk in northern France who talked about
a demon that's expelled from a temple and the common
people call it goblinus. That's our word, that's our starting
point for it. And then we know it migrates into
the British Isles in the subsequent centuries and it becomes
a really common designator of preternatural creatures and then also
humans or just weird ideas, things that look strange. So
there's the strand of the sort of supernatural running throughout it.
But then around it too are just like the ugly
dude that is called a hobgoblin, or the idea that
is stupid that a politician refers to as like a
goblin bill or something like that. And so it's these
folkloric ideas that are interspersed with these other uses that
we see really throughout the history. But you're you're right
to bring up that, like, the classifications of supernatural creatures
are really slippery, whether you have encountered them or not. Right,
It's it's really unclear. And so it ultimately was my
decision to say, Okay, I'm not going to try to parse,
at least at the outset, what makes a goblin different
from a fairy. I'm not going to try to say
the goblin is a subset of fairy, or that the
elf is a cousin of the goblin, or that the
goblin is a duende, but in a different language. Right,
I just said, I'm going to look at this word
and let's see how it's moved over time and how
it reflects like the people who have who have evokes
that word.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is is very, very interesting. And of course,
as you and I were talking prior to recording, it's
like I think we're we're a culture of stories, and
it's one of the greatest vehicles we have for passing wisdom, knowledge, ideas, morality,
any number of you know, growth mechanisms. They're all done
through the power of stories. And it's interesting to see
how an idea may have started there but then becomes
absorbed on a global scale. You know that. And I
suppose that also is part of the ambiguity of it,
because what had started out meaning can mean a whole
different thing where it ends up, and so that's got
to be a mess.
Speaker 2: It's a total mess.
Speaker 3: And like when folklore became kind of like a specialized
academic discipline in the nineteenth century, along with just like
the rise of universities generally, and in one of the
early manuals assembled by the Folklore Society, there's a whole
chapter that is called Goblin dumb like Kingdom, and it's
just about like the different kinds of creatures that are
part of this goblin umbrella and the question that you
should ask of people to try to understand, you know,
what kind of goblins inhabit their lives in some form
or another.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fantastic and curious. But in the in the
root of it all, it was a demon as far
as what you can answertain, right, was.
Speaker 3: Early recollect like the earliest word uses we have is
a monk whose primary concern is salvation and sin, right,
writing about this demon, and he says, the commoners call
it goblin, and it's kind of like haunts the city
of Evro, and that's our that's our first iteration of it.
And the story itself, I think is illustrative of some
of the like huge issues with talking about folklore from
like I don't know, pre nineteenth century, which is that
most of the texts are written by elite monks, like
elite religious officials who are really skeptical of these folk beliefs.
And there's one like sermon that I found from the
it was either the fourteenth or fifteenth century, in which
this preacher is like, Okay, we have these things called
lesser demons, and these demons some people call them elves,
some call them goblins. They might control the weather, but
we're not really sure, so let's just move past it
because we should be focusing on other things that God does.
And it's one of these just like really great like
anecdotes where you can see that this preacher sure has
to address these creatures because the people of his congregation
believe in them, right, but there aren't easy answers to it.
It's like they might control the weather, sure we'll give
you that, but it doesn't really go beyond that. And
that's what I encountered. Just a ton of these sources
are these traditions that clearly persist across centuries in various forms.
We see people believing in goblins, as you know, household
helpers who if you're loyal to them, though, they might
perform chores in the night, or they might just cause
mischief in the house, especially if disrespected. They might haunt
a location, they might lead travelers astray all of these things,
and many of the stories come to us from theologians
who are saying, look at all these superstitious rural people, right,
We're so much better than them in our cities, right,
and our education. And so I spent a lot of
the first few chapters of this book especially, just kind
of like reading these texts and being like, Okay, you
know what, what underlying ideas about these creatures can I
get from these really skeptical writers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Now, does in the in the in the understanding
of the term, are the definition of goblin? Is there
any key indicators of what that might entail?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Is it generally classically speaking, when we hear the word goblin,
we're thinking of this little creature often depicted as green colored,
exaggerated grotesque features, you know, crawling creepily through the world.
Is does that does that stereotype or archetype maintain through
different cultures as well, or does it become really widespread?
