Episode Transcript
What do we think of when we hear the word troll? Nowadays, it tends to be the anonymous commenter online, stirring trouble and hurt with their words. Thirty years ago, we may have imagined the trolls from stories, large and grotesque, dim-witted, bad-tempered, argumentative, and troublesome - the kind of monster lurking in the shadows, living in the woods or in caves, unknown creatures from dark places, brooding, threatening, and devious.
Trolls play the role of baddies in children’s fairy tales, like 'Three Billy Goats Gruff', where the troll hides under the bridge and menaces the goats as they cross, bullying them and threatening to eat them. Trolls also feature in countless movies of the fantasy genre. But what I find interesting is considering how and when trolls first became part of the human psyche. When did our ancestors first begin to add trolls to their stories and histories? Where did the idea of them come from? Have they always been portrayed as they are in the media today, or has their description and meaning changed over time?
I think the best way to begin to investigate this is to go back to the earliest point that the word troll is mentioned linguistically. The earliest written mention I can find is within the books, the Prose and Poetic Eddas, originating in Iceland. They were written in the 13th century and retell the oral myths and sagas of the Norse people who discovered and settled Iceland around 850 AD, also known as the Vikings. Even though the Eddas were written in the 13th century, we know the word troll was spoken in Norse tales of the gods at least 300 years beforehand and probably even longer ago than that. When the Norse settled in Iceland, they obviously didn’t just bring their physical belongings with them; they brought their religion and beliefs from Scandinavia too. The Eddas provide the best evidence of the Norse worldview still preserved today. Of the two books, the Prose and Poetic Eddas, historians are still unsure as to the author of the Prose Edda. However, we know the author of the Poetic Edda was the lawyer and historian Snorri Sturluson. Some believe he may well have been the author of the Prose Edda as well, but that’s just one theory. It’s important to note that Sturluson and the unknown author were Christians, as Iceland was fully converted to Christianity in 1000 AD. For an unknown reason, two Christians recorded the older Norse religion, preserving it for future generations. This in itself is unusual, though it seems the Prose Edda is written as a textbook to help scholars learn to write traditional skaldic poetry, still used in the 13th century. Skaldic poetry uses complex patterns of rhythmical meter and rhyming called kennings based on metaphors, and this is the style of poetry the Norse myths and Icelandic sagas are written in. It is in one of these myths, the Gylfaginning, the creation myth of the Norse world during the Viking period, that the word troll is first mentioned.
Thor, the Norse god of thunder, whom you've probably heard of from the Marvel movies, cue a vision of Chris Hemsworth in your head right now. Anyway, Thor uses his magical hammer Mjolnir and is the protector of all the gods. He says, "I shall fight our enemies, the frost-giants, the mischievous trolls, and the other monsters." Trolls are, therefore, in this first line, bundled in a grouping with monsters and categorized as an enemy, being in opposition to the gods, presumably creating chaos while the gods try to maintain order in the world. In fact, throughout the myths, Thor is often said to be away fighting trolls, and it's clear from the way they are mentioned in the tales that those speaking and listening to the tales when they were orated in the 9th century would already have had a clear, preconceived understanding of a troll.
Also in the myth, the world's ending is foretold to the gods, and this is where trolls really start to feature with importance, being the main players in the world's destruction.
A translation of this stanza of the myth is as follows:
A giantess lives to the east of Midgard, in a forest called Ironwood; in that forest live trollwomen, called the Iron-vi-djur, the old giantess bears many giant sons, all of whom are shaped like wolves. It is said that this family will produce a mighty wolf called Managarm, hound of the moon. as the poem Valuspá says, one will emerge, one from among them all, who in trolls skin, will snatch the moon.
Now there's a lot to unpick just in those few sentences, but looking at just the linguistic element, there's use of the word troll as both a noun, i.e., a naming word, as in the troll women, and use of it as a verb, i.e., a doing word. So in this stanza, trolls are not just an actual tribe of creatures a giant lives amongst, but an action in the way the wolf disguises himself and changes his form.
So, just quickly referring back to our initial questions at this point, of
what is a troll,
where did the idea come from,
and when did humans first begin to think about trolls,
I'm not sure that we get any sort of solid description directly from the Eddas, to be honest, but I do think the Eddas confirm that a troll is an enemy that can mean death, even to gods. But did the Norse population in 800 AD or even the Icelanders in the 13th century actually believe these trolls were real?
