The Genre of Trolls - Doria

y trolls, and keep the nine knots on his bed-linen protecting him intact
(Nyland 1887, 77: 91).
Trolls prove to be pranksters in other ways as well. The trolls in the parish
of Replot turned the turnips of another supranormal creature, Finngubben
(‘the old man Finn’), into stones (Hembygden 1917–18: 122). Angry
trolls might block the road so that travellers have to remove them to be
able to continue on their way (SLS 280: 312).
In the village of Jörala in the parish of Vörå, the trolls used to sneak
around the human settlement for three days and nights on and after the
festival of St. Thomas (on December 21st) and steal any food left unblessed
by the farm mistresses. They lived beneath the bridges, and shared
their booty there. Once a troll arrived at a homestead in Jörala, holding a
stick on which it hoped to impale some titbit. Everything in the house had
been blessed by the mistress, though, and when she caught sight of it as
she was taking water from a bucket, she blessed the water too. Simultaneously
she broke wind, and allowed the troll to take it. The troll impaled
the wind on its stick and rushed back to its haunt, where its mates jibed at
it for the lousy loot. The trolls of St. Thomas were also connected to a
prohibition against leaving tow on the spinning-wheel during the holiday.
Transgression of this taboo was punished with getting the spinning-wheel
covered with the urine of the trolls, and the housewives were careful to remove
the tow properly, not exactly relishing the prospect. Some women
even burned off any remaining fibres in order to avoid this disaster (SLS
333: 220–221). Here the trolls are used as a method of intimidation, and the
text describes what happens when the appropriate precautions are not taken
and the duties of a housewife are neglected. The night of St. Thomas was,
moreover, the night of supernatural creatures, not of humans. All work,
especially such involving circular motion, like spinning, ought to be avoided
(Schön 1989: 130–131). The loss of foodstuff and tools for making clothes
had an economic significance as well, and giving away too much to the
trolls because of negligence could have a very negative effect on the affairs
of the household; in a society entertaining the notion of the limited good
(Foster 1965), the portion allotted a farm could be meagre indeed. At the
same time the text ridicules the troll when it stoops to chasing wind. As
Ulrika Wolf-Knuts has done, one might view this descent into the lower
region as an expression of the popular culture of laughter (Wolf-Knuts
1991: 258–263, based on Bakhtin 1968).
Interaction between the Realms 105