What's a ghommid?

Lately I've been tagging some of my posts with the label "Ghommids," so I figure I should probably explain what I mean by that word.

The term was coined by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka for The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, his 1968 English translation of D. O. Fagunwa's 1938 novel, the first novel ever written in the Yoruba language. Despite using daemons in his title, Soyinka considered that word misleading and avoided it in the text itself. As he explains in his introduction to Forest,

These beings who inhabit Fagunwa’s world demand at all costs and by every conceivable translator’s trick to be preserved from the common or misleading associations which substitutes such as demons, devils, or gods evoke in the reader’s mind. At the same time, it is necessary that they transmit the reality of their existence with the same unquestioning impact and vitality which is conveyed by Fagunwa in the original.

This concern for giving creatures of West African legend the same "non-exotic validity" in English that they have in Yoruba led Soyinka to adopt what I have elsewhere characterized as a Tolkienian approach to translation. The same logic that led Tolkien to "translate" the "original" word kuduk into hobbit, a coinage intended to sound more at home in an English text, led Soyinka to coin the word ghommid to refer to that motley assortment of folkloric creatures that might otherwise have been called gods, spirits, demons, fairies, goblins, elves, etc.

I have borrowed this word of his and use it in much the same way: to refer to any of the assortment of beings -- apparently intelligent, roughly humanoid, but certainly not in any straightforward sense human -- which the human race has from time to time encountered throughout our history. I use the term as a way of avoiding making unwarranted assumptions about the nature of these creatures -- good or evil, material or spiritual, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, real or hallucinatory.