Hobgoblin

The fire has burned down to a red heap of embers, and in the hush after the household has climbed the stairs to bed, something small comes out of the shadow beside the hearth. It carries no candle. It knows where the flags lie unswept, where the tangled wool sits waiting, where the churn stands with its work half done, and it sets to all of it in the dark, warming its hairy back against the last of the heat. By the time grey light reaches the kitchen the floor is clean, the wool is carded, and the family comes down to a morning’s labour already finished. They never see who did it. That is exactly how the hobgoblin prefers things.

For most of its long life in English folklore the hobgoblin was a friend to the house. It belonged to the same broad family as the brownie, that scattered tribe of little domestic spirits who attach themselves to a home or a farm and keep it running while the mortals sleep. Small, hairy, brown, no higher than a child, it went about its chores unseen and asked for almost nothing in return, a bowl of cream or a heel of bread left where it could find it. Where the brownie was sober and steady, though, the hobgoblin had a streak of humour in it, a fondness for a joke that its quieter cousin lacked. It was never a monster. It was the spirit of the hearth itself, and people spoke of it the way they spoke of the weather in their own kitchen.

The name says as much. Hobgoblin is hob and goblin welded together, and the hob is the old, fond diminutive of Robin or Robert, the same rustic nickname that gave the country its most famous sprite, Robin Goodfellow. To call a thing a hob was to call it homely, familiar, one of the household. Goblin darkened the edges a little, but for a long time the darkness was mostly for show. The word turns up in English around 1530, already carrying that mixture of the domestic and the uncanny, a creature you might curse when the milk went off and thank when the barn was swept.

Then the framing changed. As Christianity spread its long shadow across the old beliefs, the small spirits of the hearth were pushed toward the company of demons, and the hobgoblin’s mischief hardened in the retelling from harmless prank into something closer to malice. The tireless helper became a thing to be wary of. It kept its old habits, but now the tellers watched them with a colder eye, and the same creature that had carded the wool was suddenly suspected of spoiling it.

What never left the hobgoblin was its love of a trick, and no telling captures that better than the one Shakespeare gave the stage. Puck, the mischief-maker of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is named outright as a hobgoblin, and the play lets him boast of exactly what his kind get up to. He skims the cream from the pan and stops the housewife’s churn so her butter will not come. He leads night travellers off their path and laughs at their floundering. He whips a three-legged stool out from under an old woman just as she lowers herself to sit, so that she topples and coughs and the whole table roars. He can wear any shape he likes, a horse, a hound, a hog, a headless bear, a flame that dances just ahead in the dark. That shifting is the hobgoblin’s deepest gift and its greatest danger, the thing that lets a helper by the fire become a light on the moor that drowns a man.

There is an older, larger shadow behind the small figure too. In a play from 1607 a similar being called Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire is described as a giant and the son of a witch, and the folklorist Katharine Briggs treated the two as one and the same. Later fiction ran with the giant and forgot the hearth. Tolkien made his hobgoblins a bigger, fiercer sort of goblin, then admitted in a letter that he had got it backward, that the folklore truth was the reverse, the hob being the smaller and homelier thing all along. The muscled war-brute of modern games and novels is a young invention. The real hobgoblin would fit in a cupboard.

Its powers are the quiet, useful kind, sharpened by that one wild talent. It can finish a household’s work in a single night and knows every corner of the place as if it had built it. It can take whatever form suits its mood, help or hinder as it chooses, sour milk, tangle manes, and lead a lantern-seeking traveller straight into the bog. Its weakness is the same brittle pride that undoes every spirit of its kind. It cannot bear to be watched, thanked, or paid, and the surest way to lose one is to leave out a gift of clothes. Whether the hobgoblin is offended by the charity or simply too proud to labour in a new coat, no two tellers agree, but the result is always the same. It takes up the garment, and it goes, and a hobgoblin sent off badly does not always leave the milk sweet behind it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hobgoblin in English folklore?

A hobgoblin is a small household spirit of English folklore, a hairy little man closely related to the brownie who does chores around a home or farm at night in exchange for small offerings of food. Traditionally it was helpful and good-natured, though fonder of practical jokes than the quieter brownie. After the spread of Christianity, hobgoblins were increasingly recast as mischievous or even malicious.

Where does the word “hobgoblin” come from?

The word combines “hob,” an old, affectionate nickname derived from Robin or Robert and used for a rustic household sprite, with “goblin.” The name is first recorded in English around 1530. The “hob” element marks the creature as homely and familiar, the same diminutive that names the famous sprite Robin Goodfellow.

Is Puck a hobgoblin?

Yes. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the character Puck, also called Robin Goodfellow, is identified as a hobgoblin, and he is the most famous example of one. In the play he describes his typical pranks, including skimming cream, stopping butter from churning, misleading night travellers, frightening young women, and pulling stools out from under old women.

How do you get rid of a hobgoblin?

The traditional way to banish a hobgoblin is to give it a gift of clothing, which drives it away forever. Folklore disagrees on why, some say the spirit is offended by the gift, others that it is simply too proud to work once it has new clothes. Watching, thanking, or trying to pay a hobgoblin will also make it leave.

Are hobgoblins big and evil like in fantasy games?

No, that is a modern invention. In folklore the hobgoblin is small and homely, a hearth spirit no taller than a child. The large, warlike hobgoblins of works like Tolkien’s writings and Dungeons & Dragons reverse the original tradition, a change Tolkien himself later admitted was backward.

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Puck, Hob, Brownie, Boggart, Bogle, Goblin, Pixie, Redcap, Bugbear, Púca, Kobold