#the mutability of names

Don’t let the date fool you, this is actually from 11/27/2020. It’s a little experiment using folklore/TDG sensibilities compared to modern fantasy ones.

Quick! You are in the English countryside and have encountered a supernatural being. It is social, lives inside a hill, has access to immense wealth, can become invisible to harass human beings, rewards the good, and punished the bad. Is it:

a) a fairy
b) an elf
c) a goblin?

The answer is… you don’t know! It could be any of the three, as, depending on the specific locality in question, there may not be any meaningful difference between the three. In modern fantasy there is a strong pressure to canonize certain traits to form a homogeneous species out of folkloric stories. Certain names are attached to these and thus come to be synonymous with them. But in the original stories they come from, these names don’t carry as much power as one might think. The story of Goblin Combe shows goblins being just as pretty and sweet as regular ol’ fairies (they do disappear a guy, but that’s on par for fairies). The German Alp is derived from the word “alf”, or elf, and sits on people’s chests to cause nightmares or lick their nipples to draw blood like a vampire bat. And Oberon, aside from his appearance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a dwarf who literally derives from Alberich. Despite what connotations the names might imply they are just names and can change in meaning or be switched around as a story-teller desires. Which isn’t to say that there are no mean and ugly goblins or pretty and winged fairies, just that there is no “one true” version of the creatures.

Another reason why “A Guide to Household & Garden-side Pests” (Anon) is trite, in Dwoll’s opinion. The compilers who stolehis notes (re: found them after he was missing for a while without knowing who wrote them) didn’t have any of the real first-hand experience with the pests they wrote about. So they delineated species and families arbitrarily and failed to acknowledge the flexibility of the supernatural world, which they probably never knew about in the first place! Oooooh it just makes him so mad.