Business Practices in Today's Economy
Time’s are tough. I think we can all agree on that. The global economy is suffering and so are people. When people can’t pay their bills, bad things happen, namely goblins coming to your house and destroying you. If there’s nobody to get in the way, they can loot your house at will!
Goblins have long been a favourite of mine, though they are tremendously under appreciated in storytelling and lore. You see them sometimes as an afterthought in fantasy literature, never really at center stage. Orcs, on the other hand, get all the attention in the world. There was a series of books my brother had picked up at one point that told a story entirely based around them and painted them as misunderstood rather than outright evil. I want to see that sort of treatment for goblins.
You seem to get two types of goblins in literature. Evil, horrendous, weak and cowardly goblins, or the Brian Froud sort of goblins, small, mischievous, and fun-loving. I would argue that Froud’s goblins are just faeries in disguise. Reprehensible!
Tolkien, for whatever reason, seemed a bit confused about where goblins fit into his own setting; surprising for a man so thorough in almost every other regard. He often used the terms orc and goblin independently, as though they were separate races, but then states in other parts of his books that they were one in the same. I’m not sure if anyone’s done a thorough study of this, but if they have, I am legitimately curious, no matter how ridiculous the matter is.
Some of the most fun goblins can be found in the Warhammer universe. Warhammer is a fantasy tabletop game which set the tone for a lot of other games (the notorious World of Warcraft included) and books. Their goblins are small and weak, subservient to their orc cousins, but smart, quick, and clever. I always thought that sort of synergistic relationship was pretty interesting.
Part of the fun of folktales and myths is that you can impress your own ideas upon them with relative ease. These monsters and legends are pretty widely recognized and drawing on something like that as inspiration for a story or a joke is a lovely thing. It can be difficult to do right, but when it happens, it’s magic.
Discussion (26) ¬
I’ll never let anyone from the power company come to my home again D: haha
If you haven’t heard of it, there’s a comic you should read that is just called Goblins. The web address is http://goblins.keenspot.com or http://goblinscomic.com
It is the work in which goblins are misunderstood rather than cruel. Usually. It does make a villain out of the heroic adventurers a lot.
I always liked the concept of goblins used in Magic: The Gathering the best.
you’re right. now i kinda wish goblins were more understood haha. if i could write well i would so be the next one to make a series based on goblins in whatever style you want :p (i’d be a writer for hire lmao)
Lil’ K is such a racist.
Goblins may very well be the personified mischevious nature of Faeries. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck is called “hobgoblin” by the villiage maidens, and is known for his debauchery and shenannigans. Speaking of which, I play Oberon in our college’s production of the play and would love to see your thoughts on Faerie-kind, especially in this context of intervention with the human world.
Goblins replaced vampires in my heart. But, of couse, vampires were evicted when they began wearing glitter.
From what I understand about tolkiens works…goblins are a variety of orcs. Goblins are smaller more wilely orcs. But not all orcs are goblins. Kinda like how not all rectangles are squares, but all squares are rectangles. Now I’m confused as to bow I got into this tangent on geometry.
@arex: Geometry is relevent to everything.
I love the moblins from the Zelda universe. They’re like a weird variation of goblins.
I’m just happy he mentioned Warhammer.
http://goblins.keenspot.com/
have you seen the 10th kingdom its a BBC miniseries/one really long long movie (4 vhs cassettes) from 2000, goblins have their own kingdom though they arn’t very smart they are seen allot. the storyline ties together many fairy tails into one world its worth watching, its just fun
I just read this comic from start to finish, and I have to say, this is absolutely adorable and hilarious.
well, im reading The Silmarilion now, so… about orcs and golblins, the explanation is kind of easier. if you dont mind reading a small wall of text here it is:
Orcs are a race created by one of the low gods in arda, melkor, or rather the first dark lord.
orcs are nothing but poor elves who were captured by the first dark lord, and suffered slow torture and mad science things, add some malice and evil, wait some years and tadaa there you have a genuine tolkien’s orc.(thats why tolkien’s orcs are black, part of the torture involved fire and burns)
golblins are those orcs that get astray and went to live under holes. and at free will. the difference between orcs and golblins are basically the social arrangement. Orcs have the dark lord as supreme sire, and the golblins have a king, but they are a bunch more disorganized than the orcs, also technology and stuff.
thats all i know about Tolkien’s golblins and orcs, i hope i could help at least a little.
Have you read the Order of the Stick? (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html) It definitely has goblins with a rich backstory and whatnot. Very fun comic!
