Guide to Goblins: The Explicit
This post is part of my Guide to Goblins series. Click the link to check out the rest.
Today's goblin focus comes from @tiberianpun on dice.camp (you can follow me here!), who recommended me the Greco-Balkan goblin, the Kallikantzaros. While details of the Kallikantzaros vary from location to location in southeastern Europe, I'm choosing to focus on the Serbian interpretation, called the Karakondžula in Serbian. Then, we'll take a look at the most common subject of the JSTOR search for "Goblin," the Victorian poem Goblin Market. There's a unifying theme between them, I promise!
Our guiding questions are: what is the historical context of these stories? What are the key elements of these goblins? And then how can we adapt these goblins for our TTRPGs?
Karakondžula
Our first goblin this week is the karakondžula (or Kallikantzaros, in Greece). Known for primarily being active around Christmas, the Greek version of the myth even has the goblins as agents of the apocalypse, trying to saw at the world tree. In Serbia, the karakondžula is instead simply more active during the 12 days of Christmas, which is a general time period for evil creatures to come out.
Historical Context: Religious Beliefs of Eastern Europe
I'm not going to go into depth about Orthodox Christianity's beliefs and practices, both because I am not an expert and because I don't think that they are relevant here. The important aspect is that, for many centuries, the Balkans were a predominantly Orthodox Christian region under the rule of a mostly religiously tolerant, Muslim Ottoman Empire. There's a lot of cultural blending that comes into play in the region, giving rise to a variety of folkloric creatures, including the famous vampire, which we'll get into the mythology of for Halloween.
A great deal of Balkan folklore is a form of fear of the religious or ethnic "other," because a lot of folklore came into being in this time of religious and ethnic rule by a different culture. It's part of why vampires are seen as particularly susceptible to the crucifix; they are a demonic, "other" entity, and the power of the Church can protect you from such an other. This is the general tradition of the karakondžula.
It's another goblin that I've struggled to find English language scholarship about, so I'm going to have to make a few assumptions here based on the sources that I do have, and I'm going to have to trust more sketchy sources like Wikipedia for some of this, unfortunately. Once again, if you're a scholar with expertise in this subject... please let me know what I got wrong.
The karakondžula arise in two major Serbian traditions. The first is their connection with the twelve days of Christmas. This part is well-documented; during the days immediately following Christmas, all sorts of demons and evil entities come out to wreak havoc. It is the middle of winter and near the start of the New Year in the northern hemisphere, and so there is a general, pagan-descended idea that it is a moment of rebirth. Particularly in the Greek form of the myth, the karakondžula are only seen at Christmastime, as they spend the rest of the year sawing the trunk of the world tree to bring about the apocalypse (a very pagan understanding of the world). When the final part of the trunk is about to be sawed, Christmas comes and the goblins emerge to the surface, leaving the tree to heal itself by Epiphany (January 6th), restarting the year.
This brief period, where evil creatures come to earth to interfere with mortals, is a moment for general hedonism. According to one scholar (link below), there is a general sort of freeing of one's attitudes. There is often an eroticism in stories concerning this Christmas moment, which is a major contrast to the Western focus on the virginity of Mary.
There is also a tradition in Serbia of unmarried men going around, making lots of noise, as a way of driving off any karakondžula that has entered the mortal world. This tradition is tied to raucous Serbian wedding customs, where driving off evil spirits (and goblins) is also an essential practice to ensure a long and happy marriage.
All this leads to another aspect of the karakondžula mythology, though it was one I was mostly only able to reference on Wikipedia: that these goblins are also the particular torturers of adulterers.
Adulterers were known to sneak out of their homes while their significant other would sleep, and then visit the person they were cheating with... The karakondžula would sit and wait on the top of the doorframe of the front door to the house and jump on the back of the adulterers and lash them with a stick or scratch or dig its sharp nails in the person's back and neck and force them to run through nearby forests all night.
