Some Words, From Others, to Ponder upon the Subject of Past, Present, and Future

"The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future."
-- Teddy Roosevelt

"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
-- Victor Hugo

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-- George Santayana

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
-- Karl Marx

"And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page."
-- Lord Byron

Because my mind works oddly at times

For no particular reason, okay, that is not true. I have been reading Joe Abercrombie's First Law series - an entertaining fantasy yarn, incidentally, well worth the time - in which he presents a creature in his world called the Shanka. This is clearly his stand in for the standard non-human monstrous threat, very much in the same vein as Tolkien's Orcs in terms of being a 'created' species by a evil wizard-type.

Anyway... I challenged myself to to remember (without looking) the names of traditional monstrous humanoid races that function and act together in fantasy. And this is as far as I got.

• Goblin
• Kobold
• Gnoll
• Orc
• Hobgoblin
• Troglodyte
• Troll (this is a bit of a reach, generally portrayed in small numbers, but often along with some of the above)

The following are not always 'good', and certainly are non-human:

• Elves 
• Dwarves
• Gnomes