Scholars studying the folklore of the British Isles and Europe during the nineteenth century used these oral traditions to make overarching claims about national identities. Goblins or hobgoblins were sometimes seen as distinctly English phenomena that corresponded to other European creatures like the German kobold. More common, however, was the use of the goblin as a broad category of creature within the realm of Fairyland. Such classificatory distinctions, however, were of little concern to colonial writers operating in the Global South. They used goblins in their analyses of belief systems to represent a range of entities, but more important than parsing the differences between these creatures was the civilizing mission undergirding these texts. Simultaneously, some Victorian writers began to classify groups of people as goblins. They saw the “pygmies” of Central Africa as reminiscent of goblins or dwarves: the descendants of the original fairies that once lived in Europe. People with physical disabilities, especially dwarfism, were also infantilized using the language of Fairyland. Peculiar natural landscapes, especially forests, were also given the goblin label outside of Britain in locations where such fairy traditions had never existed—an act of folkloric colonization that brought the familiar goblin to unfamiliar locations.