Normally I would not reference something that I could only find on Wikipedia and not in a more authoritative source, but this one fits well with the wedding custom of chasing off the karakondžula, so I think it is still worth sharing. Having one nearby would indicate infidelity, even if the goblin is only a punisher for infidelity rather than a cause.
So with this somewhat messy collection of stories and context about the karakondžula, what can we take away from it to inform our own adaptations?
My main takeaway is that the karakondžula represents a sort of hedonistic "other." While Western Christians prized chastity as a major virtue, they were also fascinated with the idea of the harems of the Ottoman Empire. This sort of sexual libertinism is a label that Western Europeans loved to paint Eastern Europe with (and is a major part of, for example, Dracula). For people actually living under the Ottomans, the karakondžula are possibly a representation of the "threat" posed to Christian virtue in the region. They are markers of sexual immorality, and they threaten to destroy the world until they are driven off by Christian power at Epiphany. Again, this is my interpretation based on a combining of what scholarship and myths I can find; I wasn't able to find a scholarly theory saying this with abundant sources and significant research, so I may be wildly off base, but that is my impression of what I've read.
Depiction
Karakondžula are described as "heavy, squat, and ugly"--a more heavyset creature than our goblins often are. Their ugliness fits with our larger notions of being grotesques. In some stories, they remain short as goblins tend to be depicted.
Still, these goblins are noted for varying in depiction from region to region and even source to source. Some illustrators depict them with animal parts. Sometimes they're even depicted as giants, while in others they are tiny. Scholar Carlo Ginzburg writes that they are predominantly male, often with protruding sexual characteristics--again, that idea of sexual immorality springs up. Wikipedia reports that most stories, however, have them (at least in Greek versions) as "small, black creatures, humanoid apart from their long black tails."
The Serbian depictions of karakondžula seem to be universally nocturnal. They appear at night during the Twelve Days of Christmas, when it would jump on the person's back and demand to be carried, before disappearing at dawn. Similarly, when the goblin would appear to an adulterer, they would wait for the adulterer to leave their house at night to go to the place where they are having their affair. Then, they would once again jump on the person's back, lashing and clawing at them, before fleeing at first light.
Adaptation
So our two defining traits of karakondžula are that they are both signifiers and, in some ways, depictions of fears of a religious "other" that challenges Christian virtues; and that they are nocturnal. How can we take those elements and fit them into a D&D campaign, especially since most D&D campaigns don't (and probably shouldn't) focus on sexual themes?
I don't think we really have enough here to make a goblin subculture that meaningfully engages with the mythology. A different and distinct creature? Absolutely. But for something that we could generalize, where we'd be able to feel like our goblins have a reason for becoming a distinct culture, more relevant than just for one hyperfocused plotline? Not in my opinion. So let's turn to another story that links concepts around sexuality and goblins, and instead of creating two goblin subcultures, we'll merge the two stories into one culture.
"The Goblin Market"
Our second goblin this week comes from the 1859 poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti. If I struggled to find scholarship in English about the karakondžula, oh boy, did I have absolutely no trouble finding scholarship about Goblin Market. There are many, many academic papers, an abundance of dissertations, and so many debates about the meanings of the poem that I cannot hope to summarize them all. You can read the full poem itself below, though it is probably best read at home--it is pretty overt in its sexual descriptions, so quite literally it might not be considered "safe for work".
Christina Rossetti
For a very quick summary of the poem: two girls, Laura and Lizzie, live by a river. They are tempted by the calls of "river goblins" who are selling fresh fruit, which would have been an inaccessible luxury for a lower-class individual at the time. While Lizzie goes home, Laura decides to purchase fruit, but having no money, trades a lock of her hair in exchange. Laura gorges herself, but when she returns home, Lizzie criticizes her–another girl in the village had eaten goblin fruits and then wasted away. Laura ignores the criticism.
The next night, Laura cannot hear nor see the goblins calling out about their wares, while Lizzie still can. Distraught that she will never be able to eat the fruit again because she cannot find the vendors, she grows weaker and weaker over the next months.
