The — Princess And The Goblin

Goblins: Developed as a collective antagonist with distinctive subterranean culture and cunning leadership. MacDonald gives them variety but keeps their moral composition largely negative; their plotting is grotesque yet often portrayed with grim humor.

The goblins of the mountain are not merely monsters; they are a philosophical antithesis. Once human, they were driven underground by a royal edict, and generations of living without sunlight have deformed them—not just physically, but spiritually. They have lost their “heels,” the symbolic point of stable contact with the earth and, by extension, with humility. They are creatures of pure, malicious mechanism. Their songs are nonsense, their inventions are cruel parodies of human craft (such as the wire-strung shoes to trip miners), and their king seeks a purely political, material union (via the goblin prince) to a human princess. the princess and the goblin