Well, I think we have to assume they did. In the Viking era, the mythology talks regularly of the gods walking in the human world and speaking and interacting with humans, so it seems very plausible that Viking society would believe they shared their world with many other supernatural beings and unexplainable phenomena. There were many natural events that occurred in the world that had no explainable reason. These beliefs didn’t just die off after the Icelandic conversion to Christianity as you would maybe expect them to. Instead, there was a mixing of the old and the new beliefs blended together for Norse people, and this even extended into official laws written in the 13th century in Norway forbidding people from having contact with or seeking knowledge from trolls!
Another source of evidence to investigate for references to trolls is in the Sagas of the Icelanders, which are the family histories of Icelandic people. Written in the 13th and 14th centuries, these record events that took place in the 9th to 11th century. In these sagas, there is an acknowledgment that Icelanders would prefer to take a longer or more difficult route when traveling if it meant avoiding getting too close to a place where a troll was thought to be living. Icelanders in the sagas may even refuse to go out at night when it was thought trolls were more active, as happens in Grettir's saga, which talks about a village trying to get rid of a supernatural and malicious being haunting their sheep pastures. It says that when a shepherd who usually returned at dusk failed to show, the people went to church as usual, but everyone was worried that the shepherd had met an unnatural end. While one farmer wanted to search right away, the other villagers refused, saying that they wouldn’t risk falling into the hands of trolls at night.
These sagas of the Icelanders give us other troll evidence too, where it concerns the ability to become a troll. It is plainly written in the sagas many times that being called a troll was a severe insult, and insults are never taken lightly within the sagas, often resulting in blood feuds, where one family would fight and even kill members of another family for generations in order to preserve honor.
Some of these accounts of events may have served as cautionary tales teaching lessons on good behavior, such as in Njal’s saga, where a wife is called a great troll with words, as she becomes argumentative with her husband over his roving eye during her friend's wedding. Things end badly for her, as they usually do for trolls in stories, when she is thrown out of the wedding and her husband makes it a double wedding by marrying the girl he had been eyeing.
The story, however, does not end there but continues with the wedding antics igniting a blood feud between the two families. Njal's son is described to us as a dangerous and threatening man, and he is condemned for killing an innocent priest, causing such fear in the people around him with his demeanor and deranged, purposeless act, that he is also said to be a troll. So here, giving Njal's son the name of a troll identifies him as dangerous, unpredictable, something to be wary and fearful of.
Another point to note in the Sagas of the Icelanders is that, in the specific wording used, people are not said to 'act like' a troll; instead, they are said to be a troll. This kind of goes back to our initial question as to what is a troll, and this idea which also ran through the Eddas, as to whether someone or something could actually metamorphosize into a troll. In the Eddas, we hear how the gods can change into beasts at will, for example when Loki, the god of mischief and brother to Thor, becomes a mare and births a foal. And of course, there is the ultimate shapeshifter of them all, Odin, who it is said in the saga, Heimskringla, could change his shape and appearance in any way he pleased. In fact, I would go as far as to say that there just doesn't seem to be that same concept in old Norse culture that we have today, where a category of being is forever physically static, i.e., a dog will always remain a dog and never be anything else. Instead, it seems that shape and being are much more fluid, and even the Icelandic populations, at least up until the 11th century, believed there to be the opportunity, in certain situations, for beings from one form to change into another, for example, the dog to become a falcon.
And this is evidenced no better than when the Sagas of the Icelanders talk of the berserker, a type of Viking warrior who fought in such a frenzy of bloodlust and fury that they became like an unstoppable force on the battlefield, killing with seemingly superhuman strength and speed, while also being invincible to iron or fire. The berserker would even fight bare-chested as he had no need of armor to protect him. The verb, to go berserk in Old Norse, was not as literal as how we say it today; the word used was 'hamask,' which directly translated means to change form or shapeshift. Another linguistic point directly referring back to this same idea of fluidity of shape and being, and if a Viking could change into a berserker, it does seem pretty logical that they could also turn into a troll. In fact, berserkers were often named as trolls themselves in stories, such as during a duel scene when one dueler has his foot cut off at the ankle but carries on fighting just as ferociously as before, and the other says, "What! A very troll I deem thee, whereas thou fightest with one foot off,'" believing it impossible without it being supernatural that a person could continue with such an injury.
So in summing up the ideas and theories we have discussed, can we now answer the original questions? Are we any closer to determining what trolls are, where the idea of a troll came from, and when trolls came into the human psyche?
Taking each question in turn, and choosing possibly the easiest to answer first, I think we can say that based on the addition of trolls in the Eddas, our oldest written evidence of oral history and Viking era world views, trolls were established in human thought at least as early as 800 AD and likely earlier.
