Dark Fairies by Bob Curran

Author:Bob Curran [Curran, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Career Press - A
Published: 2010-07-20T07:00:00+00:00

Trolls

Indeed some of the dwarves’ darker traits had been passed to another type of fairy that lived in deep caves, gullies, and ravines: the troll. Like the idea of both the dwarf and the kobold, the idea of the troll probably originated in Scandinavia. And in many respects the troll may have had its beginnings in the idea of the walking dead, because it corresponds closely to the idea of the lumbering draugr, the walking corpse of Norse folklore, which was known as a shambling, rather vacuous entity with immense strength. However, there is a slight problem as to what the troll actually looked like. In some tales, it is described as a towering if rather stupid monstrous creature, living high in mountain caves. They have flat, brutish faces, sometimes with long, lower tusks and perhaps a single eye in the center of their foreheads. This image perhaps comes from the Norwegian jotnar (giants), who were huge primitive beings living a brutish existence in the caves and caverns of the underearth. They were also known as jaette in both Sweden and Denmark, and the idea of these gigantic slow-witted trolls appears to have emerged from that concept. The idea has also found its way into some of the English perceptions as well, perhaps through the Viking occupation of that country, where it appears in places such as Trollers Gill and Trollerdale, near Appletreewick in Yorkshire, in an area known as the Barden Triangle. Here among the tumbled and grotesquely formed rocks, huge, violent trolls are supposed to dwell, giving the region its name. However, in some cases, the trolls are described as blood-drinking goblins—harking back, perhaps, to the old notion of dwarves and the dwarfish species as vampires. The large English species is perhaps more akin to ogres, and in many tales are often described as such.

In the southern part of Scandinavia, however, a slightly different concept regarding trolls seems to have emerged. Here, the trolls are much smaller, and, although still primitive in their ways and brutish in appearance, they more resembled the huldufolk discussed earlier. However, in stories about them they seem to be more deformed and more malignant than any of the huldufolk; so much so that it has been suggested that the word troll may come from an ancient southern Scandinavian word meaning “someone who behaves violently or flagrantly,” and that the original trolls in this region may not have been supernatural at all, but rather some form of human outlaws. Others, however, have stated that the word is in fact Germanic and refers to some form of skill or art with supernatural and malignant connotations. They point to an early Germanic word, trolldom, meaning “witchcraft” or “spell working” in an antisocial sense.

In Scandinavian folklore there is also some confusion as to whether trolls live alone or in groups. In the northern areas where they are said to be giants, they tend to live alone in very deep caves, well away from human settlements. In the

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