What it defines?
Speaker 3: It's never like every single idea that you gave there,
I can find examples that work for it and examples
that don't. Okay, And so the the green skin one
is a great one to bring up when I like,
I'm generally against like these new AI models, right, but
I decided, for the sake of just my own just
kind of interest, to run to ask all these AI
models to give me a picture of a goblin. Uniformly,
every single one was green, no exceptions at all. Yeah,
and that's like a reflection of World of Warcraft, maybe
Spider Man, right, like of a handful like really popular
iterations of goblins, because in the history they're really just
associated with darkness generally, okay, And the early associations of
like a green goblin usually it's they're wearing green clothes.
Fairies are often kind of lumped in with green arey,
you know, they live in forests and things like that,
But goblins are often dark and they are sinful, and
there's a connection between those two things. So yeah, they're
not always green. Some of them are, even if we're
looking at even like you know, like the more fantastical
interpretations that I think influence are understanding of how they
look generally, you know, like in early iterations of D
and D, they're not green. They're like gray and gray,
yellow and red.
Speaker 2: And things like that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the I in the book, I don't say,
like a goblin, is this thing exactly? I say, here
are some common strands, and you hit on a number
of them, like, yeah, they tend to be small, some
of them are large though they tend to be mischievous
to malevolent, but some of them are helpful. They tend
to be right on the edge of where humans exist.
Right they're not sitting next to me here, but they
might be in the corner of a room when it's dark,
or they're in the forest or the mind next to
where people are working, and they might help you, they
might hurt you. And they tend to be ugly in
some way or grotesque. As you say, some of them
are beautiful, but often they're like kind of a pale
reflection and like of humans. We see that in some
of the goblin kingdoms. That that's more in fiction, granted,
but like they're like a pale reflection of arc worlds,
which in turn, in these worlds are like a pale
reflection of the beautiful fairy case doms up in the heavens.
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Speaker 3: So yeah, the definition itself is just elusive, and it's
I'm sure that's an annoying answer to everyone listening. I
can't give like three sentences that really nails it down.
But the whole idea is that, like there's too much
here and too many traditions to just give one coherent thing.
And that's why everyone hates academics, right, we just we
just make things complicated for you and we don't give
you like the easy, like definitive answer.
Speaker 1: Sure, but to be fair, you're you're trying to untangle
the worst game of telephone from Hell that takes place
over the centuries, you know. I mean, it's these these
amalgamations of ideas, as, these terms spread, what do they mean? Like,
I'm thinking this probably comes up a lot. Like in
terms of bigfoot, we have globally, there's hundreds, literally hundreds
of names of what these creatures are and or at
least or at least they're very closely related, from like
the the yarin in China to the the the the bigfoot, sasquatch, grassman,
skunkcape Yowie in Australia, girlgowk, big man, gray man. There's
so many iterations of it, and each place seems to
there's always the similar anchor points though that they're they're
these elusive creatures that seem to live in our absence
or choose our absence, and they live in the wild,
feral places in the world, and they subsist fine without us,
you know, try to avoid them. Are there are there
common threads that you found with the goblin in your
in your chasing down what is this and what does
it meaner? How does it move around the globe? Are
there common pieces that are consistent throughout definitions of it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think there are some commonalities, even
if they're not like universal. So like to to Juxapos
with the bigfoot example, as I understand it, and this
is just based on my own like Seattle upbringing sasquatches,
bigfoot in folklore, they like never seek out humans, right,
They're trying to avoid humans. No, no, am I am
I mistaken there.
Speaker 1: They're generally considered very curious. They choose people on their terms.
They don't they I mean they avoid people if people
come into areas, but they are known to approach to observe.
They seem to be a very curious creature, so they
do come in to observe.
