Trolls

An Unnatural History

John Lindow

• Editorial: Reaktion Books
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780233307
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

Trolls lurk under bridges waiting to eat children, threaten hobbits in Middle-Earth, and invade the dungeons of Hogwarts. Often they are depicted as stupid, slow, and ugly creatures, but they also appear as comforting characters in some children's stories or as plastic dolls with bright, fuzzy hair. Today, the name of this fantastic being from Scandinavia has found a wider reach: it is the word for the homeless in California and slang for the antagonizing and sometimes cruel people on the Internet. But how did trolls go from folktales to the World Wide Web?To explain why trolls still hold our interest, John Lindow goes back to their first appearances in Scandinavian folklore, where they were beings in nature living beside a preindustrial society of small-scale farming and fishing. He explores reports of actual encounters with trolls—meetings others found plausible in spite of their better judgment—and follows trolls' natural transition from folktales to other domains in popular culture. Trolls, Lindow argues, would not continue to appeal to our imaginations today if they had not made the jump to illustrations in Nordic books and Scandinavian literature and drama. From the Moomins to Brothers Grimm and Three Billy Goats Gruff to cartoons, fantasy novels, and social media, Lindow considers the panoply of trolls that surround us and their sometimes troubling connotations in the contemporary world.Taking readers into Norwegian music and film and even Yahoo Finance chat rooms, Trolls is a fun and fascinating book about these strange creatures.

1

The Earliest Trolls

Trolls enter the literary record in verses attributed to Viking Age poets, but even at this first moment they are challenging and striking. We first hear from a troll rather than hearing of trolls. The troll in question has a verse exchange with Bragi the Old, the first named poet in the North, credited with the creation of the verse form that Viking Age poets and their descendants in Iceland used for centuries. This Bragi appears in many sources, including a tenth-century poem describing the entry of the vanquished king Eiríkr Bloodax into Valho̧ll (Walhalla), the abode of the Nordic gods; Óðinn (Odin), the head of the gods, is gathering up heroes for the last battle against the forces of chaos and evil, and Bragi stands alongside these heroes. A few centuries later, medieval antiquarians appear to have lost sight of the distinction between these heroes and the gods themselves, and they conceived of Bragi as a god of poetry. It is therefore significant that he was the first person to meet a troll. We do not know much about the human poet Bragi, but he appears to have been active in the late ninth century in Norway. From our point of view, then, the first troll appeared in a late ninth-century forest in Norway, and she revealed herself to a poet.

The exchange is recorded only much later, c. 1220–30, in the medieval Icelandic poet and statesman Snorri Sturluson’s book Edda (the title probably means ‘poetics’). It is found in the longest section of the book Skáldskaparmál (Poetic Diction) and was probably cited because it had many expressions for denoting a poet, as it did for designating a troll. Sturluson tells the story succinctly, as a legend narrator would. Here are the relevant passages in Anthony Faulke’s translation (1995):

Bragi the Old spoke as follows when he was driving through a certain forest late in the evening; then a troll woman accosted him in verse and asked him who was going there.

The troll speaks first:

Trolls call me moon of the dwelling-Rungnir, giant’s wealth-sucker, storm-sun’s bale, seeress’s friendly companion, guardian of corpse-fjord, swallower of heaven wheel; what is a troll other than that?

Bragi responds:

Poets call me Vidur’s [Odin’s] thought-smith, getter of Gaut’s [Odin’s] gift, lack-nought hero, server of Ygg’s [Odin’s] ale, song-making Modi, skilled smith of rhyme; what is a poet other than that?

The first line of each verse might also be construed as ‘they call me a troll/poet’; this semantic uncertainty does not, however, change our understanding of what trolls or poets might be called. Before turning to the verses, let us consider the situation. Bragi is driving through a forest, either with a wagon or a sled. By its very nature this forest is at some distance from human habitation, perhaps a considerable distance (otherwise Bragi might be walking rather than driving). We do not know what the troll woman is doing there, but the fact that she challenges Bragi suggests that he has entered her domain. Humans rule their own dwellings and the areas they use and cultivate around them; the rest is mysterious and the domain of Other beings. It is late at night, and therefore likely to be dark, or at best semi-dark if the encounter takes place in summer. The perceptual situation thus fits the model of empirical supernatural experience described in the Introduction.

