Goblin Culture, Part One

Worldbuilding

I’m working on a novel called Ogrecrantz & Goblinstern, and despite getting second billing, Goblinstern is the narrator of the story.

I wanted to create my own twist on goblins, and after some thinking I decided to write goblins not as greedy, untrustworthy creatures, but as beings who are often stereotyped as greedy and untrustworthy due to cultural differences. I have ADHD and many neurodiverse friends and colleagues, so this naturally led to me thinking about goblins in terms of neurodiversity, which led to me thinking “what would a society be like if ADHD is the norm?”

This actually dovetails well with some goblin stereotypes. For instance, goblins treat ownership of objects differently from humans. To the goblin mind, it’s silly to “own” something like a spoon. Why would you claim to own something you’re likely to lose track of? So many common, portable objects are considered up for grabs. It’s similar to the “Need a penny? Take a penny. Have a penny? Leave a penny.” trays you find in convenience stores and the like, except everywhere.

I’ll go into that in more detail, but in this post I want to start at a higher level and talk about how the goblins in my book organize their society.

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Goblins live in warrens, each with a population of somewhere in the range of 100 to 300. Goblin warrens are rarely within a day’s walk (human or goblin) of each other, and there’s no central goblin authority. Goblins are not generally travelers, and the main reason two goblin warrens might make contact is to provide potential mates for each other.

Because goblin warrens are small enough that everyone knows everyone, their society works more by custom than by law. Most taboos are enforced socially, and being a pariah in your warren can be worse than prison would be. Issues that can’t be worked out goblin-to-goblin, or issues that threaten to divide the warren, are resolved by the king of the warren.

“King” is a gender-neutral term among goblins, as are most titles and occupations. I’ll be honest, I’m using the word “king” just because there’s so much precedent in fantasy literature for “goblin kings.” A goblin king’s authority is closer to what you’d probably call a chieftain; they only hold sway over their own warren. The title is usually inherited, but not according to gender or precedence. An heir is not named until the heir reaches 15, and if the king is still young, they will usually wait until at least two or three of their children reach 15 to name an heir.

In theory, the king chooses the heir. In practice, the king is greatly influenced by the opinions of the warren as a whole. It’s exceedingly rare for a king to choose an antisocial, malicious child as the heir, and in some cases kings have chosen a more distant relative such as a niece or nephew rather than incite a mutiny.

(I want to take a moment and note here that not all of this is ADHD-related. The reason I chose small communities is that it makes a lot of the other aspects of the culture easier to imagine. “Need a penny? Take a penny” works better in a small community than a large city where someone could get away with hoarding pennies more easily.)

One key to goblin survivability is that they can choose to become fertile or not. I haven’t decided on a mechanism yet, but this ability both prevents overpopulation and underpopulation. Goblinstern himself was conceived after dozens of goblins were killed by greatsparrows in a catastrophe called the Ravening.

(Greatsparrows are what they sound like, giant sparrows. They don’t usually hunt animals, but sometimes during their breeding season they just decide to attack anything they see. I based this on Australia.)

Does built-in birth control turn warrens into giant orgies? Not really. There isn’t a taboo against premarital sex, but when you have a personal connection to everyone in your community, and a third of them are your cousins, your dating pool can be pretty small. At this point I don’t really expect the stories to get down and dirty, so I haven’t fleshed out (heh) sexual customs fully in my head.

I haven’t worked out a lot of details around family, except that having two parents is the most common arrangement but not the only acceptable one. There are certainly gay and trans goblins, and there’s no taboo or custom against their existence or relationships. Only the first half of the first book actually takes place in Goblinstern’s warren, and it doesn’t involve romance, so all the reader really learns is that Goblinstern only has a father, who is a widower.

Goblins are unique among “the folk” because they make their homes both aboveground and below ground. Humans, for example, build mines and quarries, and some may live in homes carved from a bluff, but they don’t typically actually build homes underground. The same applies to various underground folk and the overworld. About eighty percent of goblins in a given warren make their homes underground, and that’s where most activity takes place. The other twenty percent are usually farmers, herders, fishers, or have some other occupation that mostly takes place aboveground. The most common crop is millet, and the most common livestock are chickens and cavies, large guinea pigs raised for meat. Sorry, guinea pig lovers!

There is, naturally, a bit of a cultural divide between the “oversiders” and the “undersiders.” It’s not the sort of thing that often leads to overt discrimination, it’s more like the rivalry the day shift and the night shift might have at a restaurant, or the rivalry between the U.S. Army and Navy.

Goblin society is based on apprenticeship. A goblin is expected to find an apprenticeship at the age of 11, and they typically leave home and instead live in the workplace of their “lector.” This is true even if the apprentice is the child of the lector; living where you will work is considered core to learning the job.

Goblins who can’t or don’t want to find an apprentice will become “shovelers,” which is a word instead of “terrier” or “digger” because it’s less confusing and funnier. Shovelers keep the underside safe and stable; buttressing tunnels, redirecting leaks, and digging new areas when needed. Goblins are not above a bit of snobbery, and shoveling is a low-status job, but shovelers are on equal footing when it comes to things like access to resources and justice under the king. Shovelers don’t typically do the planning, they follow the dictates of another occupation for which I haven’t come up with a name, but basically civil engineers.

Now this all sounds kind of spare and utopian, so I do want to add that goblins can be as cantankerous, rude, and selfish as you like. The small community limits the amount that a miscreant can get away with, but Goblinstern’s nemesis in the first part of the book is a younger goblin who knows how to work the system to torment him out of jealousy and pure cussedness.