Speaker 3: Okay, So like with when we're talking about goblins, and
I think fairies more generally, and here I have to
go broad because we're like, we're the definitions are so
ob skewed, Like we're often dealing with social supernatural creatures,
ones that are choosing certain humans to interact with and
taking them to places that are just outside of our
own world, so called fairyland or like a lower hemisphere
depending on the author. And so they're in you, like
you experience things that are not beholden to the rules
of our own world. And this is often framed in
documents as something that has happened a long time ago
but no longer happens. It's a term that Barbara Rietti
has called the perpetual recession of the fairies. It's this
idea that the fairies are no longer existent, but they
used to be, and they're kind of always kind of
receding from view. Funnily enough, because so many people say
that we just have evidence of people believing in fairies
across the decades and the centuries, and so often you
get these stories about fairies written by people who are
claiming that they're no longer believed in. This happened at
Joan of ARC's trial, like she was eventually convicted on
grounds of you know, cross dressing, which is a heresy,
but like early on there was discussion her trial of
like the fairies at dome Remi, her village and the
and everyone said, well, at olden times these things happen,
but no longer, and so these interactions are often framed
in accounts as like, oh, not anymore, but at one
point they did. We also have, with regards to goblins,
associations with forests and minds. This is often based on
what is next to human settlement. So if travelers are
passing through mysterious woods at night and there aren't a
lot of other people around, and danger lurks in the shadows,
that's where you might find a goblin. Similarly, during the
Industrial Revolution, we have stories of goblins and minds because
people are digging under the mountains and you might hear,
you know, the knockers if we're talking about Cornwall, the
Cobalds of Germany, right, And so we get these encounters
with these preternatural creatures in spaces that are really on
the doorstep of where the humans are in terms of
the kinds of interactions. You know, early, I think the
earlier you go, the more likely an interaction with the
goblin is going to be a bad one for the
human right. It might be leading them to a human
to death. It might be leading them into sin, which
for the clerics is even worse than death. It might
be just getting them lost, for example, kind of like
in a mischievous way. There's one text that talks about
a how goblins used to like lure those who are
looking for illicit nighttime trysts into circles and then when
the sun would pop out, the goblin would laugh and
then the would be lover was like, ah, damn, So
that's not that's not what I wanted to have happens,
and I and so those are those are a few
of the threads there. And to piggyback on what what
you were asking too. Yeah, they tend to be dark
skinned of some sort, tend to be small as most
fairies are, and tend to be atypical in movements like
we hear a lot about long arms and long fingers,
erratic kind of like dances and movements generally, as well
as some sort of like deformities that usually reflects kind
of ugliness according to White authors more or less.
Speaker 1: Oh, you know, I found something really interesting that we
were saying before, and I just took a note here
because I wanted to make sure to cover this with you,
and that was that, you know, a lot of what
you're able to research was recorded from a very Christian perspective,
from these religious monk like you know, monk squires and
pages and whatever have you. So everything that was recorded,
of course, is through their lens, through their paradigm and
their worldview. One thing that's interesting that we're seeing a
lot of right now that I'm noticing anyway, and many
of our listeners I'm sure are going to be familiar
with this, is that, of course there's a and I
don't mean to get really spider webs in our own
discussion here, but it's a phenomenon that I think is
playing itself over and over. And this is in the
fol community that there's a disclosure push going on, and
now there's there's like this increasing pressure from the more
religious views to regard these not as our friendly visitors
from the stars, maybe transdimensional, but probably demonic. So it's
like this, this Christian perspective is pushing into this now
and it's causing you know, a lot of people to go, oh, well,
I don't want to see UFOs because that means demons
are here. And so it does. That is a theme
that scarily enough, seems kind of timeless. And and I'm
not putting down anybody's religious or spiritual outlooks, but I
think that it's surprising to look at an unknown and
yet feel like you can attribute its whole nature to
it based on your worldview, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this is this is where we're getting into, like,
you know, people's perspectives. And here my goal in writing
this book was not to judgment on what people believed.
I'm just looking to understand how their worlds exist, right,
and so the phenomenon, like I I'm not as deep
in the this as you are, but what I've seen
is like a New York Times podcast about UFOs from Rosstutit,
who's a conservative Catholic.
Speaker 2: We have JD.
Speaker 3: Vance talking about aliens and UFOs, and what I'd say
is that like both of them are Catholic, which I
think is relevant. You know, if you believe in a
certain religious doctrine in which there is a singular God
and there's this like heaven and Hell dichotomy.
Speaker 2: Maybe with purgatory there like.
