Troll

The first troll anyone thought to write down was a poet. She stepped out of a certain forest late one evening in the ninth century, stopped the skald Bragi Boddason on the road, and demanded to know who he was. Before he could answer she told him what she was, stacking six riddling names on top of each other like stones on a cairn: moon of the dwelling of Rungnir, sucker of the giant’s wealth, bale of the storm sun, friendly companion of the seeress, guardian of the corpse fjord, swallower of the heaven wheel. Then, having buried herself under all that, she asked the only question that matters. What is a troll other than that?

Bragi answered in kind, described himself as a skilled maker of verses, and the scene simply ends. He rides on. John Lindow noticed that this odd little standoff, preserved in the Prose Edda, sets a pattern the next thousand years would repeat almost without variation: a meeting far from anyone’s hearth, between a human being and something that should not be there, and a human being who walks away from it. Not always. But often enough that the shape of the story became load-bearing.

The word itself refuses to sit still. Trǫll in Old Norse could mean a mountain-dweller or a jötunn, but it could equally mean a witch, a ghost, an evil spirit, a demon, a heathen demi-god, a magical boar, a berserker, or simply a person who was abnormally large, abnormally strong, or abnormally ugly. Ármann Jakobsson, who has done more than anyone to map the medieval usage, has argued against the tidy older schemes that tried to sort trǫll, jötunn, þurs and risi into four separate species, calling that theory unsupported by any convincing evidence. Troll was never the name of a creature. It was a verdict. The same root gave Old Norse trylla, to enchant or to turn something into a troll, and gave Icelandic its ordinary words for witchcraft, trǫlldómr and trǫllskap. To call a neighbour a troll was to say that whatever else he was, he was no longer safely one of us.

Grettis saga puts the ambiguity on display. Grettir Ásmundarson goes to the farm at Sandhaugar to deal with a haunting and is met in the hall by a great troll-woman, who grapples with him through the dark and drags him out toward the ravine. He cuts her arm off at the shoulder. Following the trail down to the river, he dives beneath the waterfall and finds a cave, and inside the cave a giant with a fire burning, and the fight starts again in the smoke and the noise of falling water. The saga calls the woman a troll and the cave-dweller a jötunn without ever explaining the difference, because there was none to explain. Earlier in the same saga, Grettir himself is mistaken for a troll by people who see him in the dark and jump to the obvious conclusion.

Later, as Scandinavia became thoroughly Christian and the sagas receded into literature, the troll settled down into a being with its own habits. It lives in rocks, in mountains, in caves and burial mounds, usually in small family groups, most often a mother and son or a father and daughter. It is very old and very strong and, in most tellings, slow. Folklorists collecting in Norway, Sweden and Denmark found it under different names in every valley: troldfolk and bjergtrolde and bjergfolk in Denmark, trollfolk and tusser in Norway, and in Orkney and Shetland a cognate called the trow, which the Norse settlers seem to have carried west with them. Size was never settled either. Some regions told of trolls no bigger than a child; others told of things that had to stoop to look into a window.

What actually separated a troll from a human being was not anatomy. Lindow’s point is blunter and stranger than that: trolls are the ones who are not Christian, and who are not known to the people who meet them. They could be hideous or they could look exactly like anybody. They could keep a farm, run a household, hold a wedding. They were still dangerous, and the danger had a name, bergtagning, mountain-taking, a word Norwegian still uses for being spellbound. A girl goes out for berries in the long summer dusk. The rock face opens. She is inside the hill, in a hall with a fire and a table, and the people there are courteous, and she does not come home.

Where trolls came from is a question the sources decline to answer. The etymology is not settled either, though the Old Norse noun probably descends from a Proto-Germanic form whose original sense may have had something to do with treading or stepping. John Arnott MacCulloch suggested that trolls and the older Norse land-spirits, the vættir, both grew out of beliefs about the dead. It remains a suggestion.

Their powers follow from what they are. Strength enough to throw stone for miles, and a great many isolated boulders across Scandinavia are still identified locally as troll-work, hurled at churches under construction by something furious about the noise. Magic, in the older material, of the kind that makes trolldómr a synonym for sorcery. Longevity that turns memory into a weapon. In the folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe from 1841 onward, the tales that fixed the troll in the modern imagination, they can also smell a human being through a wall: ugh, it smells like a Christian man in here.

The weaknesses are just as consistent, and they are the reason so many troll stories are comedies. Sunlight is the great one. Caught by the dawn, a troll bursts or hardens into stone, which is why so many rocks in Norway have names and faces. Church bells drive them off, and the absence of trolls from settled districts was explained straightforwardly by the constant din of the bells; lightning terrifies them, a belief that reads as a long shadow cast by Thor. Above all they can be outthought. A billy goat talks its way across a bridge by promising a bigger meal behind it. A boy wins an eating contest by cutting open the sack tied under his shirt. The troll, ancient and enormous and immensely strong, loses because it believes what it is told.

The pot-bellied, long-nosed, many-headed troll on every souvenir shelf between Bergen and Stockholm is younger than it looks. That image belongs largely to the nineteenth century, to Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collecting and to the painter Theodor Kittelsen, who drew trolls as though the pine-covered mountains themselves had stood up and gone walking. The creature under it is much older and much less friendly, and it kept its best trick to the end: it never held still long enough to be defined, which is precisely what made it useful. Anything at the edge of the firelight that could not be named could be called a troll.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a troll in Norse mythology?

In Old Norse sources a troll is not a single species but a broad category of dangerous, magical or monstrous beings. The word could be applied to a jötunn or mountain-dweller, a witch, a ghost, an evil spirit, a demon, a berserker, or even an unusually large or ugly person. The related words trǫlldómr and trǫllskap simply mean witchcraft.

Do trolls turn to stone in sunlight?

Yes. In later Scandinavian folklore trolls exposed to direct sunlight are said to burst or harden into stone, and many distinctive rocks and landmarks across Norway and Sweden are locally explained as trolls caught out by the dawn. This is the single most consistent weakness attributed to them.

Where do trolls live?

Trolls live away from human settlement, in isolated rocks, mountains, caves and burial mounds. They usually appear in small family units rather than alone, most often as a mother and son or a father and daughter, and they are almost never described as helpful or friendly to people.

How do you defeat a troll?

Rarely by strength. Trolls are driven off by church bells and frightened by lightning, they are destroyed by daylight, and in the Norwegian folktales they are most often beaten by trickery: a goat that promises the troll a larger meal, or a boy who fakes an eating contest. Their great age and strength are undone by their willingness to believe what they are told.

What is the first troll story ever recorded?

The earliest recorded troll encounter appears in the Prose Edda, where an unnamed troll-woman confronts the ninth-century skald Bragi Boddason on a forest road at night and describes herself in a series of riddling kennings before asking what a troll is if not that. Bragi answers in verse and the encounter ends without violence.

Related Entries

Jötunn, Trow, Hulder, Tomte, Draugr, Fossegrim, Skogsrå, Bergsrå, Dvergr, Ymir, Surtr, Thor, Grýla, Grendel, Grendel’s mother