I would be interested to hear your goblin ideas.
Well, OK, but you may be sorry that you asked, since my ideas about goblins became more and more complex as I wrote the stories in which they appear.
In
Goblin Moon there are, first of all, the gigantic Goblins of myth and legend, voracious and terrifying, exemplified by the personification of the devouring moon, swelling and growing hungry for half of each month, bringing high tides that eat greedily at the land when the moon is full, as well as tremors in the earth, and occasionally quite serious quakes. Rivers jump their bounds washing away villages and farms, people, houses, graveyards, etc. etc. It is during the full moon that the discovery of a coffin floating on the river, containing the remarkably well-preserved body of a sorcerer and his books, which launches the main plot, involving a mad alchemist obsessed with the magician’s books, a vengeful fairy duchess and her intended victim (a young girl who has reached the magically dangerous age of sixteen) and the swashbuckling adventures of our dashing hero.
Then there are the common, everyday hobgoblins. In appearance somewhere between a rat and a monkey, hobs have clever little hands with opposable thumbs, which give them the ability to open locks and creep inside houses. It is almost impossible to keep them out when they want to get in. At the full moon they are most vicious, for then the rumbling in the earth drives them from their underground dens. Their bite is poisonous, and if not properly treated may result in the loss of a limb. For all these reasons they are regarded as vermin, and killed without compunction.
But in the sequel — originally called
The Gnome's Engine but re-issued a few years ago as
Hobgoblin Night— which finds my MCs (fleeing the wrath of the Duchess) across the sea on another continent, where Humans and Dwarves and other races of so-called "rational beings" have been settled for a scant few centuries, the hobgoblins are actually a separate species from the Old World hobs, mistaken and misnamed by the early settlers, because of a superficial resemblance and the fact that they live underground. They are mischievous but not dangerous: thieves, mimics, a terror to gardeners because they'll eat a rosebush from the bottom up in a single night, and they'll undermine the foundations of buildings with their tunneling and appetite for wood. Are they vermin? Are they intelligent? What are they up to and what should be done about them? These are some of the mysteries that my main characters must solve. (If you look at the cover for
Hobgoblin Night, down below in my signature, you can see what my hobgoblins look like, though due to artistic license on the part of the cover artist the hob is depicted somewhat larger than life-size.)
It was several years later that I wrote
The Queen's Necklace. Like GM and HN it is set in swashbuckling 18th century type setting, but it is not the same world. Originally the villains were to be a beautiful but terrifying race of fairies, which I named the Vough, who had ruled the world for five thousand years (give or take a century) before they were overthrown by humans and supposedly exterminated fifteen hundred years before the beginning of my story.
How the Vough became Goblins instead of fairies I don't remember, but somewhere between completing the outline for submission to my agent and publisher and writing the first chapters it somehow happened. After a while, I decided that "Vough" did not sound threatening enough, so I changed the name of their species to Maglore, something I ran across in a book of fairy tales, the name of a vengeful fairy godmother. Still beautiful, they had become willful, ruthless, and vain . . . and of course some of them had survived to produce future generations, or what would be the use of them?
As they had once ruled a world-spanning empire and lost it, when my novel begins they naturally
want it back. Much of the story revolves around the schemes of the Goblin princess Ys, and her formidable governess, Valentine Solange.
As the story developed, my ideas about the Maglore evolved. They had survived because they are outwardly indistinguishable from humans, allowing them to hide in plain side, but that appearance is deceptive. Internally, the Goblins of TQN are more closely related to plants than animals.
There are other Goblins in the story, four species once subservient to the Maglore. Regarding them as harmless, Men contented themselves with herding them into ghettos, where they continue to live in poverty, even though many are exquisite craftsmen, or gifted in philosophy and the natural sciences. I had come across the names previously — Ouphs, Padfoots, Grants, and Wrynecks — and liked the sound of them. The first three are mentioned in the Denham Tracts, which were written in the mid 1800s, as part of a long, long, long list of fairies, goblins, spectres, woodland spirits, and other supernatural beings (which rather interestingly includes hobbits). I don't remember where I encountered the name Wryneck. These Goblins lack the beauty of their former masters — in the eyes of humans they are small and malformed (Ouphs and Padfoots), or tall and gangly (Wrynecks and Grants) — but share the Maglore's vulnerability to salt and fire.
The natural life span of the Maglore is measured in centuries, and for most of that span they age slowly, but near the end they swiftly deteriorate, mentally as well as physically. They are expected to suicide as soon as this process of rapid aging begins, but vanity drives many of them to do so at the very first wrinkle. But the last Empress was greedy for life, and not only lived on as her beauty withered but even after her mind had lapsed into senility. When she died she had no obvious heirs, since her daughters and granddaughters, nieces and great-nieces had all departed at the first signs of age. With the succession in doubt, the government in turmoil, the Maglore were vulnerable, and it was then that Men rebelled and won their freedom.
There is much more I could say, since my ideas continually evolved in researching and writing the story, but I am sure I have waxed eloquent for quite long enough! ("Too Much Information," I can hear everyone cry.)
By the way, I know of several recent books which feature goblins as characters, so I think they are not as under-used as you might think, though there is certainly room for many more such books.
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Much of the above is adapted from a guest post I did a few years ago for Jo Zebedee's blog.
