Posts Tagged: hobgoblin

  • Commemorating the death of Shakespeare —Sydney statue is inscribed with—We are such stuff as dreams are made on

    We are such stuff as dreams

    Today is the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s death on the 23rd April 1616 (it is also the 452nd anniversary of his birth). William Shakespeare is considered the greatest of all writers in the English language. He wrote 37 plays that created some of literatures’ most famous characters. He introduced hundreds of words into English that […]

  • Flibbertigibbet at Wayland's Smithy

    Flibbertigibbet, a will-‘o-the-wisp, a clown

    The misunderstanding In the heat of a moment, and what I thought was great foolhardiness, I called my wife a flibbertigibbet. I was cross with her for trying to do too many things at once and consequently getting nothing done. Surprisingly, she took it quite well, which made me think I had, perhaps, misunderstood what […]

  • Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas from the Detroit Institute of Arts.

    Nightmare’s lost creature

    There is a whole menagerie of semi-human creatures from folklore that live only in our imagination, in children’s stories and, at their worst, in our nightmares. It is from one particular group of these creatures, that we now call incubi (singular incubus), that truly gave us nightmares. In medieval times incubus was used to denote […]

  • Afraid of the dark, Lagerboy. Photoshopped Hobgoblin advertisement from Wychwood Brewery.

    Advertising hobgoblins

    What is a hobgoblin A hobgoblin is a mythological or magical sprite (an elf or fairy) that is smaller than a goblin but far more mischievous. (It is a common mistake to think that a hobgoblin is larger than a goblin.) The goblin, apparently, originated in France, as a Gobelin, a particular sprite haunting parts […]

  • Image of a hobbit with the caption: In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-[1973]): one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal men. JRR Tolkeii's definition for the OED,

    Hobbit and the words of Tolkien

    The Oxford Dictionary defines hobbit as ‘a member of an imaginary race similar to humans, of small size and with hairy feet; origin, invented by the British writer JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) and said by him to mean hole-dweller’. It has been alternatively suggested that the concept came from a children’s book, The Marvellous Land of […]