We do not know what this first troll looked like. There is no indication that she was larger (or smaller) than Bragi, and no indication that she was old or young, beautiful or hideous, or just ordinary-looking. If it was truly dark, Bragi may only have heard rather than seen her. We the readers know that she is a troll woman. In the scene we are reading, Bragi may have learned that she was a troll only by hearing her verse.

Each of the two verses in this exchange consists of a list of the kind of metaphor we call kennings in Old Norse poetry. In these a base word that has nothing to do with what the poet is thinking of is modified by another word to indicate the meaning. Thus Modi is a son of Thor, but a Modi who makes songs is a poet. Modi in the mythology is no such thing, and the kenning would work just as well with the name of any other god, or hero, who was not a poet. Frequently these kennings are unintelligible without knowledge of myth and heroic legend. With this background, we can attempt to examine what the troll claims other trolls call her.

Unfortunately, this first troll spoke enigmatically. The only clear kenning of her speech is ‘swallower of heaven wheel’: that is, ‘of the sun or moon’. In the mythology, at Ragnarök, the end of the world, a wolf is to swallow the sun or moon (the word used can mean either). This is of course a cosmic threat. If there is no sun, there is no daylight. Crops fail, there is no fodder for animals and humans die. If there is no moon, humans cannot reckon time properly. While this may sound less disastrous than starving in the dark, time-reckoning was established in the mythology early on by the gods, and in human life time-reckoning was tied to crops and fodder in that it told people when to plant and when to harvest. Sun or moon, the threat is cosmic. This cosmic threat is probably also taken up in the first and third kennings, although not without slight changes to what the manuscripts actually say. If those changes are accepted, the troll invokes the name ‘Rungnir [giant, destroyer] of the dwelling of the moon [the sky]’ and ‘bale of the storm-hall [the sky]’.

In addition, the troll woman is a ‘wealth-sucker’, and even if we do not know how that term should relate to a giant it sounds bad, and is probably an attack on human prosperity, since it would be possible to construe ‘wealth of the giant’ as a kenning for gold. She is the friendly companion of a seeress and guardian of the ‘corpse-fiord’ (graveyard), indicating connection with chthonic forces and the dead (according to the mythology, some seeresses may in fact be raised from the dead). So: trolls represent a threat to the cosmos, are destroyers of prosperity and are associated with death. This is not a reassuring resumé.

Bragi responds with ways to refer to a poet. Three of his kennings invoke Odin, head of the gods and a real god of poetry: Odin’s thought, his gift and his ale (in the mythology, poetry is made material in mead, and Odin brings it to gods and men). In addition, Bragi’s verse employs more rhymes and other flourishes, and it seems clear that he wins the exchange. The poetry of humans is thus more powerful than the poetry of the trolls, and in fact we hear only a few verses from any supernatural beings in the extant record, but thousands from humans.

There is a small footnote to this argument, however. The last section of Snorri’s Edda is the Háttatal (Enumeration of Metres), a praise poem Snorri composed for the young Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway, and his guardian, the jarl Skuli. The poem, which is embedded in a metrical commentary, comprises 102 stanzas, each exemplifying some metre or aspect of diction. Snorri calls one of the metres trollsháttr (‘troll’s metre’). This comes toward the end of the second section of the poem and is followed by what appears to be ‘ghost’s metre’, then ‘mouth-throwing’ (‘improvisation’) and finally ‘formless’ (earlier there is also a ‘witch-metre’). Troll’s metre is rather stately, a variation of a basic form that was to prove popular with Christian poets as the Middle Ages progressed. I can see nothing in it to connect it with trolls.

