about the origin of goblins

a lot has been talked about the seemingly ubiquitous presence of goblins in fortresses, but not much is known about where exactly they come from. some theories have been proposed by our most rebearded scholars on the matter:

- they come hidden in caravans

- they are first taken as pets by deranged dwarves

- they are born from childrens nightmares

- some hidden vampiric process converts regular creatures into goblins

- from the chaos of happenstance, like when a sock goes missing or a coin lands on heads too many times in a row

- they come from underground

from all the alternatives, the last one seems to be (despite its apparent ridiculousness compared to the others) the only one that, at least, seems to hold some verifiable truth to it. ancient documents from more civilized times suggest that goblins were lesser demons once, hidden deep underground, that for unknown reasons ended up in the surface of the world and were forced to adapt to life there; becoming more like "creatures" and forming what they call "civilizations". in any case, superstition and legend seems to mix with knowledge in this case, and we cannot discard for sure any of the alternatives.

but even if that is the true origin of goblins, that still doesn't explain "why" and "how" they end up being not only this eternal enemy to dwarven society, but also integral part of our infrastructure. it's an origin story about them as a race, but says nothing about how they end up inside fortresses.

because of their origin, goblins are, by nature, aligned as evil. they are prima facie rejected by most dwarves (an animosity that goes both ways) but that hasn't stopped them from entering and prospering in societies everywhere. it has been speculated that some of them have personalities and value systems that make them, even if not desirable, at least tolerable inside the cultural fabric. it has also been noted that the problem is that certain dwarves find their terrifying appearance adorable (giving more weight to the "pet hypothesis"). the important thing is that once there they inevitably end up occupying important positions (perhaps because of such base animosity, or because of personality advanatges for such positions, like lack of empathy) inside the government and management apparatus of the fortress that both rejects and feeds them. sometimes even outnumbering the local population! these outposts remain dwarven in nature, even when none of the original population remains. the fortress itself (even when impossible to be built from scratch by these beings) becomes the perfect substrate for their proliferation, a cause-and-effect dynamic that can't be eliminated by simply purging existing goblins without destroying the very basis of organizational structures that have made the fortress function in the first place. eventually, more goblins would appear, or goblin-personality dwarves will rise and fill those some positions and bring about the same problems. their existance might also be a lesser evil, effectively impeding the meritocratic rise of able dwarves into managerial positions but also of much more well suited vampires or liches. an historic cycle that seems to repeat over and over no matter the precautions we take for that not to be the case.

not only goblins are present, their presence seems to grow at the same rate as the needs for a centralized managerial system do, expanding their presence in a "need to" basis that is immediatly met with its own solution ―the demand for even more goblins― that if even nobody knows where they come from, they always seem to arrive. for this reason and lots of others, instead of elucubrating about how a goblin arrives to be, most dwarves offer a funny cause-effect reversal to the question that might be profoundly wise. giving birth to the popular saying of "bureocracy causes goblins".

on a related note, here is a transcript from Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

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Whether we seek the distinctiveness of today’s Europeans in what we call ‘civilization’ or ‘humanization’ or ‘progress’, or whether we withhold our praise or blame and simply use the political term: Europe’s democratic movement—behind all the moral and political foregrounds that such terms describe, a tremendous physiological process is occurring and continually gaining momentum. Europeans are coming to resemble one another more and more, and are more and more free of the conditions that would give rise to races connected by climate and class. They are increasingly independent of any particular environment that might inscribe its identical demands into their bodies and souls over the course of centuries—that is to say, an essentially supernational and nomadic type of man is slowly emerging, one that is distinguished, physiologically speaking, by having a maximum of adaptive skills and powers. 

This process of the evolving European, which can be delayed by great relapses in tempo but may as a result very well grow with new force and depth (like the Storm and Stress of ‘national feeling’ still raging even now, for example, or the recent emergence of Anarchism): this process probably ends with results that were least anticipated by its naive sponsors and apologists, the apostles of ‘modern ideas’. The same new conditions that typically give rise to ordinary and mediocre men (serviceable, industrious, diversely useful and handy herd-animal men) are also those most suited to producing exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities. For while it is quite impossible for this adaptability (which tries out ever-changing conditions and starts a new project in every generation, almost in every decade) to promote the powerfulness of the type; and while such future Europeans will probably give the overall impression of being diverse, loquacious, weak-willed, and extremely handy workers who need a master, a commander, like their daily bread; and while, finally, the democratization of Europe will end by procreating a type that has been developed in the subtlest sense to be slaves—the strong man, in the individual and exceptional case, will have to turn out even stronger and richer than he ever would have done before, owing to the impartiality of his training, owing to the tremendous diversity of his activities, arts, and masks. That is to say, the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary contrivance for the breeding of tyrants—understanding the word in every sense, even the most spiritual.

and then he goes on to keep talking about germans, for some reason.