A Hobgoblin of the Very Worst Kind

One of my offspring is quite attached to a podcast in which a woman very nicely reads (pleasingly unvarnished and unbowdlerised) fairy tales and classic children's stories. One of them is Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen. 

If you don't know The Snow Queen, it's framed by a sort of story-within-a-story in which an evil spirit has created a looking glass which causes everything to be reflected in a distorted way so as to appear like a twisted, sinister version of itself. The spirit and his cronies take the looking glass to heaven in order to make fun of God and the angels, but it shatters on the way into millions of tiny fragments, which then descend to earth to make various kinds of mischief.

The translation which is used in the podcast in question describes this evil spirit as 'one of the very worst kinds of hobgoblins' - a turn of phrase which never ceases to intrigue me, because of what it implies: that there are lots of different kinds of hobgoblin, some worse than others.

Having done some further investigations I'm not sure this translation is very accurate - the original Danish reads:

for det var en ond trold! det var en af de allerværste, det var "djævelen"!

And this, various online dictionaries informs me, means something like 'there was an evil troll; it was one of the very worst, it was a devil'. I don't speak Danish so I'm not sure, but I don't think there is anything here that implies there are different kinds of 'trold' ('Det var en af de alllerværste' = 'That was one of the very worst'?). MR James (who, astonishingly, translated it back in the day) rendered this 'There was a wicked troll. He was one of the very worst sort—he was the devil.' But, likewise, I don't know where 'sort' comes from here, unless it's just a way of accentuating the wickedness. The rendering of 'trold' as hobgoblin seems forgivable, because as I understand it 'trolls' in Scandinavian myth were more elf-like than ogre-like (as they tend to be in English fairy tales); somebody from that neck of the woods will now no doubt appear in the comments to tell me that I am a fool and wrong and that everything I say here is foolish wrongness. But this is the state of play as I see it, vis-a-vis translations of the opening section of The Snow Queen. 

Anyway, the concept of there being different kinds of hobgoblin interests me. This is because hobgoblins tend to be unjustly overlooked in D&D, at least in my experience. The main reason for this is that they have difficulty differentiating themselves from goblins and orcs. Goblins have the 'sneaky, malicious, deceptive' humanoid angle sewn up, and orcs have the 'evil, militaristic brute' territory. What then is a hobgoblin - other than an amalgam of both?

Over the years D&D staked out hobgoblins as a sort of lawful evil counterpart to the chaotic evil orcs - the idea being that hobgoblins are regimented, militarised, and hierarchical where orcs are savage and brutal. Characteristically this was spoiled in 2nd edition by making orcs lawful evil and militaristic as well, rendering hobgoblins almost redundant But thereafter, at least as far as I can tell (I am no expert on D&D post-2nd edition) the difference has been more clearly staked out: in 5th edition hobgoblins almost seem to resemble klingons:

This is not very inspired and feels inauthentic - sort of tacked on. The good thing about goblins and orc (and any really iconic monster) is that they tap into forms of disquiet that we feel viscerally. There is something scary about a small, sneaky, deceptive, malicious trickster. There is something scary about wanton cruelty and violence. There isn't anything all that viscerally scary about having a hypertrophied sense or order or honour, which appears to be what later editions riff on when it come to hobgoblins. We may disapprove of taking those things too far, but this in itself isn't enough to strike at any nerves in a primal sense (and in any case it overlaps with what we tend to think of when it comes to dwarfs). 

The implication that there are different kinds of hobgoblin frees us up a little bit. Instead of being a single monster type, it becomes more like a category or spectrum - a family, if you like, of different varieties of evil humanoids. The question then becomes, what are the different types of hobgoblin?

Well, there is the aforementioned 5th edition hobgoblin-as-klingon. You could even take this further and make them something almost like the Spartans of 300 stereotype turned to 11 - an entire race of satanic Lt Worfs without Captain Picard to keep them in check.

Then there is the hobgoblin of Warhammer, of course, who if anything, at least in older editions, was supposed to be something like a Hun, Mongol or Cossack - a nomadic steppe raider going everywhere on wolfback. I hadn't remembered this, but they were even supposed to be ruled by a 'Hobgobla Khan', the lord of the 'Mournguls':

Then there is the folkloric hobgoblin, suggested by the prefix 'Hob-'. Tolkien is the one responsible for describing hobgoblins as bigger variants of goblins (in the preface to The Hobbit); actually 'Hob' is said to be a medieval diminutive for Robert or Rob, which if anything suggests a small, familiar or even cutesy creature - more like a brownie, sprite or knocker:

These days in Britain you see Hobgoblin beer everywhere. The latest versions are very corporate and bland, but once upon a time it was a lovely, characterful beer (one of a line of ales with folkloric motifs brewed by Wychwood brewery). Here the hobgoblin is very much along the lines of a goblin, though one rooted much more in fairy tales than Tolkien - more like an evil woodsman who you might, nonetheless, enjoy a pint with in a tavern if he's in a good mood after a day's hunting: 

The most interesting hobgoblin variant may be White Wolf's from Changeling: The Lost, where they can take almost any form and inhabit the Hedge, the liminal realm between the realm of mortals and faerie:

You may be able to suggest more - feel free to do so in the comment. As to which is the very worst kind (Spartan-klingon; 'Mourngul' horde; Robin Goodfellow; evil woodcutter; shapeshifting farie), you can make up your mind.