Also, I adore your comic, just so you know. Liz got me into it (I’m one of her roommates) and I’m glad she did, it’s plenty fun!
Alsoalso, have you read Neil Gaimen’s book “American Gods”? I’m about halfway through it, and enjoying all the modern day interpretations of gods. You might too!
~Sor
Wow! So many great comments and goblin stories! How exciting! Thanks guys and gals! 🙂
@Shiokazu That was very informative thanks. I tried reading The Silmarillion a long time ago but it was a bit dense for me without much thematic reward so I dropped it.
@Sorcyress I’m glad you’re enjoying it and yes I’ve read American Gods, its one of my favourite books of all time. Neil Gaiman is one of my heroes along with Terry Pratchett who worked with him on Good Omens (another of my favourites!).
Aren’t Tolkien goblins much smaller than orcs? Gollum’s a sort of mutant hobbit, and so can’t be very large, but he’s strong enough to overpower goblins on occasion – and orcs are fairly large, I thought.
Anyway, Jim C. Hines has written some books about goblins that might be exactly what you’re looking for, if you haven’t already run into them. They’ve got goblins as protagonists and of course the goblins are rotten but also sort of misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted- although I think that the goblins are maybe a bit more orcish than you’d like.
And A. Lee Martinez has a book called “In The Company of Ogres” that has some very funny commentary on exactly where goblins fit into the world of fantasy.
In the Tolkien Encyclopedia it is stated that after the initial creation of the orcs out of elves, Sauron came along and put more magic into the orcs under his control. Then from there made the Uruk-hai. So the original orcs that ran off and live in caves, are more like the Goblins we all know/love and the modified orcs that Sauron created are more like what we think of orcs today. and then the Uruk-Hai are just Badasses. 🙂
I think the real explanation is that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and it was an earlier work, and it was more of a children’s book, and he used goblins in it.
Later, he wrote LoTR. It was a later, more grown-up work. And it had orcs. And so he basically retconned orcs and goblins to be the same thing, or at least different flavors of the same species.
Also, I LOVE that you love Neil and Terry! Their books are the best. Also, Sandman.
Sadly, I don’t have it within reach right now, but I believe in the “translation notes” bit at the end of The Return Of The King, Tolkien mentions that “orc” is just the Elvish (Sindarin?) word for goblin, and that he chose to “not translate” the word ‘orc’ so that people wouldn’t think about Brian Froud during the seige of Minas Tirish, for example.
For example, the name of the sword “Orcrist” is translated as “Goblin-smasher” in /The Hobbit/.
As far as I can tell, the word “orc,” as with the plural forms “elves” and “dwarves” (using the f->ve) are Tolkien originals… although IIRC he found some Old English (Beowulfian era) word “orc” that meant something like “troll,” and re-purposed it?
having just come across this comic and thus going on an archive binge for all the awesome, and having read a fair bit of tolkien and some of the backstory stuff (Shippey’s Road to Middle Earth is a pretty fascinating take on a lot of Tolkien’s influences, particularly in the academic philological sense)…The Hobbit primarily grew out of stories he made up for his children, only somewhat loosely being integrated into his own mythos (what would become the Silmarillion) with characters like Elrond, and mentions of things like Gondolin. When asked for a sequel, he first presented the Silmarillion stuff, but being a collection of various stories in entirely different styles (and none like the Hobbit) they were rejected, so thats when he started LOTR, which he was much more deliberate about being in Middle-Earth. Goblin and Orc are pretty much equivalent, though goblin does tend to refer to one’s living in the caves under mountains (such as those seen in the Hobbit and in Moria in LOTR)
The orc thing came from orcneas (from Beowulf) which literally translates to demon-corpses, Elves and Dwarves (as opposed to Elfs and Dwarfs) comes from his stance that elf and dwarf were both native English words that had simply fallen out of use before being reborrowed from German, and therefore should follow the normal rules for native English words (hoof-hooves being an example from a word that never fell out of use)…The biggest thing to remember with Tolkien is he was a philologist at heart (a big reason for creating Middle-Earth being by his own admission to create a place where his invented languages would have been spoken). I’m sure it also didn’t hurt in creating a bit of a distinction from the Victorian notion of elves and fairies and all that
whoops, wall of text…but eh, I’m wordy, what can I say.
If anyone’s interested, I believe the series he refers to that paints orcs in a new light is the Banewreaker series.
Oh, and the word ‘orc’ was not made up by Tolkein. Its etymology is closely related to that of the word ‘ogre’.
Damn, I wish this was a Labyrinth reference.