Troll — the monsters hiding in the mountains
Stupid, strong, slow, frequently turned to stone by sunrise. The most-loved figures in Norwegian folklore and the namesakes of half its scenic features.
Norway’s trolls come in two strains, and the difference is mostly one of scale. The older strain is the jotner — the giants of Norse mythology, ancient adversaries of the gods, beings of cosmic size who existed before the world was shaped and who will help tear it down at Ragnarok. The younger strain, the one the folktales kept, is the troll proper: the bergtroll, the mountain troll — huge still, but dim, slow, gullible, bound to rock and forest rather than to the fate of the cosmos. The giants are mythology. The trolls are something more like difficult neighbors.
The folktale troll is not, on the whole, frightening so much as a problem to be solved. He is enormously strong and enormously stupid, and the folktale hero never defeats him with a sword — he defeats him with a trick. The boy who out-eats the troll by quietly emptying his food into a sack. The boy who hands the troll a stone, calls it cheese, and dares him to squeeze water from it. Strength loses to cleverness every time, and Norwegian children have been told that reassuring shape of story for centuries.
Turned to stone by the sun
The single most important fact about a troll is that he cannot survive daylight. Caught above ground when the sun comes up, a troll turns to stone — and that is the old folk explanation for the Norwegian landscape itself. The country is full of troll-named rock. Trolltunga, the Troll’s Tongue, the thin slab jutting out over the water in Hardanger. Trollstigen, the Troll’s Ladder, the switchback mountain road. The Troll Wall, the Trolltindene peaks — troll this and troll that, across every map of the country. Each jagged formation is, by the old reckoning, a troll who misjudged the dawn. It is a folklore that doubles as a reading of the scenery, and the family will pass troll-named places on the map without looking for them.
The face Kittelsen gave them
The modern Norwegian troll — lumpen, mossy, enormous-nosed, with a few too many fingers and a tail he keeps forgetting about — is very largely the invention of one man. Theodor Kittelsen illustrated the great Asbjørnsen and Moe folktale collections at the end of the nineteenth century, and before Kittelsen the troll was a word and a feeling. After Kittelsen the troll had a face, and it is recognizably his face that sells today on every souvenir shelf in Norway.
That commercial troll — the grinning rubber figurine — is friendly, and the friendliness is not entirely a betrayal of the folklore. Norwegians are genuinely fond of their trolls in a way they are not fond of the darker figures of the old country — the draugen, the nøkk, the huldra at her worst. The troll is the folklore Norway is comfortable handing to children and to tourists.
But the older feeling is still in the rock. Stand in a Norwegian valley at dusk, with the light going and the mountains turning to black shapes against the sky, and the idea that those shapes were once alive and simply ran out of night does not feel like a children’s story. It feels like the most natural explanation available.