Months later, Lizzie decides to buy fruit for Laura to prevent her from dying and goes with money. However, when the goblins learn that Lizzie is not going to eat the fruit herself, they attack her and try to force-feed her the fruit. She escapes, and she returns home to feed Laura the pulp and juice that she has gotten soaked in from the attempted force-feeding. Laura finds it gross, but by the next morning, she is cured.
Interpretation
So while there are a ton of differing opinions on Goblin Market--just a quick search on JSTOR for "Goblin Market" will pull up too many articles to read in passing--there are a few key strands of academic interpretation of the poem.
The first strand of interpretation is the feminist reading of the poem. The Victorian era was one of really conservative opinions on sex as something that could only be confined to marriage; it is the Victorians from which a lot of English and American concerns over "sexual immorality" come, not necessarily something more rooted in the more distant past. A lot of Victorian works have a sexual theme (for example, Dracula, which elevates the monogamous Mina Harker while killing off the more "tempting" Lucy and exoticizing Dracula for having multiple "brides").
In this reading of the poem, Goblin Market pushes back against a lot of Victorian tropes by allowing Laura to be cured at the end. She is not a "fallen woman" because she engaged in the sexualized act of eating juicy fruit--a reference to the "forbidden fruit" of the Bible with Eve and Adam. Or rather, she is not the Victorian ideal of a fallen woman who can never recover; through love, she recovers, while most fallen women of Victorian literature die for their crimes (like Lucy in Dracula). This reading is bolstered, in my opinion, by Rossetti's own volunteer work in a prison for "fallen women." She has a strong motive for believing in the possibility of redemption.
Another academic strand is reading the Victorian obsession with race in the text. We talked in the kick-off article to this series about antisemitism and goblins, something that was far from universal in traditional myths (just look at the karakondžula, or the pukwudgies, or the redcaps). However, the antisemitic conflation of goblins with Jewish people was something actively happening in the highly antisemitic world of the Victorian era. Eight years before the drafting of Goblin Market was the publication of Yeast, which was hugely influential in establishing goblins as an antisemitic trope.
In this reading of the text, the goblins are allegories for Jewish people, tempting "good Christians" away from the true faith. There was an existent idea that Jewish people had access to goods that other merchants did not, such as fruit, because Jewish communities in the Middle Ages would keep in better contact across international boundaries, enabling different trade routes for Jewish merchants. While in practice that difference had mostly gone away by the Victorian era, I do believe that Rossetti could have been drawing on that trope, and consequently tried to imply a pro-Christian, antisemitic allegory in the text; it is a Victorian text, after all.
The third major trend of scholarship about the text is that it is economic. Over the century prior to the writing of Goblin Market, the Industrial Revolution had disrupted traditional ways of life, from farming to manufacturing to, importantly, the ways that goods were sold. Permanent shops, rather than traditional markets, were becoming the norm. Despite growing economic output, things like fruit remained luxuries only for the rich, and wealth inequality was certainly being perpetuated if not worsening (just who the rich were was changing hands).
In this reading of Goblin Market, the work is either a critique or an endorsement of the economic changes im society. It is either a critique of the way that the rising shops used advertisement, an innovation in Victorian society in many ways, seen in the way that the goblins call out to tempt the girls away from propriety; or it is a critique of the traditional "market" scenes for essentially the same reasoning, and an endorsement of the more modern, urban shops. The way that the fruit leads to wasting away and creating a craving also sounds to me like it is addictive, and the rising Victorian availability of opium and cocaine meant that I think it could also be a critique of Victorian drug marketing.
You can find way more nuanced arguments within each of these strands of scholarship, but this is the broad overview of the way that scholars seem to be talking about the work, based on my research.
Depictions and Powers
Goblins in the Goblin Market are almost animalistic. From the poem: "One had a cat’s face, One whisk’d a tail, One tramp’d at a rat’s pace, One crawl’d like a snail, One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves, cooing all together."
