I have a friend who knows all there is to know about leprechauns and elves and so they always know where to find him as well 😉
A while ago he invited us home to meet leprechauns. As I passed the ditch at the back of his huge garden, I saw a kind of inlet looking a bit like a small port and there I perceived some tiny people I presumed to be leprechauns.
I asked them who they were. They told me they called themselves “Goblins”. Half an hour later I envisioned another one of them at the edge of a narrow stream that ran under the road. He actually rolled on the ground laughing, as though he was laughing at us and when I questioned him he disappeared.
So, although we met them and they appeared to be friendly they left me with a mixed feeling of uneasyness and pleasure.
A few days later I searched books and the internet on the meaning of this word “gnomes” and read that these goblins are a separate bunch of small people.
They are very playful but sometimes they have very nasty tricks.
They love to tease: they are the ones who knock over cups of milk, set the road signs and finger-posts the wrong way, they like to hide property of human beings, and the legends claim that they also change human baby’s [so called changeling’s]
Goblins originated in France and spread rapidly all over Europe. They have no homes and usually live in mossy clefts in rocks and roots of ancient trees, although they never stay very long in the same place.
The name ‘hobgoblin’ is thought to be an abbreviation of ‘Robin Goblin’, the name Druids gave to the first goblins when they entered Britain.
In an old book by Wirt Sykes , he gave the name of goblin to other tribes of elves-like people, but then he also often called tribes of dwarfs by the names of tribes of elves and vice versa (British Goblins Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions, Wirt Sikes [1880])
[Website of this friend, (German) ]
Yolanda 