The exchange between Bragi and the troll woman forms a paradigm that will often recur: a threatening encounter, in a place far from human habitation, between troll and human, with the human emerging unscathed in the end. The characteristics of threat to the cosmos and to humans and their prosperity, and the association with death, are assigned to the female in this encounter, and indeed Old Norse literature and mythology have a clearly gendered system in which the female is associated with disorder and darkness. Not all trolls are female, but it is perhaps instructive that this first one is. For the rest of their history, trolls continue to be associated with disorder and darkness, with the nonhuman, with chaos and the Other. Here Snorri’s Edda gives us yet another piece of information. Some of the manuscripts contain versified lists that have come to be called þulur. Although they may not be original to Snorri’s work, they do rely on knowledge of poetical (and thus mythological and heroic) traditions. Among these are five stanzas containing more than 60 names of troll women. Some of these we recognize, but most we do not. Some, however, are transparent in meaning, such as Bakrauf (‘rear-hole’, or anus), Harðgreip (‘hard-grip’) and Loðinfingra (‘shaggy-fingers’). Interestingly, there are no þulur for male trolls, only for giants (jötnar), and no þulur for female giants. Poets seem, then, to have thought of the word troll as more appropriately attached to female than to male monsters, and it is poets who give us the earliest information about trolls.

Perhaps the most beautiful poem of the Icelandic Middle Ages is Völuspá (Seeress’s Prophecy), which appears to make use of Christian as well as pre-Christian imagery in its powerful portrayal of the origin and ultimate demise of the cosmos. It is likely to be the creation of an Icelandic poet working around the time of the Conversion (c. 1000 CE). The three kennings of Bragi’s troll woman setting forth a cosmic threat presage this verse (translated by Carolynne Larrington; 1996), set in a terrifying sequence of visions of the unravelling world.

In the east sat an old woman in Iron Wood

and nurtured there offspring of Fenrir;

a certain one of them in the form of a troll

will be the snatcher of the moon.

In the mythology, Fenrir is a son of Loki, friend and enemy of the gods. Apparently born a giant, he has sworn a blood-brother oath with Odin, the chief god, and is ‘numbered among the gods’. When the gods perceive that this son of Loki poses a threat, they transform him into a wolf, and then bind him. In the process, Fernrir chews off the hand of the god Týr, and at the final battle of Ragnarök he swallows Odin. He remains in wolf form throughout. Because Old Norse inflects for gender, we know that this wolf who will snatch or swallow the moon (or sun) in troll form is also male.

When Fenrir’s lupine descendant snatches or swallows the moon (or sun – again, the word can mean either), he will be in the form of a troll. Snorri may offer a hint about what the poet meant by this expression. In his description of Ragnarök in the Edda, he wrote this about the wolf Fenrir, who has broken the bonds the gods put on him:

But Fenriswolf will go with mouth agape and its upper jaw will be against the sky and its lower one against the earth. It would gape wider if there was room. Flames will burn from its eyes and nostrils.

If we connect this statement with ‘the form of the troll’ in Völuspá, we may well have in that poem the first indication that trolls could appear as large, misshapen and truly frightening beings. Also important is the implication that trolls can be involved with the changing of shape, guise or skin. Furthermore, wolves are wild animals, and they threaten domestic beasts and occasionally even humans. Like Bragi’s troll woman, they inhabit the woods and other places far from human homes, although they do sometimes invade the domestic space of humans. We should therefore associate trolls with the wild rather than the domestic or tame; with outside rather than inside; with nature rather than culture.

Snorri Sturluson quotes another early use of the word troll, this time in his compilation of sagas about Norwegian kings called Heimskringla (Orb of the Earth). In the first saga of the compilation, Ynglinga saga (Saga of the Ynglings), Snorri quotes extensively from the poem Ynglingatal (Enumeration of the Ynglings), attributed to Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, another early Norwegian poet, perhaps even Bragi’s contemporary. The poem comprises a catalogue of the earliest Swedish kings, focusing on the ways in which they died. The first stanzas deal with prehistory and approach myth. Stanza 3 contains the word trollkund, a feminine adjective meaning ‘troll-related, of the family of trolls’. The verse, which is full of difficulties, is shown here in a literal translation:

But to visit

the brother of Vili

the creature of magic

arranged for Vanlandi,

when the troll-related night-Hildr [witch]

was to tread underfoot

the enemy

of the band of men;

and that necklace-destroyer [king],

whom the nightmare strangled,

burned on the bed of Skúta.