Speaker 3: You are constrained, I guess in how you can interpret
phenomena that are outside of our understanding. And one of
the ways that makes sense to classify is as demonic
in some form. This this reminds me a lot of
like the Reformation, in which these things that were these
creatures that were like seen as being the products of
witches and summoners. They were just like widely dismissed by
Protestants because like Catholics might say that a witch can
summon demons, Protestants were less likely to do. So this
was just a whole kind of like divide that happens
in the sixteenth century.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: You know, like I'm not gonna like tell any of
these people that their interpretation of UFOs is right or wrong.
But I understand if you're a Catholic and you deeply
believe in that theology, why you would take anything that
seems to be coming from outside of our knowledge as
potentially the work of an afarious force. That's not necessarily
what I think. And when I think about like modern
kind of run ins with creatures that are outside of
like our understanding, I am struck by the work that
Simon Young has done. I brought him up earlier on
the fairy Census. Is that something you've encountered before?
Speaker 2: No, I'm okay.
Speaker 3: So it's publicly available online, and this is the work
of a British historian who has gone through and collected
a thousand or two thousand fairy encounters, describing them in
publicly available documents. So to give you an example of one,
this is from I'm just reading from the screen here.
This is number five thirty three A. This is from
a woman from the twenty tens. She says, the manager
of the shop I was working in a couple of
years ago, was driving between her home late one night
when she saw, in her words, what I can only
describe as a goblin in the lights running across the
road and into the hedge. So that's the entirety of
the entry, right, But we have like two thousand of
these or so that testify to people having these encounters
that they perceive as fairy encounters. And there are surveys
too from major research institutes that show that in some
places people still really hold these beliefs. If you're a
practicing Catholic, you might say demons or the hallucinations of
people who are on meds or something. But if you're
sympathetic to these ideas, yeah, why not, right? And so
that's what I That was kind of like the challenge
I had in writing this is trying to like understand
the worlds of the people who are encountering these creatures
and never to dismiss them, but instead trying to understand,
you know, what is shaping those encounters.
Speaker 1: Well, you know one thing that I've discovered since doing
this show. And before I started doing this show, I thought,
I know this stuff, I got it all figured out.
I can do a show. And then I started doing
the show, and then you start diving down these rabbit
holes and you realize what an intricate web all of
this stuff is. And my point being that I think
one aspect of it that gets overlooked a lot is
the experiencer. That we often look at the people that
experience things like seeing a goblin, seeing a ghost, seeing
a UFO, having an abduction, any number of things, seeing bigfoot,
we think of those as more incidental pieces that that
was just what was there to absorb this experience without
really tying into the fact that I think the experiencer
is a is probably a key part of the experience.
And by that, what I'm saying is I think we
are incredibly powerful manifestors of our experience that we do create.
And I'm not just like, oh, I'm gonna have a
good day. Wow, it was a great day. I was,
I was right. I manifest that. I mean that I
think that on a very fundamental level, we are very
involved in creating our experience here in this world, and
I think that that can have a lot to do
with the way we observe the world. And so then
the experiencer has to observe this chaotic event and attribute
reason to it. So it's got to go through the
filters of the person. So what may have been some
ambiguous creature becomes a goblin, because that's a point of
reference the person grabs onto and therefore it's recorded now
as a goblin. Is it really a goblin? Well, hell,
I don't know, because I'm not really sure what goblins are.
But they're everywhere. But so are these experiences, And so
I think that we often diminish our involvement in these
experiences as again more peripheral, whereas we are a key
part of the.
Speaker 3: Moment, and you're absolutely hitting on something that was like
really hard for me in this, which is that like
only like when we get to like these later accounts
of people experiencing goblins, I sometimes have their own words,
and that's great, like I can that makes things easier
even in like some of these nineteenth century accounts we have,
you know, someone describing a story as told to them
directly or close to it. When we further back in time,
we get though, the more removed I am from the
person who had this purported experience, and so sometimes I'm
like three people between the young peasant from a rural
village who had this encounter with a faery, right, And
so what I'm getting is just like a sliver, like
an absolute sliver of this experience, and like the experience
of that person, it's just gone right. It has lost
the time. And the best I can do is try
to understand through looking at as many of these as
I can what you know, people might have thought based
on this, but you're it was just like it's such
a it often feels like just a totally fruitless endeavor,
like I'm never I accept that I'm never going to
really understand and you know how these people felt and
interacted and interfaced, especially with like what we'd consider the supernatural.