Now, let's come to the question, where did the idea of the troll come from, and this one is a slightly harder question to answer I think. There is pretty strong evidence in the Eddas and the Sagas of the Icelanders that whenever a troll is mentioned, it is in respect of something dangerous or threatening, something fearful and scary. I think that trolls were the explanation for the unexplainable. They were the reason sheep disappeared, or people went missing and left no trace. And when a being became a troll, it was equally a simple way of explaining feats of seemingly impossible or unnatural acts, or behavior that was confusing or dangerous. Again, an explanation of the unknown, alarming, and possibly the best way of describing where the idea came from is to say that something was probably needed to explain why certain places, actions, and people gave others an uncomfortable and on-edge feeling.
And now to the last question, what was, or is, a troll? It certainly seems while there are links and a crossover from how Viking era society saw trolls in comparison to how we do today, there are also many differences, and there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all definition. The concepts we have of trolls now have evolved over the many years since then and moved away, or maybe the right phrase is become rooted, rather transfixed in a specific set of characteristics. More rigid in its definition. The troll has always been identified as strange or supernatural. It is linked to magic and nature, but it is unnatural in that it can do things normal people or creatures cannot. It can be invincible like in the form of a berserker, it can survive in wild places where humans would not, it can even end the gods. But probably the most defining element that describes a troll, back then and now, is that trolls are in some way dangerous. They are always negative, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, something to be feared, or at least wary of.
So, while we might not be able to pinpoint an exact picture in our minds of what a troll was originally supposed to look like, I think we can certainly now agree that the definition of a troll is more about the feelings it evokes than any specific solid state.
Evidence and further reading to support the discussion
Anonymous, 'The Saga of the Heath Slayings', Translated by William Morris and EirÃkr Magnússon, Icelandic Saga Database, Sveinbjorn Thordarson (ed.), 2007. Available at: http://www.sagadb.org/heidarviga_saga.en
Sturluson, S., The Younger Edda; also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda translated from Old Norse by R. B. Anderson [eBook] (Project Gutenberg] 31 July 2006
The Viking Age – a reader. 3rd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto press, 2020
Abram, C., Myths of the pagan north: the gods of the Norsemen, London: Continuum, 2011
Anderson, SM, & Swenson, K (eds) The cold counsel: the women in Old Norse literature and myth, London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2001.
Arnold, M., The Vikings: culture and conquest, Hambledon: Continuum, 2006
Bourns, T., ‘Becoming-animal in the Icelandic Sagas’, Neophilologus 105, (2021) 633–653
Gaiman, N., Norse mythology, London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Gates, BT., ‘Introduction: why Victorian natural history?’ Victorian Literature and Culture. 35, 2 (2007). 539-549:542.
Grönstrand, H, Heede, D, & Heith, A (eds) Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
Guðmundsdóttir, A. (2017) ‘Behind the cloak, between the lines: Trolls and the symbolism of their clothing in Old Norse tradition.’ European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 47,2, (2017) 327-350.
Hurstwick, Trolls of the Viking age, 04 April 2018 [video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=2F0SNlzMn3cIFrzb&v=kq0GV-qjWWQ&feature=youtu.be [Accessed on: 05.01.2023]
Jakobsson, Ármann., ‘Beast and man: realism and the occult in ‘Egils Saga.’’ Scandinavian Studies, 83, 1, (2011) 29-44.
— ‘History of the trolls? Bárðar saga as an historical narrative.’ Saga-Book, 25, (1998) 53-71.
—The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North, California: Punctum Books, 2017.
Kirby, John R., Egil’s Saga: Traditional evidence for Brúnanburh compared to literary, historic and archaeological analyses, Archaeopress, 2019
J. Lindow, Trolls, an unnatural history. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2019.
Lönngren, A., 'Trolls: Folklore, Literature and 'Othering' in the Nordic Countries' in Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia, 205-230, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
Mundal, E., Oral art forms and their passage into writing. Museum Tusculanum: Gazelle Drake Academic distributor. 2007.
Pálsson, H., ‘Reflections on the creation of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.’ Scripta Islandica 68 (2017) 189–232.
Poilvez, Marion., ‘A troll did it? Trauma as a paranormal state in the Íslendingasögur’. Paranormal encounters in Iceland 1150–1400, ed. by Á. Jakobsson and M. Mayburd. Boston: Medieval Institute Publications, 2020.
Potts, D., Introduction to skaldic poetry, [eBook] ASNC, 2013.
Price, N.S., The children of ash and elm: a history of the Vikings, Penguin Books, UK. 2022
Ross, Margaret Clunies. A history of Old Norse poetry and poetics. NED-New edition, Boydell & Brewer, 2005.
Tolkien, J.R.R., The Hobbit, or, There and back again. 4th edn, Allen & Unwin, London. 1978.
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