Snorri cites the verse in connection with the following story, which can be summarized thus:

The Swedish king Vanlandi visited the Finn Snær the Old and married his daughter, Drífa. The following spring he returned to Uppsala and failed to keep a promise to return to Drífa within three years. After ten years, she arranged for a woman with magic powers [Old Norse seiðkona, a woman who practices seiðr, a kind of shamanic magic] to charm Vanlandi back to Finland or kill him. When shortly thereafter Vanlandi found himself eager to return to Finland, his retainers dissuaded him from the trip. He was then attacked by a nightmare – not a bad dream, but a supernatural being, more often female than not, who disturbed men and animals in their sleep. When Vanlandi’s men protected his head, she attacked his legs, and when they protected his legs, she attacked his head and killed him. He was cremated by the banks of the river Skúta, and his son with Drífa succeeded him as king.

In Snorri’s understanding of the verse, the ‘troll-related witch’ was both a Finn and a sorceress. In Old Norse, Finn can refer both to Finns and to the Sámi people, but in either case, the witch was an ethnic outsider. It is certainly possible that she was also the nightmare who killed Vanlandi and was therefore not only a shape-shifter (transforming from a witch into a supernatural being) but also one who could act invisibly. The nature of trolls as ethnic outsiders and as shape-shifters with certain magic powers would remain salient for centuries.

Like Bragi, most humans in later legends about nightmares walk away intact from their encounters. The fate of Vanlandi, however, shows us that threats from the trolls and those related to them are serious, despite what happens in most texts. Thus there is always a tension when humans meet trolls, for although the odds favour the human, the trolls do win from time to time.

Another poet who wove trolls into his verse was Kormákr Ögmundarson, the eponymous protagonist of Kormáks saga, one of the subcategory of Sagas of Icelanders we call skald sagas. Kormákr lived in tenth-century Iceland. In one of his verses, Kormákr stated that a fair woman (his beloved Steingerðr, according to the prose context) gave his ring to the trolls, which seems to be a way of saying that she threw it away. In another, he says that trolls have done something to a woman, perhaps trampled or enchanted her. Finally, the saga writer attributes a verse to Kormákr’s adversary Holmgöngu-Bersi in which Bersi says: ‘May the trolls take me if I never again redden my sword with blood.’

These three verses share a characteristic use of the plural. According to this usage, the trolls are conceived as collective beings, like other creatures in the folk belief attested in Old Norse: landvættir (‘land spirits’), dísir (collective female spirits related to fate) and so forth. All these collective beings are associated with the Other: the mysterious, inexplicable and unknowable. If one throws something away, it goes among the trolls. It becomes invisible and presumably never returns to the world of human beings. The same fate may befall humans, which leads to the proverb ‘May the trolls take him/her/them/me/you’. Holmgöngu-Bersi comes down to us as the first to utter a version of this proverb, but he was hardly the last.

In its poetic context, at least, this proverb seems to mean ‘to die’. An anonymous verse retained in Haralds saga hárfagra, the saga of Harald Fairhair (ruled Norway c. 860–930 CE) in Snorri’s Heimskringla, made this brief report on an encounter in the Orkneys between the Norwegian Torf-Einarr Rögnvaldsson and two Vikings named Tréskeggr and Skurfa. If it is genuine (and we can never be sure), it would have been composed c. 900.

Then he gave Tréskeggr to the trolls,

[and] Torf-Einarr killed Skurfa.

Another example also involves two Vikings, but here they are poets. Somehow, according to Grettis saga, one of the classic Sagas of Icelanders, the Hebridean Vikings Vígbjóðr and Vestmarr extemporized and...