But you know, these sources give us a fascinating just
sliver into a glimpse into it that I try to
tease out. And unfortunately, there's a lot of scholars that
have you know, been doing work like this too that
hopefully is making our world richer in our understanding of
different cultures in different times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Now, earlier you had you had alluded to the
fact that some variations of the Goblin story we were
almost positive and not necessarily regarded as a dark, horrible thing,
but that we're serving some positive purpose. Can you get
go into that a little more? What are some examples
of that?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: So the first one that comes to mind is an
example from a British politician who said that the English
hobgoblin is is good because the English hobgoblin punishes those
who don't do their work essentially, whereas it might reward
those who are like helpful or who are like industrious essentially,
like it's more or less like a reinforcing of British
work ethic. You also have the goblins that the so
called drudging goblin. It's from a poem by John Milton
that you might pay in order to churn your butter, right,
turn your milk into butter. So it's often tied to
household labor essentially, and it might be the goblin might
be helpful therein you also might get the goblin who
reward you, you know, with something, but then turns around
and makes your life harder later on. So when I
think about the positive things, it's most often that sort
of household side of things. The negative stuff is like
everywhere else, it's haunting and causing commotion and that sort
of stuff.
Speaker 1: The reason that I ask is because what came up
to me is, of course you're you're bringing up another
term that you've mentioned before, but it's hobgoblin and what
does the hobb add to the word goblin in a
in an academic way that distinguishes it from one from
the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the so again, you know, we're dealing with
two words that were often interchangeable. Hobb could have been
the word like it's the word for hearth, like the
container you a shelf that sits on a hearth. It
also is the term for another folklort creature in like
northern England and Scotland, and so it might just be
kind of combined the two together, or it could be
this particular domestic kind. But what we do see, like
in the written record, is that the hobgoblin becomes more
associated with like merriment and joy. And this is kind
of based more on Shakespeare, because in A Midsummer's Night Dream,
which is itself like heavily inspired.
Speaker 2: By folklore, you have the character of Puck, who's.
Speaker 3: Also called called Robin Goodfellow, who's also called called hobgoblin.
And so we have this folk lord traditional hobgoblin that
Shakespeare puts into his play, and Shakespeare becomes uber popular
and everyone knows him, and so that in turn influences
how the folklore develops and it's that kind of annoyingly
hazy interplay that's kind of present throughout this. But Hobgoblin
takes on this kind of merry traveler persona, this like, uh,
this more this kinder creature, whereas goblins it's it's a
little bit more generic. It's more of like an all
encompassing term. And you see more associations with like evil
and maliciousness. Uh, that kind of separates them. And then
this becomes, uh, you know, even more further divided when
you get into like the more explicit, like explicitly like
fictional works.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, because when you were when you're saying hobgoblin versus goblin,
I was thinking, well, that's kind of interesting because of
course everybody knows what the demon is, but a deemon
is generally considered a much more positive for us, or
at least benign, whereas a demon is is absolutely contrary
to everything good. So I was wondering your voice kind
of like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the nothing like quite that definitive, but there is
a real break, I would say, in like the early
modern period in associations. And I think there's even one
ballad this it's called a broadside Ballads it's like a
cheap piece of music that could be sung, and it
reveals more of like what might have been sung in
a pub in a village than.
Speaker 2: Most sources.
Speaker 3: And I think it refers to Hobgoblin driving out the
goblins or something like that, like a Mary Hobgoblin taking
out all of the bad things, the imps and the
demons and the goblins. We see goblins lumped in with
ghosts and imps with some degree of frequency.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's you know, an imp would be a
great tie in there for the demonic. Of course, they're
supposedly at the task masters are of the imp in
many regards, are alleged to be the demons, and so
that's interesting. I was thinking of of also, like in
Slavic traditions, there's a house spirit. Now it's never described
as a very attractive thing. It's usually kind of creepy
little things, but they're I think they're called the domovoi,
and they're they're regarded as these positive spirits of the house.
