My latest troll drawing reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to make a post about.
In the English language media I’ve seen trolls are generally depicted as big and stupid, though occasionally they’ll just be small and primitive.
And don’t get me wrong, we also have that here in Scandinavia as seen in the Norwegian movie Troll Hunter.
But trolls from nordic folklore are a lot more nuanced than what modern English language media would lead you to believe.
In folklore they are a sort of hidden nature people with cultures that varies between countries and towns. They can be cruel or kind. In Norway they can smell the blood of Christians and eat people, while in Denmark they don’t mind Christians but can’t stand the sound of church bells and will often move at the first sign of a church being build.
They’re also closely entangled with humans. Trolls steal human babies so they can raise them to go places trolls can’t (in Denmark at least), but leave their own babies with the humans assuming humans would find use for someone with a troll’s strength and abilities.
And that’s why in more modern troll media for adults they’re often used as a sympathetic allegory for people who feel wrong and out of place.
You got the Swedish movie Border from 2018 about a woman who couldn’t feel more wrong. People think she’s ugly and weird and she can’t even have sex because there’s something wrong with her genitalia.
But then she meets a man who looks like her and he slowly reveals that they’re both trolls and the only reason she feels weird is because she’s trying to live the life of a human. She’s a perfectly normal troll. It even turns out that troll men give birth and her “weird genitalia” is meant to impregnate, not be pregnant.
There’s also the band De Underjordiske (The Underworldly which is an old Danish word for otherworldly people that live under ground like trolls and dwarves) from Denmark who have the song Trold about Nordic people in general feeling off because we’re forest trolls who long to return to nature, but also Under Skyggernes Kniv (Under the Knife Of Shadows) about a person asking a troll that has lived their whole life under ground to not be afraid and come up into the sunlight and meet people and the video shows a person who appears to be dressing up as a woman for the first time and trying to live an authentic life.
So trolls are often very queer coded in modern Scandinavia which might sound insulting if you’re and outsider who’s only familiar with the English language version of them but makes a lot of sense in context.
“ while in Denmark they don’t mind Christians but can’t stand the sound of church bells and will often move at the first sign of a church being build. “ In Sweden we say that giants (giants are sometimes seen as just being big versions of trolls) hate the sound of church bells ringing, and they get so angry that they throw giant rocks at the buildings to make it stop. And that’s how swedish people explained all the large boulders laying everywhere! Interestingly, some also said that that is what caused the islands Gotland and Öland to be. some giant got really angry, took a bit of land (which created the two lakes Vänern and Vättern) and threw them. Nowadays we have explanations to all of these phenomena... Unless the government is actually just a bunch of trolls trying to hide their past of getting drunk and throwing rocks everywhere by coming up with a cover story! ...
Or it was just the iceage... but that’s boring
