rustchild
I am mere centimeters away from writing a full on essay about how the “goblins are inherently antisemitic” myth spawned by this website propagates misinformation, displays a huge misunderstanding of what folklore is and does, and contributes to an environment that distracts people from how antisemitism actually operates and the ways in which it’s dangerously on the rise in our current climate–something which, surprise surprise, has almost nothing to do with little green fairy men
There are antisemitic iterations of the goblin! There are also antisemitic iterations of basically everything in European folklore, because if there was one thing people in Europe loved it was hating Jews! But those aren’t definitive and the problem there didn’t originate with the invention of the goblin–which was an evolution of other existing fairy myths, overlaps with them, and isn’t nearly as distinct, differentiated, or universally codified as people seem to think. It originated with people hating Jews, and using pre-existing stories and myths to express that hatred. Most of the time, though, they just wrote about Jews, because they didn’t need a secret magical creature code to be terrible to us. They could just do that!
The way that people on this website are obsessed with a single, “original” version of a story, which can then be deemed morally acceptable or unacceptable, goes fundamentally against the way folklore is created, propagated, modified, and used to fit different locations at different times. There isn’t a single “problematic” goblin canon you can point to! They aren’t defined that simply! And no, A Certain Popular Fantasy Series doesn’t count!
By focusing on the goblin as the problematic thing, and not the stories about Jews that the antisemitic goblin myths–which are rarer than people seem to think–draw off of, the Discourse™ focuses on a single pass/fail signifier of wokeness instead of actually educating people on the complex narratives that have built different iterations of antisemitism over the centuries. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, not how folklore works. Learn about blood libel, learn about the myth of the Protocols, learn about how antisemitism uses Jews as the powerful other to justify other forms of prejudice and oppression, and don’t write stories about money-obsessed people with hooked noses. Goblins themselves don’t factor into that as anything other than a footnote.