And I was wondering if there's any any version of
Goblin that you came through that would also tie or
align with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The tricky thing here is that there's so much variation
the word goblin that you could slot it into virtually
any like we could go with the Spanish duende, we
could the Japanese yokai or kappa. Right, we could just
find any like number of global creatures to like slott
it into and translate something as I mean, I found
a bunch of translations of like Buddhist demons essentially, or
like Buddhist spirits as goblins, the specific spirits varying depending
on the translator. So yeah, I and it with like
the ones I see most commonly kind of like juxtapose,
are like the Brownie, the Nisa, the cobald, those other
kind of European spirits that were the common points of
comparison for authors who are trying to say, like, well,
this is a Scottish tradition, this is an English tradition,
this is a French tradition, and so on.
Speaker 1: Oh I got ya, I got cha. So so, and
I'm putting you out there a little bit, But do
you have any idea like, well, how should I best
say this? Do you have an openness of mind to
to acknowledge that maybe there's something to this even still
that people are seeing or experiencing some sort of anomalies
that they're interpreting as goblins.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'll give you two answers. Like one is,
as a historian, I don't see it as my job
to like just like evaluate the like factualness of a
statement like that. Instead, what I want to do is understand, oh,
what this person thinks, why they think it, what it
says about their world, their culture, and things like that.
That's my professional answer when it comes to me, Like specifically,
I borrow from the folklorist Catherine Briggs, who says she's
like agnostic on the subject, which is where I'm like
every year, I feel like the past iteration of me
was very stupid in some form or just didn't get it.
And so at this point I'm of the perspective that
I'm never going to understand everything about this world, and
so I don't have any particular experiences with these sort
of creatures. I don't dismiss those who have them, but
it's also not like the emphasis of what I'm of
what I'm working on. So I welcome the stories especially.
I appreciate what you said at the beginning of this
conversation about the importance of stories, right, And I think
that's one of the sort of one of the most
rewarding parts of doing this book is just encountering so
many stories about goblins that help explain away, for example,
like why building supplies are going missing. You know these goblins,
these goblin builders have taken it away from this construction
or something like that. Just love the stories that come
out of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what were those? There was some little creatures that
were that were supposedly uh sabotaging airplanes during World War Two?
Speaker 2: What were those?
Speaker 3: That's the gremlin? Og Yeah, yeah, I believe that is
that word is specifically like that's one of the few
like kind of folklore creatures where it's like, we know
the point of origin for it. I think it's either
World War yeah, world War two. Uh so, yeah, the
the gremlin used to explain away engine failures. Yes, yes,
and then turned into a famous Steven Spielberg movie.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's money to be had there, definitely, right.
Speaker 3: So not in goblins, though goblins famously have been there.
There's been a few attempts to do like horror movies
with goblins, and they're commonly noted as.
Speaker 2: Like the worst movies ever made.
Speaker 3: You get David Bowie and labyrinth as like the real
like Architects.
Speaker 1: That was a great movie. Yeah, yeah, I love Labyrinths. Yep,
very cool. I I gotta I gotta wonder is this
is this a first of for you or is it
your your plan now to go dig into something wholly different?
Or where are you going from here?
Speaker 3: I am wait. I want to see what the reviews
are of this book, both from the people as well
as from other academics, because you know, a lot of
a lot of the people writing on this subject, like
some of them are folklores by training, some of them
are historians, some of them are based in literature, and
so there's just a lot of different thoughts going around.
And I want to see what people think. And if
people say, like this guy is off his rocker, he
has misinterpreted every source, this doesn't make any sense, then
I might go back to like the medieval Mediterranean, right.
But if if they're positive reactions, then I think there
might be more to be said there.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I think you can, like you can write histories about
these these creatures in any number of ways. And there's
like Francis Young just came out with the Fairies a
history which kind of takes the opposite approach to my book,
which is like he looks at the idea of the
fairies as these like preternatural creatures written large and tries
to tell them from a folkloric context primarily, whereas like
I go pretty explicitly into the realms of the fantastic,
like the expressly like literary, fictional, theatrical, and things like that.
And so I just want to see how things shake
out with those reviews before I go digging. But I
really enjoyed this process, and I really enjoyed seeing the
interplay between folk beliefs and you know, these paranormal encounters
as well as popular media and how they intersect.
Speaker 2: With each other.
