Kobold

Origin

From German Kobold.

Alternative forms

• cobold

Full definition of kobold

Noun

1. (German mythology) An ambivalent, sometimes vindictive, spirit that is capable of materialising as an object or human, often a child; a sprite.
• 1904, Andrew Lang (collector), author and translator not identified, , , page 176,At this point a cock crew, and the youth jumped up hastily saying : 'Of course I shall ride with the king to the war, and if I do not return, take your violin every evening to the seashore and play on it, so that the very sea-kobolds who live at the bottom of the ocean may hear it and come to you.'
• 2009, Robert Grant Haliburton, The Dwarfs of Mount Atlas: Collected Papers on the Curious Anthropology of Robert Grant Haliburton, page 75,Movers, in the first chapter of his Phönizier, says that that group of deities called Dactyls, Cabiri, Corybantes, and Cyclopes, were similar to those old Germanic divinities now known as Kobolds.
2. (German folklore) A mischievous elf or goblin, or one connected (and helpful) to a family or household.
• a. 1867 George MacDonald, , 2000 1980, The Golden Key and Other Stories, page 96,The king had seen all kinds of gnomes, goblins, and kobolds at his coronation;....
• 1977, James Buchanan Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England, 2007, page 138,Among the nonhuman creatures that peopled rural Europe in the Middle Ages — the fairies, elves, dwarfs, trolls, and kobolds — there were beneficent female spirits who patronized those households that treated them well.
• 2011, William Wirt Sikes, Varla Ventura, The Occult Powers of Goats and Other Welsh Tales of Goblins, Fairies, Gnomes, and Elves, unnumbered page,In Germany also the kobolds are rather troublesome than otherwise, to the miners, taking pleasure in frustrating their objects, and rendering their toil unfruitful.
3. (fantasy literature) One of a diminutive and usually malevolent race of beings.
• 2005, Scott Elliot Hicks, The Shattering Light of Stars, page 62,There were also various trolls like great smiling badgers, brownies darting about laughing, dwarves with large gray heads, sensuous mermaids, stony kobolds, green gnomes, sirens and many elves, who were busy purifying the sacred hilltop in a mythological cooperation marvelous to the soul's perception.