The Genre of Trolls - Doria

The trolls also possess ornate vehicles and excellent horses. A wedding
procession travels in fine glass carriages ornamented with gold and hitched
to agile horses (SLS 56: 153), and a female troll is known to have left its hill
in a carriage drawn by a huge black horse (SLS 280: 132). The pets and servants
of the troll are similarly of the stunning sort: an old troll cherished a
creature, not unlike a cat, with glittering eyes (SLS 65: 45), and a troll prince
had a large bird with a feather the size of a tree trunk at the back of its neck,
and with an equally prodigious appetite; four barrels of wheat was its standard
fare (SLS 202 Sagor II, 1). Another troll cared for three big, ugly dogs
with one, two and three heads respectively, and the last breathed fire out of
its maw as well (SLS 31, 146). Royal trolls may also equip armies of snakes,
dragons, dogs, wolves and other repellent animals (SLS 137 I, 1; SLS 31,
146), and their horses are swift, running 300, 600 and 900 miles per hour
(SLS 137 I, 1).
Magical ointments and objects are a defining feature of the otherworld,
and they figure rather prominently in my material. Some ointments serve
to resurrect the dead (Nyland 1887, 19; SLS 37, 6; SLS 137 I, 1; SLS 202
Sagor I, 8), while others may confer second sight (SLS 28, 12). An ointment
of the former kind is present in a tale narrated by the elementary school
teacher Sandholm; a girl has been abducted by a troll, but unlike her sisters
who rejected the troll’s advances and were killed in a fit of pique, she survived,
but lives a rather tedious life:
so ende se å in da, at e in bokk foll in i bärji. me sama va gobbn o ogd nakkan å an o
kasta an i tjellari toå börja flikkan groåta o sa: “to skoa leti an liva, so sko ja a avi nogon
ti liéka me lika”. “no e jär inga”, sa trollgubbn, “no foår ja ono ti liva alti”. so to an ein
bork me nogo sors smörjo i o smörga po bokknakkan o passa owo in po sama stelle, o
so fikk botjin liv. “å”, tengkt flikkan, “no veit ja or ja ska jöra me systrona mina jag entoå”.
so for trolle bort ein da, o flikkan to opp syskona från tjellarn o smörga poå ota
smörjon o sat owona poå dom, o so fikk dom liv. (SLS 202 Sagor I, 8:46–47)
It happened one day that a he-goat fell into the hill. At once the old man beheaded it
and threw it in the cellar. Then the girl started crying and said: “You should’ve let it
live, so that I’d have someone to play with as well.” “Oh, that’s no bother,” the old troll
man said, “I can make him live, to be sure.” He took a jar with some kind of ointment
and rubbed into the neck of the he-goat and put the head in the same place, and the
he-goat was resurrected. “Oh,” the girl thought, “now I know what to do with my sisters,
after all.” Then the troll was away one day, and the girl took up her siblings from
the cellar and rubbed on the ointment and put the heads on them, and they were resurrected.
The Troll and Its World 97