Speaker 3: You know, I would welcome the idea of, you know,
people writing the history of gnomes and things like that,
like why is it the gnome and the goblin, which
were commonly conflated Why is one out in every other
garden right? And the other is an avatar for like
social nonconformity in like post like COVID twenty twenty one
or whatever.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think those long term histories they can be frot
but they're also I think pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: From from our perspective. In the in the paranormal supernatural
realms and discussions, the gnomes are generally the red hats especially,
which are what people usually decorate their gardens with, usually
according to experiences that are that are claimed they hate people.
Speaker 3: They hate us, yeah, the red caps, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. It's like a very common like oh, antagonizer, Yeah,
they don't like us at all, them and punk wadgies.
Speaker 1: Man, they just think that they don't have any time
for us. So, I don't know, I guess we rub
people wrong or something. Matt, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I can see it that that was one of the
more interesting like in looking at like paganism, especially like
modern paganism, which is an attempt to kind of like
go back to especially like pre Christian European times, Like
you see this real inversion of what had been happening
in centuries past, where like all these like educated guys
are saying, look at these superstitious rural people with their
fairy encounters. They know nothing, they don't have like the
training we do. And what a lot of modern pagans
are saying is like wait, a second, like these people
were closer to the earth, they had a better understanding
of the world around us, and maybe we should take
their advice. And there's a lot to be said about
like how pagan this is or how much it is
a reinvention of the nineteenth century and whatnot, but that
was a cool kind of like almost full circle moment
for part of the history was to see the Goblin
seen as part of this group of nature spirit. Essentially,
that represents a return to a oneness with the Earth
that's been lost in a world of say like you know,
industrial capitalism and things like that, you know, siloed in
concrete jungles, right, a yearning to return back to the
earth and to have that communing with nature.
Speaker 1: That is fascinating too. And when you look through like
the Victorian occult revivals that were really big people going
back to like seances and other occultic practices, and it
was a big resurgence in Victorian lifestyle. So yeah, I mean,
maybe we're maybe we're just on this treadmill that just
keeps repeating.
Speaker 3: Matt, Yeah, I mean it's attributed to Mark Twain, But
there's that quote, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but
it echoes and I I yeah, yeah, I feel that
in my bones a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: So before we're done, I want you to take a
moment and let people know how to stay in touch
with both what you're doing and where to find the books.
And you know how to stay.
Speaker 2: In touch, okay, for sure.
Speaker 3: So I mean my email is Matthew King one at
USF dot edu. If you just type in matt King
Goblins you'll probably find me. But I'm I'm an associate
president the University of South Florida and I have my
information available there. I am not one for social.
Speaker 2: Media these days.
Speaker 3: It's just it's too much and I'm trying to spend
less time on screens and more time outside though, as
you said, in Florida, it is not a good time
to be outside. So yeah, if anyone wants to get
in contact, you know, my email is the best way.
And yeah, no, I just really appreciate taking the time
to chat with me. I know this is not my lane, right,
I know I'm entering into a different world, but I
hope we both take something from each other in a
conversation like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm actually really pleased with the discussion because I
think it's I think that it's important to acknowledge all
facets of this stuff, not just the parts that a
lot of us want to believe in. I mean, there's
there's there's an entomology to this, there's a there's the
information has traveled and how does it transform us and
our experiences. I think it's a very powerful aspect of this.
So I think that's what you've really helped color in.
But how did they find the book?
Speaker 3: If you type in a History of Goblins into Google,
you can get it via Amazon. The publisher is Paul Grave,
and so it's just called The History of Goblins, released
a few weeks ago, and so I think it's the
only one called that.
Speaker 2: I know it's the only one called that. So a
Google search we'll get you there.
Speaker 1: Very good, sir, Well, I really appreciate you taking the time.
I haven't really enjoyed our conversation. It's there's so much
unpacked with all of this stuff, but thank you for
breaking it down for us as best as you can,
and let me you know, if you ever got to
come back and tell us something new, let me know.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it. Thanks for having me all.
Speaker 1: Right man, Thank you so much. All right, everybody, that's
going to wrap it up for us today. So hope
you guys enjoyed the show, and thank you again so
much for all your love and support. And remember, if
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remember to laugh as much as you can. Until next time, Bah,