Trolls, as we know, are a kind of ogre found in Scandinavian tradition, but just what is a troll and what does a troll look like? John Lindow illuminates these matters in the book under review by surveying representations of trolls from Viking Age Scandinavia to present-day popular culture.
He begins with terms that are central to his investigation, first of all folkloristic categories such as legends (“more or less believable stories, set in the here and now”), folk-beliefs (“a shared system of views and conceptions about the world in which people live”), and belief itself (“we cannot really know what anyone believed”). Then he turns to the Nordic word troll, which unfortunately does not reveal anything about the essence of trolls since the word itself is of uncertain origin and etymology. Still, there is the intriguing philological fact that compounds of the word troll in the Nordic languages commonly signify “magic” or “enchantment”; for example, Mozart’s Zauberflöte, or “Magic Flute,” is Trollflöjtan in Swedish.
After these preliminaries, Lindow considers trolls chronologically from the earliest evidence to the twentieth-century. In the first attestation of a troll in Nordic literature, the Viking-Age poet, Bragi the Old, encounters an unnamed troll woman in a forest during the evening. The woman is not described, but her words suggest that she is in various ways a threat. This scene—the confrontation of a troll and a human being in a place remote from human habitation—is found again and again in early Scandinavian literature. The troll regularly conveys a feeling of disorder, darkness, and the non-human. Some sources attribute to trolls qualities such as large size, the ability to shape-change, and wildness, whereas others do not.
In the medieval period we find, in addition to the earlier, “believable” trolls, trolls that have more to do with the imagination, by which Lindow means trolls that are described in extravagant terms. For example, in a late-medieval saga a she-troll is said to breathe as though a squall were blowing out of her nostrils; mucus hangs down from her mouth, and she is bald and bearded and has hands like claws. A recurrent idea is that trolls have an aversion to sunlight, such that if the sun shines on a troll, he or she turns to stone (the usual medieval idea) or bursts (common in later lore). In the course of time largeness, strength, ugliness, and proficiency in magic become more commonly explicit features of trolls. All in all, trolls go from being under-described to being over-described.
Turning to trolls in narratives collected from recent Nordic folk tradition, Lindow finds that “the term ‘troll’ seems to have become almost an all-purpose word for supernatural beings who may be large or small, solitary or social, real or imagined” (51). The only thing that all trolls seem really to have in common is that they dwell outside the human community. They are The Other.
Lindow turns next to a consideration of notable folk-narrative collectors and illustrators in Norway. The classic collection of Norwegian folktales was made by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, who collected tales in the 1840s, and his collaborator Jørgen Moe. Asbjørnsen’s trolls tend toward the fantastic. They have extremely long noses or multiple heads, or they make snorting sounds or, in one case, get so angry that they give off sparks. Lindow calls the details of Asbjørnsen’s trolls “word pictures” (75). The notion of trolls among English-speakers today derives for the most part from this tradition, via George Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), which made tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe available to English readers.
Norwegian book-illustrators began depicting trolls around 1850. The earliest illustrations show trolls as figures of approximately human size and basically human looks, with beards and long hair and minimal clothing. They are not very eye-catching and are little known today. Fluid at first, the tradition moved toward fixity within a couple decades, trolls being regularly portrayed as big and ugly and tending to blend in with the materiality of the landscape. For example, the limbs of a troll pictured in a woods may be indistinguishable from the surrounding tree-limbs (86). The most masterful illustrator was Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914), whose work remains very well-known today.
A chapter follows on trolls in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scandinavian literature and eventually also films. Best known is Henrik Ibsen’s drama, Peer Gynt, published in 1867, with music composed by Edvard Grieg. The story came from a collection of Norwegian legends collected and retold by Asbjørnsen.
If authors of adult literature have sometimes played with blurring the distinction between trolls and humans, authors of children’s literature in Scandinavia and elsewhere have transformed the scary, anti-social trolls of earlier times into the mostly friendly and sometimes cute trolls of modern popular culture. An example is Tove Jansson’s extremely successful series of Moomintroll books for children (1945 ff.), in which the characters look like hippos and are trolls in name only.
In his epilogue Lindow describes the principal manifestations of trolls in modern culture as the friendly and the unfriendly. In marketing to children one finds mostly friendly and reassuring trolls, whose type can be traced in a direct line from the nineteenth-century collections of folktales to modern media. In contrast, the anti-social tradition retains more of the spirit of the early Nordic trolls. Examples are the use of the word to refer to homeless persons, to frequent patrons of emergency rooms (“medical trolls”), to firms that make their money via patent litigation (“patent trolls”), and to disruptive persons in online discussion groups (“internet trolls”).
Trolls: An Unnatural History is a quick read (around 150 pages), clearly presented and pleasantly written by an authority on Scandinavian folklore. With its reliable text and enjoyable illustrations, it should be welcomed especially by readers with an interest in Scandinavia, folk narrative, and/or popular culture.
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[Review length: 969 words • Review posted on March 4, 2015]