In terms of powers, these goblins mostly are just... persuasive. They're tempting. I think they can definitely be read as magical, with the power to turn invisible to some (to Laura after she has eaten the fruit) and possibly magical enhancements to their ability to tempt. Their fruit is certainly enhanced; it is addictive and leads to memory loss, disease, and ultimately wasting away. Perhaps a sort of magically cursed item?
Beyond that, the poem is fairly limited in terms of descriptive text, so we'll move on to our adaptation.
Adaptation
Just as the karakondžula does not feel like it presents enough material for a whole goblin subculture that could be used more generally, beyond just one hyperfocused quest or adventure, neither does the Goblin Market. However, by combining the two of them, I think we have a pretty good goblin cultural option.
Visually, I want my goblins to still all look goblinoid, so we're going to use our more specific, less animalistic karakondžula depiction. These goblins will be particularly squat for a goblin: more burly than skinny and darting. We can borrow some of the imagery from bugbears from standard D&D, the brawny cousins of typical goblins. They're darker than regular goblins--maybe a sort of dark grey rather than the sallow yellow traditional to goblins in D&D--and we'll keep a sort of tail as our nod to the animalism of the Goblin Market goblins (as it is also something that shows up in the karakondžula).
Culturally, I think our goblins are going to be traveling merchants, to borrow from the Market Goblins. These goblins are going to have a strict moral code and a belief in fidelity. They have a strictly contractual culture. This also connects as a way to subvert the idea of goblins as thieves; these are scrupulously non-thieves, and will actually attempt to persecute thieves, even if they are other goblins. However, these goblins believe strongly in the concept of buyer beware; they will never steal or break a contract once agreed to, nor falsely advertise, but they do not offer refunds or warranties.
These goblins also have an intense notion of communal responsibility--again, playing with the notion of communal identity that we've explored with some of our other goblins. If one person violates a contract, it is on the entire community to punish them. This is another way that these goblins are sometimes seen as thieves; if you break a contract with your neighbor, and your neighbor forgives you, these goblins will still burgle your house to give your neighbor what the neighbor was promised in the broken contract. They feel that it is their responsibility to punish contract breaches even if they are uninvolved in it.
One particular contract that they hold sacred is marriage. They will punish adulterers for the same reason as they'll burgle a house. Marriage is a contract, and so adultery is a communal responsibility to punish--even if your spouse doesn't know of your infidelity, or even if they forgive you.
One may question why these goblins are allowed into town if they're going to stick their noses in business that doesn't concern them and carry out their own particular breed of justice. They certainly have a reputation for bringing danger. But, these goblins are talented magic users, a highly regarded profession in their culture. They bring magic items to town for sale, goods that are out of reach for the regular peasant.
The idea of "wandering merchants bringing unavailable goods, magic users, who somewhat keep themselves as a distinct culture" can very easily be used in an antisemitic or anti-Roma way. I don't think that the idea itself is inherently discriminatory, but it is something to be on guard about accidentally falling into. Therefore, I want to emphasize a few things in their descriptions to avoid falling into real-world cultural stereotypes.
First, that these goblins are highly moral--they're not looking to trick people into signing bad contracts. That keeps some of the "anti" parts from being relevant. Second, I think that these goblins should be fairly drab; I don't want the colorful exoticism that often is applied to traveling merchants that caricatures Roma people to be a part of these goblins. Third, I want to make sure that their physical characteristics do not fall into any traditional stereotypes of Jewish or Roma people--which I think we're certainly accomplishing with the descriptions we've established.
Conclusion
This union of the Goblin Market goblins and the karakondžula is our seventh goblin subculture group that will be in my eventual Guide to Goblins product that I'm covering with the Guide to Goblins series on the blog. Be sure to subscribe to the blog to have future posts delivered to your inbox so that you make sure that you do not miss any! I hope you are all enjoying this series. I'm having a lot of fun writing it and exploring the folklore. And stay tuned for news of when I'll release the full and polished product!